We're not moving

You know that moment when you don't see the sun for five days straight? Yeah that's what happened this week in "sunny" south Florida. Its quite a hardship to have soaked socks all day and a wet umbrella in your locker, but for some it was worse. A tornado ripped through the area at 130 mph and damaged several homes. Some places were split in half, while the next door neighbors were untouched. A friend of the missionaries wasn't the most fortunate and had some damage done to his house. Just looking at the mess around his house made me want to pick up everything and just move it, maybe just start over. But this man wasn't in that same mentality. He siphoned some gas from his car and revved up the chainsaw, getting to work. He wasn't going to wait for someone else to come and clean up for him, he had work that needed to be done so he did it. This kind of relates to some messages heard in stake conference today. One speaker quoted a verse from Jeremiah that basically said that it seems like the wicked have joy and the righteous have hardships sometimes. The righteous have hardships because of their potential, because they can grow from those trials and reach that potential. We are not told that the right way is always the easy way, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the right way. We are holding onto unchanging standards in an ever-changing world; we're not moving. Turmoil increases around us each day. Sin and deceit become more and more rampant and acceptable, and although the adversary is constantly against us, we're not moving. Sometimes it seems like it would be so much easier to join the ranks of the other side, but the righteous will not move. They will stay firmly planted in the truth of the Gospel. This is our testimony. Sometimes however, our testimony begins to slip and become neglected. Yesterday, my friend and I went to a garage sale to check out the price of a pretty sick race car bed. Too bad it was fifty bucks. Something that caught my eye was an old chair. It's probably mid-century vintage and is one of those chairs that the seat flips up and there's a few steps underneath for a stool. It was kind of rusty and it had some paint splattered over it, so we took it home to work on it. Scratching off paint and rust was hard, we even tried painting over the pieces to cover up the errors, but we took the paint back off. Finally, the idea came of using steel wool to take out the imperfections, and that worked superbly. Back to my point, about the neglecting of our testimony. Sometimes we let go of it and it gets rusty and dull. We need to make the effort to retrieve it and clean it off, we can't just cover our imperfections and hope that it'll be okay. We need to turn to the Savior, or the steel wool, and fix our testimonies. Don't think that you can't change, because you can. Today a sixteen-year-old kid got baptized at Church. He was of another religion his whole life, but he had a desire to change. He searched for the truth and came to our Church. Don't ever move from your values, they are the one thing that remains true forever. Clean yourself up with the Savior's Atonement, and be the righteous person you should be, not changing for anyone.