Life Worth Living

The majority of my spiritual thoughts on my blog come from things I've found in the scriptures during the week, and I would hate to break the trend today. It's a real thing, scripture study. My life has been so blessed by it.

Scripture study is a tangent I could go off on, but today I really want to talk about life.

I've been reading in Ether lately, about the "destruction of an entire civilization," as Jeffrey R. Holland put it (he may have been talking about other destruction, because the Book of Mormon has a lot of of it, but it fits Ether nonetheless). In chapter 15, Coriantumr finally writes a letter to the other leader, Shiz, to ask that the fighting cease, "for the sake of the lives of the people." I thought about that for a minute, and this is what I wrote in the margin:

If we value life and don't kill, how come we don't treat each other better? We don't want to kill, but it's okay to hurt? I know God expects more than that. These are His creations, His children!

Really though. Why do we frown upon and punish for taking away a life, but we turn the other way when it comes to making a life miserable? Don't we all deserve a high quality of life? And I'm not talking about material possessions and the circumstances we find ourselves in when I mention quality. Those things are out of control. But we can control the quality of our own lives and the impact that we have on the lives of others. I've often found that the quality of my life improves when I am focused on someone else's life and what I can do for them. 

And how can it not? When I am removing burdens from the shoulders of those I care about, when I am helping someone else see the good in their circumstances, how can I not feel good about my life and what I am doing?

What about the effects of others' actions on my own life? I have been so blessed to have been surrounded by so many fantastic people. I have never truly been alone, no matter how much I try and have tried to convince myself (but that is a story for a later day). Their stories strengthen me, give me hope, set examples for me to follow. Which leads me to my next thought: stories.

My visiting teacher shared a story during fast and testimony meeting today that had been shared with her. The stories we tell, the lives we live make their way to far more people than we realize. How often do we tell stories that we ourselves have been told? And how often do those stories set us thinking, keep us going, change the course of the paths we are on? 

We have a far greater impact on the lives of others than we realize. If you want proof, take a look at your own life. Look at the fingerprints and thumbprints and hand prints and footprints that are scattered all over your story. Some are clean, and leave you with feelings of happiness and contentment. Others are dirty, leaving you with the desire to scrub them off. Try as you might though, they never will. Either kind. They have become part of you, even though they are the marks of others. They have shaped you and molded you, and you would not be who you are without them. And would you really take them off? Some of you would, despite who you are today and what you have become with them. And that's okay. 

But this all lead back to my original point - why do we not place a greater value on life than simply allowing it to continue living? Why do we not try to leave it better than we found it? What if that was our focus, to add good to the lives of our friends and family and even the strangers that we come across on our way to work, during work, in class, at church? What difference could we make? Back to my visiting teacher. The story she shared was from her mission. There was a man who was a surgeon before World War II. He loved his work, and he was good at it. During the war, a bombing left him blind, unable to return to his work as a surgeon. Rather than giving up, he went to various factories, asking them to give him three weeks to learn to do the job blind. He would then gather other blind war veterans and teach them what he had learned so that they would be able to work and support themselves and their families. 

I love that story. Here was a man who did not let his limitations and his weaknesses hold him back from living his life, but he also used them to help others live theirs. How that story touched me! He changed his life, the lives of the war veterans he helped to find jobs, the lives of their families and the descendants of those families, the lives of everyone in my visiting teacher's mission who heard that story, the lives of everyone in sacrament meeting today, and now you. Not to mention so many more who have heard that story from others who were told the story. We have no idea what our stories can do, and my urging this week is that we think about what we can do to improve the quality of those living around us. 

If you made it to the end of this extraordinarily long post, thank you. Have a wonderful week. If you didn't, that's okay. I hope you have a wonderful week as well. :)