Peaches and Pruning... My Lesson of the Day

Driving into work today and listening to the Ensign, as usual, the Lord thoroughly yet gently chastened me. I started reading a really good book this weekend and was about half way through and totally enveloped in the awesome story line when suddenly a racy scene came up and totally caught me off guard. But then it was over just as fast as it started and I was like "ok..." and kept reading. Then there was ANOTHER racy scene 3/4 of the way through the book, and I should have known better that if there's one, there's usually another, but I was so caught up in the non-racy storyline that I totally rationalized to myself that "it's not a big deal, I'll just skip over those parts." It sounds practical, but it's really not, I'm single and getting caught up in crazy stuff like those types of books, even though I went into it totally unwittingly, is really just a slippery slow down hill. Then it turns out that the book isn't even finished and the last chapter available is such a cliffhanger, and I'm probably only 70% done with the story. It drove me crazy! I wanted to know what happened, but without all the "other" stuff you know. And I thought about how even though I tore through this book, in the end I was only frustrated with the lack of finality, and felt guilty for rationalizing and even indulging a little bit in content that I knew was inappropriate. I knew better and in the end, I was more irritated then when I started. And that made me think about the rabbit hole that is disobeying the commandments, and straying from the iron rod. We think that there's going to be this amazing thing, some awesome result, but in the end, we are broken and crushed, just like I was, though to a lesser extent, when I came to the end of this book. That's part of the reason that I wasn't able to focus very much on the reading last night, don't get me wrong, I was exceptionally short on time, but I still could have done more. So that brings us to my "you're doing it wrong," message that I got today. It began with a January 2009 Ensign article called "Peaches, Pruning, and Spiritual Progress," where the little blurb says "Like pruning away the unnecessary limbs from a tree, we need to prune away those activities that might weaken our testimonies or lead us astray." Hmmm.... anyone seeing the message? The author continues "the limbs of a tree are like all the possible actions we can accomplish in our lives. To gain a testimony and accomplish our eternal goals in this life, we have to prune away those activities that might weaken our testimonies or lead us astray... I now wonder how the Lord is pruning me. Am I learning the lessons he wants me to learn? Am I bearing fruit worthy of Him? Do I see and appreciate the guidance of the Master's hand in my life? Do I let go of what is unnecessary or sinful in my life and keep only what is good?" This was definitely my message that reading books with racy scenes in it is not bringing me closer to him, and that I need to get rid of that right now. Now don't get me wrong, I avoid all media with risque content like the plague, but this one just sort of found me, and that's going to happen sometimes, but instead of putting that book down, and running away from it, I was like "oh it's not so bad." And my message from the Lord today was "yes it is that bad." Ok, I thought, so I'm only going to read the scriptures and listen to hymns and think about nothing else all the time? That will be completely overwhelming, and I try to keep my spiritual growth balanced with other aspects of life, such as spending time with friends, looking at Pinterest, cleaning, and listening to the radio. Now, I've come to be able to keep most of those in line with what I think the Lord would be happy with, like I don't watch R rated movies, I try to not to indulge in gossip or bad humor, and I try to avoid offensive music. So my other stuff that I do is hopefully kept "clean," I do try hard to keep it that way, but I feel like it needs to be balanced with my spiritual growth like praying, reading and writing about the scriptures (this blog,) listening to the Ensign on my drive to work, etc. Anyway, my point is that I got this message and thought that it was a call to give up every single thing that it's church centered, but then came my next message from the following article entitled "My Guilt Was Swept Away." It talks about a retired man who felt called to do more family history work and "left the class upset. I felt I had books to write and pictures to paint and just did not want to give all my twilight years to family history work." That's basically how I felt after the first message, I didn't want to give up other aspects of my life and focus on solely on one thing. Then the article continued, "as I sat there stewing, I had a quiet and simple revelation: To do family history research I did not need to give up writing or painting. I just needed to spend each Monday morning from 8:00am unto noon doing the work. That would still give me time to paint, write, perform my work as a temple sealer, and attend a temple endowment session each week." This message might be a little bit more difficult to discern then the other one, it was basically my being told to relax, and to maintain the balance that I have, and just to be more vigilant about keeping filth out of my life. I didn't need to give up reading or listening to the radio or cooking or playing or even browsing, when I have time, but just that I need to make a commitment to keeping that other "real" portion of my life clean. It was a kind lesson, but still one that needed to be taught, that no matter what I told myself, that type of craziness needs to be kept out of my life, and I'm grateful for the lesson.