Things Out of Place

When I obtained my second missionary companion in France I changed apartments but I didn’t leave the city I was in.  So the two of us took our stuff to a very small and very dirty apartment at the top of a narrow apartment complex that seemed to be sort of jammed into the roof of the building.  There was barely room for the two of us, and the apartment was filthy from the previous missionaries.  My new companion insisted that we clean it up and organize it immediately rather than to wait for some other day to get things in order there.  I remember that he made a statement—I think he said it was words of wisdom from his uncle—about the fact that if you leave something in a certain place (where it really doesn’t belong) for a couple of days, there is a high probability that the thing will simply stay there indefinitely and we will stop even noticing it.  In other words, if we don’t quickly take care of something that is out of order, we usually no longer even see that it is out of place.  I thought of this recently at work when I did just that—I got a replacement phone and I set my old phone on the floor next to my desk, thinking I’d take care of that later.  It sat there on the floor for months—and I looked at it every day without even seeing it—before I finally took the 30 seconds to put it away in a closet.  I believe that it is the same way with things that we need to take care of spiritually in our lives: it is so much easier to correct our course of action the day we start going awry.  The longer we wait to repent for some small bad habit, the less likely it is that after a while we will even see anything wrong with what we once knew was in deed out of place in our lives. 

            I believe this is why President Nelson’s counsel to repent daily is so important—it is so much easier to make those course corrections daily than to let negative actions become habitual.  He counseled, “Nothing is more liberating, more ennobling, or more crucial to our individual progression than is a regular, daily focus on repentance. Repentance is not an event; it is a process. It is the key to happiness and peace of mind. When coupled with faith, repentance opens our access to the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”  In the law of Moses, the priests offered daily sacrifices, such as the “daily meat offering” and “daily burnt offering” (Numbers 4:16, 29:16).  Paul emphasized how the “priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices” (Hebrews 10:11).  He was comparing the daily need for sacrifice with the single atonement of the Savior, but it highlights at least the fact that they had to make a daily, consistent sacrifice before the Lord.  Surely this is like the repentance that we need to make—a daily attempt to give the Lord the best that we have.  We can make our daily sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit by looking each day for some way we can change our actions or thoughts or feelings to be more like the Savior wants us to be.  We can put in order those figurative out of place items in our lives quickly before they become permanent fixtures that are much harder to move.