Discipleship

In my linguistics class, we've been talking about morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest unit of language that holds meaning. We often think of them as roots or suffixes or prefixes.

I've been wading through the New Testament in my personal scripture study the last few months. I love the four gospels, but Paul's words tend to wash right over my head. But one thing stood out to me as I was reading in the gospels. Christ refers to his followers as "disciples." According to the dictionary, a disciple is a follower, student, learner, apprentice, or pupil.

I have often wondered what it means to truly be a disciple of Christ. I think the answer to that question is a lifelong question. I don't expect to ever master the concept in this life. However, while contemplating morphemes the other day in class, I realized that "disciple" has the same root as the word "discipline." That means that the two words are related.

Isn't it true? Part of following Christ and being a disciple of Him is obeying his commandments - and all the commandments require discipline. It takes work and practice and self-control to emulate Him in all that we do. Those who practice an instrument or play a sport understand the discipline it takes to keep going even when it's hard, to do something over and over and over so many times until it becomes a habit, second nature, if you will. They understand the practical application of discipline in both body and mind to be able to keep going even when all you want to do is quit. Is it not the same with the gospel? Some habits are hard to break, and others are even harder to form - but, as the instrumentalists and the athletes can attest, once the task is mastered, the rewards far outweigh the pain and stress and difficulty and discipline it took to get there.

I know that's true. I know it's worth it. Sometimes, it takes an inhuman amount of discipline to keep doing everything I know I should. Sometimes it seems so much easier to quit, to stop trying to keep my temper in check, to keep getting up early to read my scriptures, to keep remembering the purpose of my fast, to keep working on myself as a person and trying to grow. But it is SO worth it. It's worth it every day when I kneel at my bedside and feel the incredible love of a Heavenly Father wrapping all around me, encouraging me to keep going. It's worth it when I stop and recognize the hundreds of blessings, both big and small, that are showered upon me in the most unexpected ways. It's worth it when I remember the promises made to me in blessings and in the temple, and knowing that someday, somehow, everything will be made right, that all the frustrating inconsistencies of this life will be resolved, that relationships will be made perfect, that loved ones will be cared for, and that no matter what, I can always access the love of a Heavenly Father, who is God, who knows me and loves me and supports my righteous efforts.

That's worth all the discipline in the world. Being a disciple is more than talking about following Christ. It's truly syncing my life with His and being like Him.

Viva la Vida.

What makes me HAPPY!

~* getting a new recipe I'm excited to try out

~* translating - even "boring" linguistics textbooks

~* my new job - it's addicting! I love emailing people and getting stuff done and stuff. awesome .

~* writing crazy high-school style blog posts with no capitalization, and being like, YEAH take THAT English teachers, I am not in an English class right now and I can do what I want with IMPROPER CAPITALIZATION! (why yes, I am in a rebellious mood at the moment, and this is how it comes out :)

~* my sisters-in-law . i am so very, very sad they all live so far away, except for the newlywed one . the wedding weekend was the best!

~* my new jeans - bought with said sisters-in-law - *see above *

~* my sewing class - just chillaxin' in the sewing lab making cute clothes 4 hours a week . cool.

~* hanging out at work and talking to my mom about all sorts of things

~* skiing - and going down adventurous hills (for me) and rocking at it .

~* stalking cute wedding pictures on facebook . people are so cute .

~* writing blogs that are NOTHING like my typical blog-writing style .

~* watching Ryan study and cheering insanely with him when he aces quizzes - and being home to do it .

~* watching Raising Hope (i know, it shouldn't make me laugh... but it does. man. the addiction power of tv.)

~* looking at pictures from Ryan's mission and remembering our awesome trip to visit it!

~*seeing the eiffel tower and being like, oh yeah, i went there . nbd .

~* pretending to translate my senior project while really listening to THIS:

I was born in the wrong decade.

Mamma Mia - Abba

Take a Chance - Abba

Our Mexican dance - the version that works :)

If you missed it... *shame on you* ...this is the Mexican dance that I was in for Christmas Around the World this past weekend. I love folk dance :) 

Bees and Seas

For several semesters -like six, or seven maybe - I've been chasing the elusive Dean's List semester. In my college, that means taking at least 14 credits and getting straight A's. I've come SO close on several occasions, but I always end up with that one class that comes in just under the A mark. (Of course, Ryan got one last winter without even trying... or caring... or even knowing what it is... It's still on our fridge, reminding me daily of my bad luck and lack of scholastic competence.)

