'Decisions determine destiny'
The home teaching message for January 2015 was by President Thomas S. Monson. The above quote was from that message.
Another statement from that message was; ‘history turns on small hinges and so do our lives’.
You, my grandchildren, will see how true these statements are. It is very important for you to make the correct decisions in your life. The commandments of God are a good place to start. The world will tell you that these are restrictive, but they are eternal laws of happiness. You can never break the commandments of The Lord you only break yourself against them.
I have learned that even the slightest deviation from the commandments of The Lord eventually brings sadness and misery into our lives. This may occur as a result of our own transgression or someone else's not keeping the commandments. As an example many innocent people died recently, because some terrorist did not heed the commandment to love their neighbor and 'thou shalt not kill'.
We will all make decisions that will turn out to be in error, but we should never make a decision that we know is contrary to what we know and have been taught to be right. We sing the song 'Do what is right, let the consequence follow.'
The nice part about this is that we can always make course corrections. We do not always have to continue down the wrong path. We may have to suffer the consequence of a bad decision, but through repentance we can avoid the eternal consequences.
The sad part about making poor choices is that they not only hurt us, but they hurt other people as well. We do not live in a vacuum. We are put into families for a reason. We were not hatched on a rock with no one to care about us or love us. When we make poor choices true parents do not say a Kaddish and never have anything to do with us. They may have their hearts rended and broken, but we are still bound by covenants to them and The Lord.
The parable of the prodigal son is illustrative of the principle of the love and patience of the father and most parents who are grounded in the gospel of Christ. We sorrow when those that we love make decisions, which bring us pain and bring undesirable consequences to the decision maker.
Unfortunately decisions do determine destiny and history does turn on very small hinges. When I was in high school we studied a number of Shakespeare's plays. He wrote Julius Caesar. Brutus and Cassius were key players in the drama. At one point Cassius says' The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."
There is a false notion that has pervaded the thinking of men from the beginning that if the stars were not aligned in our favor that nothing we could do would change the outcome. Our actions do determine what happen in our life. As is often quoted from the poem Invictus, we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul.
D&C 93:39-40 lets us know that when we are disobedient the wicked one comes and takes away our light and the truth that we have, thus our decisions do have very subtle consequences that we may be unaware of.
Please make the right decisions so that your destiny will be all that you are capable of.
Love,
Grandpa
The home teaching message for January 2015 was by President Thomas S. Monson. The above quote was from that message.
Another statement from that message was; ‘history turns on small hinges and so do our lives’.
You, my grandchildren, will see how true these statements are. It is very important for you to make the correct decisions in your life. The commandments of God are a good place to start. The world will tell you that these are restrictive, but they are eternal laws of happiness. You can never break the commandments of The Lord you only break yourself against them.
I have learned that even the slightest deviation from the commandments of The Lord eventually brings sadness and misery into our lives. This may occur as a result of our own transgression or someone else's not keeping the commandments. As an example many innocent people died recently, because some terrorist did not heed the commandment to love their neighbor and 'thou shalt not kill'.
We will all make decisions that will turn out to be in error, but we should never make a decision that we know is contrary to what we know and have been taught to be right. We sing the song 'Do what is right, let the consequence follow.'
The nice part about this is that we can always make course corrections. We do not always have to continue down the wrong path. We may have to suffer the consequence of a bad decision, but through repentance we can avoid the eternal consequences.
The sad part about making poor choices is that they not only hurt us, but they hurt other people as well. We do not live in a vacuum. We are put into families for a reason. We were not hatched on a rock with no one to care about us or love us. When we make poor choices true parents do not say a Kaddish and never have anything to do with us. They may have their hearts rended and broken, but we are still bound by covenants to them and The Lord.
The parable of the prodigal son is illustrative of the principle of the love and patience of the father and most parents who are grounded in the gospel of Christ. We sorrow when those that we love make decisions, which bring us pain and bring undesirable consequences to the decision maker.
Unfortunately decisions do determine destiny and history does turn on very small hinges. When I was in high school we studied a number of Shakespeare's plays. He wrote Julius Caesar. Brutus and Cassius were key players in the drama. At one point Cassius says' The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."
There is a false notion that has pervaded the thinking of men from the beginning that if the stars were not aligned in our favor that nothing we could do would change the outcome. Our actions do determine what happen in our life. As is often quoted from the poem Invictus, we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul.
D&C 93:39-40 lets us know that when we are disobedient the wicked one comes and takes away our light and the truth that we have, thus our decisions do have very subtle consequences that we may be unaware of.
Please make the right decisions so that your destiny will be all that you are capable of.
Love,
Grandpa
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