This is me letting my paint dry today:

I don’t know that letting paint dry has much to do with anything, but I just got through telling “my” young women at church that all things testify of Christ and can teach a gospel principle, so now I’m wondering what I can come up with here…

Maybe dry paint can teach us that sometimes we need to stop doing something we love for a little bit, so that we can have time to show love to someone else. Maybe dry paint can teach us that we don’t have to try to fit everything all into one day. Maybe dry paint can teach us that it’s important to pause and rest. (It’s past my bedtime now, so this is the best you get tonight.)

(Read and Follow the Instructions)

Some parts of the scriptures are just heartbreaking to read. The times when you read about people who were following God and doing their best to serve Him, and then something happens. Or doesn’t happen, depending on how you look at it. They forget who they are, they forget who God is, and they forget that He said always remember me and seek to do my will (I’m paraphrasing from a bunch of stuff here). They forget to put God first and they start to follow their own “natural” desires. Like that time in the Old Testament when King David fulfills his lusts on Bathsheba and then commits murder by proxy so her husband won’t find out what he did. Or when Jesus’s disciple, Judas, decides that money is more important than loyalty to the Son of God. Or when in the Book of Mormon, we see an entire civilization destroy themselves because they won’t listen to God’s messengers tell them to repent of their pride and their arrogance before God.

These parts of scripture history are painful to read. I find myself wondering, “Would I be deceived and distracted too?” And then I have to change the question and ask myself, “How many times have I allowed myself to be deceived and distracted?” I’m so grateful to understand the gift of repentance and the gospel of grace and second chances.

Mormon 1-4
This part of the Book of Mormon is so hard to read. I have to ask myself though, do I do enough to inoculate myself against the deceptions that the Nephites fell prey to that led them to this point?

11 And it is impossible for the tongue to describe, or for man to write a perfect description of the horrible scene of the blood and carnage which was among the people, both of the Nephites and of the Lamanites; and every heart was hardened, so that they delighted in the shedding of blood continually.
12 And there never had been so great wickedness among all the children of Lehi, nor even among all the house of Israel, according to the words of the Lord, as was among this people.