This was going to be THE semester - since it's my last semester where I'll have at least 14 credits. However, I have that one professor whose tests are very applied and his lectures are very philosophical. I have that one class where the professor wants us to read his mind and who grades on an impossibly picky scale. I have that other class where there are outside required events that my schedule won't let me attend, and so I'm crossing my fingers that the teacher remembers that we talked about it and doesn't change their mind at the last second and dock my grade. I have that other one class where I keep thinking I'm doing great and then the test scores come in and I'm average, or worse.

All in all, it looks like my five-year-long goal of making the Dean's List might die with my April graduation, fly into the air with all the other caps, and disappear, never to be reached. Despite my best efforts, it might be a semester of B's and maybe even C's, and that elusive letter congratulating me on academic success and scholastic prowess probably won't ever appear on my doorstep.

Quitter

I'm not normally a quitter. I usually enjoy challenges and love the sense of accomplishment from overcoming something hard.

But when someone informs me the skill I most pride myself on in my job needs work because I sent an email that sounded rude, and then gives me remedial lessons in sending courteous emails, I feel like giving up.

When I go to class and find out I might fail, just like that, for missing a homework assignment I didn't feel comfortable doing, I feel like quitting.

When I rearrange the budget spreadsheet for the hundredth time and it still shows the same numbers, I want to quit.

When I discover an error in a spreadsheet that I worked and worked and worked on, I just want to give up.

When I open my planner and the millions of things I have to somehow accomplish swim in front of my eyes, and my head starts pounding and all I can think about is how I can't possibly get all of this done along with all the other things that I have to do, and then I arrive at home to more to-do lists and more things I'm failing in, and I look at that budget sheet and that April graduation date on the calendar and wonder for the millionth time what in the world I am going to do to make it all work out right... I just want to give up then. I want to crawl under the down comforter on our bed and hide between our shiny sheets and cover my head with a pillow and pretend the whole entire world doesn't exist and it's just me in my little dark cocoon and nobody can tell me what to do, when to do it, what time to be there, or that I'm doing a bad job at it, because inevitably something falls through the cracks and I can never please everybody, all at once, in everything I have to do, and if I can't please everybody, then I can't please myself, and maybe if I hide under the covers it will all go away and take care of itself and I can come out in a couple hundred years and everyone will have forgotten what a terrible failure I was at life in October 2012, and maybe they won't mind that I didn't know what to do after graduation, and they won't care that I sent an email that offended the secretaries, and they won't laugh at me for messing up spreadsheets all the time, and they'll smile and tell me that I'm doing a good job at life and maybe then I'll actually believe them because right now I really just don't. 

And that is why today I want so bad to be a quitter.

Fully Committed

Commitment: the act of committing, pledging, or engaging oneself (thank you, dictionary.com)

"There are so many people who promise so much, yet when the time comes for them to really do something and stop talking about it, they falter and fall away...So for all of us, the time to commit, to keep our covenants, to act, it now!"

This quote is from my awesome missionary younger brother-in-law. We've been friends for a while, and even before I married into the family he was an example to me - mostly because he is always so cheerful! Now, as he's coming to the end of his mission, he wrote home to say that one of the families he's been teaching for quite some time won't be baptized before he leaves. I'm sure that's an incredible disappointment to him - but instead of complaining about it, he turned the topic to commitment and continued to inspire me with his ability to glean a message from a disappointing situation.

Idea 1: Commitment. It's an interesting word we usually hear collocated with marriage. But once someone overcomes their "fear of commitment" and ties the knot, it seems the phrase disappears from the register. Apparently, in our society, the idea of commitment only extends as far as the altar and is then discarded and tossed away in favor of "be yourself" and "make sure they make you happy" and other trite, self-centered ideas. Isn't commitment something bigger than that? Isn't commitment about love, really?

Idea 2: Commitment in definition silently implies a sacrifice of some sort. If commitment is a pledge, it is a pledge to do or not do something. And that something will take away from other somethings, and therefore commitment involves doing one thing instead of another thing. Example. Commitment to daily personal scripture study involves a time sacrifice. Time is spent studying the scriptures in lieu of spending it somewhere else. That's about as basic as it gets.

