Much needed day of rest after the marathon. Went to church. The stars aligned and I taught both in Sunday school and in the Elder's Quorum. I get to do this due to being the ward mission leader and the Elder's Quorum instructor at the same time. I do not get to teach the Elder's Quorum that often, but I am in charge of the new member class. And, of course, I forgot to delegate, so I got double blessings, which I could use. The lesson in Sunday school was on the ordinance of sacrament. The Elder's quorum lesson was on obedience. During the lesson my phone, which had the lesson manual on it started to malfunction somewhat. I figured it must have happened for a purpose and used the incident to illustrate the importance of being obedient to God's commandments with exactness. We should not malfunction when asked to do good things, and God never asks us to do anything that is bad. Of course, we are at a much higher level than just a gadget. We have God-given agency. He gave us the ability to disobey His commandments to give us a chance to develop our faith. Thus, when we obey, we choose good over bad, and our faith grows, or, in fact, actually has a meaning. Tools or mere creations cannot have faith because they cannot make decisions. We can. What an irony it is when we begin to insist that to prove our ability to choose we must choose bad. Benjamin and I often study chess games of grandmasters using a games database. And there are times when out of let's say 30 games, in all of them the same move is made in the same position by 30 different players of high caliber. Sometimes it takes us a while to figure out why. Why not be original and make some other move? After some analysis, and sometimes with the help of a computer, we are able to see why not. It loses the game. How interesting that out of 20-30 possibilities there is only one that works. But it takes a high skilled player to notice that. To me, this is a powerful lesson in not trying to be different for the sake of being different, being humble enough to recognize that there is only one reasonable choice in a particular situation, and you must not be afraid of uniformity.
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