When God is with me, I am happy. Life is wonderful. When I leave God, in my thoughts or actions, life is crummy. But there is always a way back to God through the atonement of Christ. It’s simple, but powerful. 

I like to give myself advice. I journal everyday, and write down what I learned from the day. Here are some recent ones:

When the kids make a mistake or make a mess or are doing something you don’t like, the worst thing you can do is get mad. Sometimes the kid needs to think, and mostly the kid needs to learn. Confrontation puts them into survival mode, and they can’t learn, they are just surviving. When the kids made a mess and need to clean it up, threatening them didn’t work. Giving them a new idea of how to look at the mess and approach cleaning it up so it didn’t seem so daunting worked a lot better. I told them to find the biggest thing and pick it up. Then the next biggest, etc. Finally at the end, they didn’t quite finish, but I only had a few toys to go back and put away. Curtis even helped quite a bit. They learned how to approach big messes better, and I got them to clean up without threatening.

Throw off my schedule and I’m less task oriented and have more time to stop what I’m doing and play with the boys. More time to say yes, time to notice cute smiles, time to sing songs. More time to not feel so busy and work on things I want to do, not feel like I have to. More time to be creative, time to remember all the good ideas I have and actually implement them.  Less time to be overwhelmed and just push things aside. More calm, more peace.

Be more diligent and concerned at home. Remember my priorities.
I should look to do the things that
1) God wants me to do
2) That match and support my priorities
3) I am passionate about
4) Will provide a genuine service to others
5) What I have committed to do
I don’t need to do
1) What I think will make myself look good to others
2) Serve other people’s interests
3) Unimportant projects that put my own on the back burner

My thoughts were:
I’m so frustrated… This is annoying.  Can he just stop?
And then I thought….
I pick my thoughts, and if I believe these ones I make then true. 
What was actually true?
My child was crying, I felt a little frustrated. But I was also able to handle the situation just fine, and my frustration faded quickly.

I had a question in my mind this week, and after some prayer, this parable came into my mind. Hope you enjoy

All of us get to go to work at the bakery. We have various cakes to make. Each of us is given a bit of instruction, more is available if we look. So we start off, trying to make cakes. At first they are abysmal, but gradually they get better. After we make a cake, we send it to the Head Baker, who trims it, frosts it and makes it beautiful.

Whatever we do, no matter how hard we try though, our cakes are never perfect. They always come out a little uneven. But that’s okay, because the  fixes it when He finishes the cake. He can take away the imperfections, fill in gaps, trim away excess, and give it a sweeter flavor with the frosting. Sometimes he even takes a very poorly made cake, throws it out and replaces it with something much better, or asks us to try again.

While making cakes, its easy to look over at a fellow cook and say, “My cake is better than yours,” or “Her cake is better than mine.” Maybe it is. But our own cake is still imperfect. And no matter the state of the cake, the Head Baker takes all of them, fixes it up and makes it beautiful and delicious. We soon realize that comparison is mostly pointless because all our cakes aren’t perfect, but the Head Baker takes our efforts and makes far more out of them than we can.

We share ideas about how to get our cakes better. Sometimes the ideas work well. Sometimes the ideas we share don’t work, because every cake and the way we bake it is a bit different. The Head Baker gives us lots of advice, and that advice is always the best and always works.