Accountability
Overall doing well. Yesterday was a poor day for exercises. I finally had to accept that the illness raging through my family over the last few weeks had me down. I did a wall sit to place hold for my squats while letting myself conserve energy for healing. Today I had pull-ups to get through with 25 seconds of recovery between. I did 5,5,4 which was better than I expected. My nightly scripture study has been keeping up at least a verse, and would still be a chapter except that it seems when I pick up my scriptures the last few nights my wife takes that as her cue to start talking about the day which disrupts my pattern and takes the time I have for reading, especially while trying to avoid greater illness and needing to ensure I sleep so I'm not staying up later to make it up.
The devil stirred them up
In Moroni 9, Mormon is writing an epistle to his son, Moroni, and explains how the Nephites and Lamanites are doing all manner of great evils. Among these, he states how the devil stirred up the people to be in constant anger with each other. I thought about this correlates with today. It seems politically speaking there is never an admission when the "other side" had a decent idea or working together on anything. It's always fear mongering and hate mongering about how bad the other "team" is. I hear constantly at work about how horrible Trump is, or how evil the Canadian Conservatives are provincially and federally as well. While social media keeps me well "informed" about how corrupt and evil the Liberals and NDP are and how morally bankrupt the Democrats are. And with the right sparking of heart strings to match brain wiring this certainly works to sew seeds of hate and to think that all people thinking the wrong way must be defective and stupid to not see through the "obvious" evils of the other side.
While the political views we each hold here are not the point (I'm as prone to believing a certain side more than the other and thinking the others are awful and find myself wondering about the brain damage in significant portions of the population to continue supporting the others as well) what I'm hoping to do better is not allow the adversary to lure me into hating my neighbors as this is counter to the Lord's wish to love my neighbors.
Be strong!
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Stirred up, That is sure the truth. Every opportunity is taken to attack good and promote or normalize evil. The thin edge of the wedge or the nose of the camel in the tent. Fortunately, good is continuing to promote good. As Mormon says to Moroni we have a labour to perform in this tabernacle of clay. I was reminded of how Joseph Smith laboured in the scriptures. Labour in the scriptures seems like a way to exercise faith.