Sunday, February 10, 2013

BACK TO THE BASICS OF SIMPLE LIVING

This is me to a "T".  I am not sure how this guy will support a family of any size in his cabin - but this sure is an adventure I would have embarked on in my single days.  My oldest daughter gets the concept of simple living.  She understands that we are slaves to society's demands of who and what we think we should be - not what God would have us be.  Truly, we bend to the mocking jeers of those who call out from the Great and Spacious spoken of in the Book of Mormon.

I think what is coming will help us get this concept.  People like the Amish will just breeze right through the challenge and probably never miss a beat.  I envy them for their simple life - and they us (one day) for our doctrine:

   https://www.amishlogs.com/about_us.php

Does this not strike a chord in your heart?

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7nUtsa9JZDI

I love my projects and always making my situation better.  It is the higher calling of our human condition - never stop improving.  I am always planning out 10 years into the future.  One of my biggest plans is to have a shop built on an existing 68'x89' foundation on my farm.  One where I can combine my loves of mechanics and woodworking and actually have my tools all placed strategically on the shop floor without having to move them around depending on which project I am working on.  That has been the story of my life to this point - the tool shuffle in a space that has always been woefully inadequate for the task.  The best way to explain it to my wife is to describe trying to cook a four-course gourmet meal for 10 people in a galley kitchen.  Alot of gymnastics involved.....   Her solution would probably be to invite fewer people over and have chips and gourmet salsa instead....

Each time I try and picture this project in a prophetic state (as of late), I see blackness and have no vision - where I could previously see nothing but a way forward.  Folks, I believe the timeline is being cut short due to choices that have been made by the people of this once-great nation.  We are going to reap some bad consequences for our collective choices.  I sense evil on the horizon - and it is not a reflection of some dark thing going on inside of me.  I see it when I am filled with the Spirit - as well as in a "steady state" in day-to-day living.  I have been pinging it in the temple and when I have the Spirit and it is the same.  This new feeling has caused me to re-evaluate my future plans and to simplify and get back to the basics.  Our futures are fluid, depending on the choices WE make, most importantly - and our future realities are tainted by actions of those around us.  That intertwined nature of destinies cannot be ignored - we sink or swim together.  Notwithstanding our individual agency, no man is an island - and this is why we rejoiced from our pre-mortal perch, when our Savior succeeded in His task.  The flip side to this great familial cohesion - is that we have to suffer together when we collectively take a wrong turn and wander down forbidden paths.  There are a few cases where the few (righteous), are separated from the suffering of the wicked.  Noah is one who comes to mind.  Still his ministry spanned several hundred years before the Lord allowed him the escape.  Noah was nearly perfect in his ministry - therefore, his worst suffering was watching his countless posterity who would not heed, or had not been taken in the City of Enoch, suffer in the boiling waters of the flood he had warned them about for so long.

So, we should put aside our pursuits of all our "finer" things and focus on the basics.  Food, water, shelter and ask God what our future efforts should involve.

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