Gospel Principles/Scientific Principles

Well, it’s that time of year again when Emily and I went to spend an evening at the New Beginnings program. Yes, it has taken me two days for the pounding headache to abate enough to have coherent thoughts on the evening. No, this year I will not rant and rave about the dress code (but yes, the stake, Emily and I were the only ones in dresses). However, I am going to expound about having to endure an evening with (and I will steal my favorite talk show host Neal Boortz phrase here) the dumb masses.


First of all if you have been asked to speak and you are going to use something as an example, perhaps you should actually know how that something works. For instance, if you were going to use the example of a hot air balloon rising into the air, and you wanted to talk about the scientific principle behind it, perhaps you should take a minute, Google it and learn why a hot air balloon rises. That way you wouldn’t be standing up there and say something like this: “so the balloons have these big propane burners and they heat the air in the balloon and it …like…turns it into helium and the balloon rises up”. That way, in turn, I wouldn’t be forced to sit there wondering if a railroad spike being pounded into my brain really would be more painful.

But moving past that scientific massacre, the speaker then moved on to talk about how he had done a charitable act as a teenager (in great detail), which whenever he thinks about it now he feels like he is being buoyed up like a hot air balloon. I, on the other hand, thought he was confusing the warm feeling of doing something nice for someone with his extremely large, over inflated sense of self importance. We then were called on to TELL something we had done for someone else. Because my husband and mother have repeated told me that I can’t publicly smack people down, I chose to study my thumbnail really, really hard. After the group had shared…he concluded that doing small acts of kindness can lift you up like the hot air balloons.

See, here’s the deal…I think that when you do things for others, you aren’t supposed to talk about it. You have the choice after doing charitable acts to seek the earthly reward or the heavenly reward, but I don’t think you get to do both! Bragging about what you did makes it not count! So, on the way home, after dissecting everything to Emily, and explaining the either/or principle of charitable blessings, I told her that since I never did kind things that must be why I was cold and dead inside. She looked at me and said, “Oh Mom, you’re not cold … and dead inside”. Later when I started thinking about it, I realized the way she phrased it, apparently I must be one or the other, I’m just not sure which. I just hope she was practicing her sarcasm.