There's a relatively new primary song entitled If the Savior Stood Beside Me. The song starts out "If the Savior stood beside me, would I do the things I do?" The point of this song, I'm sure, is a thought experiment wherein if the answer to that question is no, then we shouldn't be doing it at all. I engaged in that thought experiment this morning while getting ready for work, and the answer to the question is, in nearly all cases, no. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing.
If the Savior stood beside me, I wouldn't clean my apartment. I wouldn't cook dinner. I wouldn't go to work or run errands. I wouldn't even read my scriptures. I would sit down, be quiet, and listen to what He has to say to me. The many worthy pursuits of my life would pause for something more important, but that doesn't mean that I should stop going to work, taking care of the necessities of life, or reading my scriptures. It means we should be mindful of the appropriate time and place for doing the various activities in life. After all, "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1
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I have the same basic response to folks who claim that people should live each day like it were their last. Well if I were to take that advice, I would probably spend every day taking my kids to Disneyland, never contribute to my IRA, and no laundry would ever be done. This course of action would inevitably lead to filty, uneducated offspring and an impoverished future.
My mother kept a church picture on the wall, the one of Mary and Martha with the Savior. When I asked her why she chose that one, she said it was because Martha was pretty (she meant "sympathetically portrayed" I think), and she always thought Martha had gotten shortchanged in the scriptures.
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