A Resolution I Can Keep

Home is the place where, when you have to there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I’m not good at New Year’s Resolutions. I’m a believer in change and improvement, but I lack the gene which influences consistency. I make a goal; I work at it awhile; I see a shiny object in the road; I lose my motivation. Especially when the goal involves some kind of self-improvement like losing weight. Experience has taught me that along about February, I remember how much I like chocolate cream pie, and all self-discipline disappears in a flurry of whipped cream.

One summer I took an intensive 40-hour class at BYU on “eliminating self-defeating behavior”. Our goal was to choose a behavior which stood in the way of our progress toward improvement. According to the professor, it didn’t matter whether we chose anything from tobacco use to perpetual tardiness, improving one behavior would effect change in all the others. I can’t remember what issue I chose to focus on, but I faithfully worked through the process. It was hard, partly because it forced me to acknowledge I had a whole bunch of weaknesses which needed addressing–that felt self-defeating all by itself. But the good news is that I learned I had the power and the will to change if I was willing to work at it.

So, I leaped in. I had always wanted to be a more competent student of the scriptures, but my love of reading murder mysteries often hijacked the time I might have spent being more consistent about scripture study. One day I was sitting with the choir on the stand at Sacrament meeting and had the distinct impression I should read the Book of Mormon looking for all the references to women and families. At the time, I remembered almost no passages specifically about women, so it seemed like an intriguing idea. I went right out and bought four colors of markers, designating one color for references to specific women, one color to families, one color to highlight new insights unrelated to the previous two categories, and one color I called “when the heck did they put that in the Book of Mormon?” for all the stuff I discovered that seemed completely new to me (sadly, there was a need for that color quite often). That project has proven quite useful over the past 30 years. I am always pulling out my “Rainbow” copy for one reference or another because it’s easy to find.

Truth is, I was quite proud of myself for having the tenacity to finish. But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of years later, I read an old conference talk by Elder McConkie in which he claimed if a person read seven pages a day, she could read all four gospel standard works in one year. I had no inclination at all to test his statement, but I couldn’t shake the idea, so one day I began. (In case you want to know, the Old Testament took forever and was sometimes incomprehensible, but I kept at it.) If I missed a day, the next day I read fourteen pages to  keep up. I finished with enough year left to re-read 1/3 of the Book of Mormon a second time. Who knew?

Once I accomplished that goal, I decided I was likely to be able to ease up and read one standard work a year without too much difficulty—which I did for several years. I’m guessing I worked through that four-year rotation at least three times–enough that I vowed never to bother tackling the Old Testament again–so naturally the Bishop called me to teach Gospel Doctrine, and the text was—you guessed it–Old Testament. (A sure sign that Heaven has a sense of humor—as well as the last word!)

However, all that commitment was apparently not nearly enough. One Sunday during Sacrament meeting in the Spanish Branch on our Inner-City Mission, the Branch President challenged us all to re-read the Book of Mormon in the next six months. “Not a problem”, I thought. I KNEW I could do that! Until I realized he was challenging us to read it in Spanish. I sighed. Here we go again.

I bought two $1.00 copies of the Book of Mormon—one in English; one in Spanish. And more markers. In six months, the Branch President asked a few folks who had accomplished the goal to speak in church about their experience. Unfortunately, I was not one of those folks–because I was only 1/3 of the way through. For at least a half hour almost every day, I opened those two books next to each other and laboriously made my way through a page of two of text.  The first few chapters were a heavy load, but as I read, I learned vocabulary which had not been part of my college curriculum. That helped enormously. However, what helped the most was the breadth of understanding which opened up from the different perspective of another language. Suddenly, old familiar scriptures took on broader, more thought-provoking meanings. It required a full eighteen months to finish. I’ve since forgotten most of that hard-earned Spanish vocabulary , but I will never forget the power of the love which seeped from the pages every day when I read.

So, my New Year’s Resolution for this year? I’ve learned change requires commitment, determination, and most of all, TIME. It’s self-defeating to judge myself for my choices (or lack of them) on my worst days. This year I’m going to award myself a little patience.  While I’m at it, it won’t hurt to extend that small consideration to those around me, too.