This one is serious and has no pictures

I recently started team teaching a mission prep class in my ward. We’ve had two lessons so far. I taught the first lesson, which was a pretty generic introduction to missionary work. My friend P Dizzle taught the second lesson which was entitled “Personal Worthiness”. As a side note, the words “worthiness” and “worthy” tend to rub me the wrong way, only because they are too close to the word “worth” and therefore are too often confused with each other. That’s probably the subject of another post though.

The discussion in this lesson tended to revolve a lot around rules and how we should obey them. I was sitting in the back of the classroom and looking around at the guys and girls that were there. I was trying to imagine what might be going through their heads during this discussion and felt the need to intervene. I said something along the lines of, “with all this talk of rules and obedience, it might seem that you are being asked to surrender who you are and become a robot on your mission.” I also said that it didn’t necessarily need to be that way and that you could obey the rules and still remain true to your own unique personality. In fact, it’s your own unique personality that is going to be able to connect to people in ways that others won’t be able to. (And not in a gross used car salesman kind of way but in a more organic you are looking for something more in your life and think what I have to offer might be helpful to you kind of way.)

I got to thinking throughout the lesson about my own relationship to rules and how it’s changed over the years. Up until a couple years ago, I was a complete conformist. I would outwardly portray that I was living by the rules, anyway. Sometimes I was even living by the rules inwardly, but in a lot of ways there was a serious disconnect between my outward portrayal and my inward reality. I know I’m being vague here, but I have no interest in publicly disclosing all my past transgressions :) This has all been shifting in the last couple of years and my outward portrayal and my inward reality have been coming more in line with each other. As I sat in the class thinking about it, it occurred to me that one reason why this is so is that I’ve started to view rules and commandments less as something that are there to control my life and more as something that gives me control over my life.

This hasn’t meant that I am now even more vigilant in following the rules. (or making it look like I am following the rules) If anything, I have become more relaxed. I think my current view of rules and obedience can be summed up as follows. Generally speaking, the younger you are, the more you probably need to be guided by rules. As you get older though, you start to connect more to your inner voice or the spirit or your conscience or whatever you want to call it. You get better at learning what makes you happy and what doesn’t, what contributes to your overall growth and progression and what detracts from it. Not only do you learn those things, but you also start to gravitate towards those things that contribute to your overall well-being and growth and leave behind those things that detract. You start to rely less on rules and expectations of other people or cultures because you’ve developed a healthy and strong inner voice. This is good because we shouldn’t need to be commanded in all things. I think this post could be an expansion of the spiritual self reliance post.

That’s all. What do you think? Has your relationship with rules changed over time? Do you disagree/agree with anything I’ve said? If so, what? And Why? Would you change or add anything? Talk to me. Go.