WHERE IS MY LIFE LEADING (part 2)

I recognize that we have a tendency in this modern world to oversimplify life’s problems and to apply catchall solutions to very complex issues. Nevertheless, as we ponder upon such lives as those spoken of earlier, we also become aware that all too few have lived ideal lives where choices which lead to meaningful and enriched lives surrounded by family and friends are made without snarling complications.

All of us might narrow the pathway leading to lonely final days and broaden the highway which might lead to family and friend filled endings if we were more willing to:

Pay the price of bonding by extending, even when undeserved, love, patience and tenderness as a bridge over troubled relationships.

Pay the price of bonding by demonstrating that happiness comes more from giving and serving than getting and receiving.

Pay the price of bonding by letting others know and feel that no matter how far they may have wandered from nourished paths and squandered their fortunes, their return would be a signal to kill the fatted calf in celebration.

Pay the price of bonding by being more interested in helping your neighbors become all that they can become and less concerned with their position on the ladder of life.

Pay the price of bonding by being less concerned with the frailties of another and more deliberate in the improvement of our own faults.

Pay the price of bonding by changing personal selfishness into the selflessness which will enable one to see another’s needs through the blinding glimmer of our commercial world.

Pay the price of bonding by understanding that responsibility and accountability also is placed upon all who are allowed to make choices and mistakes.

Pay the price of bonding by learning that real independence does not come from breaking bonds but from interdependence.

Pay the price of bonding by knowing that true joy comes only when it is shared with meaningful others.

Some thoughts from Neal A. Maxwell

“Our impact is less likely to emanate from the pulpit—more often it will occur in one-to-one relationships, or in small groups where we can have an impact on an individual.”

“The withholding of key communications can be even more serious than withholding one’s material substance. Food and raiment can sometimes be supplied by others, but the needed spiritual substance is often not available elsewhere.”

“If one tends to regard others as functions and not as everlasting individual entities, he will seek as few lasting and obligating relationships as possible. Doing this, ironically, ensures less and less happiness and even further deterioration in the total human environment. Yet today, more and more people seek to travel through life selfishly, as unencumbered and uncommitted as possible.”

Is it possible that as our society experiments with ‘new and exciting’ lifestyles, in what I consider a misguided quest to find a ‘better way,’ there will always be that rewarded few who are eternally grateful for the life which was founded on ‘old and tested ways?’

Is it possible that there is a reason why there will be those who, when their mortal journey ends,` will find their list of loved ones to be copious and extensive while others pass away in anonymity?

Is it possible that the happy state we all seek is to be found in meaningful relationships with those we were given through inheritance and those who surrounded us with comforting arms because of bonds forged in the furnaces of friendships?

As my years have extended into decades I have become increasingly convinced that the real purpose of our stages of probation is to learn how to nourish and expand our relationships. I believe that there is real merit in striving to expand the number of those who we lovingly call our bothers and our sisters.

May we live lives that will be recorded in obituaries by words such as THOSE OF HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS WHO SURVIVE ……… is my sincere prayer.