Above Yourself

I was talking with a coworker today, and we seemed to agree that Easter shouldn’t be all about hiding candy in eggs and wearing our fanciest clothes to church. It’s a great time to think of Jesus Christ, his Atonement, and the Resurrection of Christ. I’m not planning on locking out the Easter Bunny from our house, but that conversation did make me think about how I can establish traditions that bring more thoughts of Jesus Christ into our family’s Easter traditions.

In Elder Richard G. Scott’s devotional at Brigham Young University this week, he highlighted the importance of learning about the Atonement. Here is part of BYU NewsNet’s recap:

“The Atonement is that essential ingredient of our Father in Heaven’s plan of happiness,” Elder Scott said, “without which that plan would have no significant meaning.”

Although this challenge applies specifically to students at BYU, we can all learn from studying about Christ’s Atonement. As part of our Easter celebration this year, my wife and I are participating in part of our church’s Easter pageant, specifically in a scene that takes place at Christ’s tomb. It’s a very moving scene, and I’m glad that it has helped us remember our Savior this Easter season.

Elder Scott then challenged students to “establish a personal plan to better understand and appreciate the incomparable, eternal, infinite consequences of the perfect fulfillment by Jesus Christ.” He testified as an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ that one’s understanding of the Atonement will enhance the knowledge and skills learned at this university.

I’ve had to work on my mental mindset recently. We all often experience setbacks in accomplishing our goals, and it isn’t until we do something about it that things really start to change. I’m working to try to establish regular goals for writing, but other things like schoolwork sometimes get in the way for a day or two and derail those plans. Even though I’m on spring break right now, I haven’t been focused on getting those goals back in order like I should. So here’s my plan: get back up, start up on my goals again, and continue forward!

Until I can turn my goals into habits I may have to get up over and over again, but it’s much more important to work on my goals right now as much as I can instead of using excuses like “I’ll start doing that after I graduate” or “I’ll wait until I have some free time”. Those aren’t very good reasons to delay goals, and the end result is that we lose out on all the progress we could have gained in that time. I love this quote from Elder Bednar:

A spurt may appear to be impressive in the short run, but steadiness over time is far more effective, far less dangerous, and produces far better results. Three consecutive days of fasting ultimately may not be as spiritually effective as three successive months of appropriate fasting and worship on the designated fast Sunday. An attempt to pray one time for five hours likely will not produce the spiritual results of meaningful morning and evening prayer offered consistently over five weeks. And a single scripture-reading marathon cannot produce the spiritual impact of steady scripture study across many months.

David A. Bednar, Brigham Young University-Idaho Devotional, September 9, 2003

Reaching our goals in life often takes baby steps. Goals should be worked on as part of a series of events, and they shouldn’t be dependent on just one major event happening.

Think of it this way: If your goal is to retire with a million dollars, there are two types of ways you can do it. One way to get a million dollars all at once at the last minute, by winning the lottery or having a really great idea come to you out of nowhere. Winning the lottery is something like trying to hit a home run in baseball with every swing. This strategy might win one or two games through the whole season with a lot of fanfare, but Major league coaches know that consistent winning comes through stringing together a few hits and good strategy rather than trying to have every player hit a home run every time up. This is the equivalent of saving up smaller amounts all throughout life in order to reach the million dollars. It suggests that we should leverage the power of interest and savings in our investment plans.

As Seth Godin has said, “the home runs you almost hit don’t count“. Each time we swing for the fence, we don’t have anything to build on when we miss.

Success in spirituality is achieved through the same means that it is achieved in our daily life, through regular and consistent achievement of smaller goals. No one act can get us into heaven. Achieving our goals through baby steps lets us build on our previous successes, and we can start to achieve forward momentum in a world that is constantly pushing back on us.

As a follow-up to a previous post entitled “Forming Habits: Daily Scripture Reading“, daily scripture reading for me has not yet become an automatic habit like it was in my high school days when the mornings were filled with early-morning seminary. As part of building a new goal, it’s important to set reminders for yourself so that you can train yourself to turn this goal into a habit. This daily email reminder is the most important feature of ReadtheScriptures.com and the main reason to use this website.

Reading Statistics

Right now the website keeps track of how much of a book of scripture you’ve read and displays the percentage as a small bar. As someone who grew up memorizing the backs of baseball cards, I’d love to have more detailed statistics than this, including some information about how many pages I read per day or how many days I’ve missed my reading schedule.

Read at your own pace

On Read the Scriptures you decide which book of scriptures you’d like to read and how fast you’d like to read it. A few schedules are all set up and ready to use, such as 30, 60, or 90 days to read the Book of Mormon. You can also set up your own reading schedule which will let you read at your own pace.

Work as a team

A newly-upgraded team feature lets you join teams with others and get basic statistics on their reading. Again, I’d love to have more stats here, but it’s enough to tell me that my wife is quite a ways ahead of me in her reading.

Keep notes as you go

I like to keep notes on scriptures, but I sometimes wish I could write more than what I can fit in the space of the margins. Read the Scriptures has a web-reader feature that lets you read and write at the same time, without limiting the length of the notes you can write.

As summer approaches, it means that we’re about as far away as we can get from the New Year, and about as far away as we can get from thinking about our New Year’s Resolutions. That’s okay, though, because it means that we can stop feeling guilty about goals that we haven’t accomplished yet and actually get them done. Zen Habits has a great post on taking goals one step at a time called “The Amazing Power of One“. It’s pretty simple, but it’s very similar to the goals-setting that I’ve been doing myself.

In a nutshell, you list all your goals and pick the most important one to work on and do it until it becomes automatic. As part of your reminder process, you set up a new reminder for the next time you need to do it. Give it a try!