Idea 3: Commitment is action. "There are so many people who promise so much, yet when the time comes for them to really do something and stop talking about it, they falter and fall away." One cannot be committed and do nothing - unless they are committed to doing whatever they want and nothing else. Then they can do nothing. But if one is committed to anything or anyone else, action is going to be required.

So.

Commitment = love + sacrifice + action.

The true measure of our commitment is the spirit with which we attempt to keep our commitments. Halfhearted "attempts" aren't good enough. Now is the time to be fully committed to the things we believe and the people we love. Trying isn't good enough, and neither is making excuses. Perfection doesn't come all in a day - but commitment can. The time to act is now.

Viva la Vida.

And thanks, John, for being the messenger for something I needed to hear.

Coming Full Circle: Viva la Vida

I had a really hard time choosing the name of my blog.

I think my first blog's name was something like My Amazing Adventures or something. That ended as I quickly realized I didn't have THAT many adventures and none of them were particularly amazing. So the title changed to Snoopy's Musings. That one stuck for quite some time. I like Snoopy, quite a bit actually, and "musings" fit the content of most of my posts pretty well. However, the time came to close the blog and start fresh, which I did. This time I called my blog Inside Out. I thought it was a nice metaphor for all my inside thoughts going outside, but most everyone else just didn't get it. My URL is even SnoopyInsideOut. I had high hopes for that title, but it didn't even last a month.

Sometime right around this blog-naming crisis, Coldplay released a new song that flooded the airwaves every fifteen minutes. Jon Schmidt even did a mix of it with Taylor Swift's hit Love Story, and that was how I truly fell in love with the song - titled Viva la Vida. I don't even know most of the words to the song, but the music and the feeling struck me somehow. I started thinking about "Viva la Vida" and what that might mean. Somehow the music and my musings on the phrase wound themselves into a framework for my life, how I wanted to approach it, how I wanted to live it, how I wanted to feel about it. They spun together a feeling of empowerment, of courage and bravery, mingled with a taste for adventure and a freedom to "live the life" that I truly wanted to live, unrestricted by personal fears or others' opinions. With not a little apprehension, I titled my blog Viva la Vida, as a personal reminder that I have determined to live my life deliberately, with purpose, boldly, bravely, and freely.

Since then, a lot of epiphanies have published themselves on Viva la Vida, and the name stuck. The blog lives up to its name in most respects - as an open space for me to share my success and failure at living the life. Great successes and epic failures have shared themselves on Viva la Vida. More successes than failures, granted, and I think the spirit of the phrase permeates my thoughts and decisions more than gets admitted on the blog - which, I suppose, should be deemed a success.

Now, however, is the time to admit a failure. Viva la Vida has a weakness - a kryptonite of sorts - and it's called change. It's easy to be bold and brave and adventurous in the things you do all the time. It's not so easy when your life is all different and you're faced with big changes that you don't know how to approach. Sadly, Viva la Vida has shrunk in fear at the sight of big words like GRADUATION and CAREER and even MARRIAGE to a small extent. Suddenly freedom is restricted by fear and faith is dissipating in a poof of Viva la Vida-colored dust. All at once the things that are familiar and comfortable and easy for me are drawing to a close, and I'm on a boat sailing toward a cliff that's the edge of college and the comfortably familiar life that envelops it, and I don't have any idea what to do when that bubble pops. And it's big and scary and I don't really feel bold or empowered or brave at all.

But.

Then, one day, I had an epiphany. Maybe it was today, but that's beside the point.


Viva la Vida is my personal way of making myself be strong. Viva la Vida is all about me, doing big things and accomplishing goals and being awesome all on my own. And therein lies Viva la Vida's weakness. I can't do it all on my own, and so Viva la Vida was doomed to fail from the very beginning.

Fortunately, I have help. Friends. Family. A sweet, supportive husband. And most of all, a Father in Heaven who can see what's going to happen when the bubble pops. Who is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and loves more perfectly than anyone else. Who cares deeply about me and my success, and who can help bring me closer to perfection than Viva la Vida ever could.

This quote is not by God, obviously, but it's by another of my favorite characters, and it reminds me always that I'm not alone:

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together...there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, I'll always be with you. - Winnie the Pooh.

So. Viva la Vida. Viva la Vida today, tomorrow, and always, even in the face of big, scary things - because Viva la Vida is powered by a source much stronger than my own will and determination. I walk in the footsteps of one who is much better, much smarter, and much more perfect than I, and He will never leave me to walk alone.

Viva la Vida.