Monday, November 14, 2005

White-Out for Life

One day, at work, I had made a mistake on something I had written by hand which had to be accurate, and asked a friend to pass me the White-Out. As I used it to cover up my mistake, I jokingly commented to my friend, "Too bad we don't have White-Out for life." But as soon as I said it, I stopped myself, and not so jokingly said, "Oh, I guess we do, don't we! The Savior and His Atonement."

Too often, like myself, we forget this, and waste time stressing over our mistakes as though they're fatal, and never move on - which, in a sense, makes them fatal!

3 comments:

Cricket said...

I was reading along thinking "Yeah that'd be nice".

I'm impressed that the answer came to you so quickly. It would have taken me a bit longer, LOL...

But that is a very good point that too many of us just up and forget that. I was reminded of that just today by Bobby McFarin singing Don't Worry Be Happy:
"In every live we have some trouble, but when we worry we make it double, don't worry, be happy"

svoid said...

I had a 8th grade history teacher that made us write out all of our tests and assignments in ink, refused to let us use white out and would mark us down for having to cross things out and rewrite them. His point was that he wanted to force us to think about what we were writing before we started writing rather than just always assuming that the white out would be there to save us.

I ran across this article the other day where the author was making the same point about believing in God. From the article, "Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

TK said...

svoid,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would have to agree: your 8th grade teacher had a point. I guess everything in life requires a certain degree of balance - not going to either extreme. (But I would have had a hard time in that class, as I seldom ever get things right the first time!)

And thank you for sharing the article, too. If I believed that the Savior was willing to die to pay for our 'sins' so that we could just mess around and not really try, I'd agree that the author has a good point. However, I believe his Atonement was for the times that we tried our best, but being human, didn't quite make it; or, being human, became too discouraged to even try because we were at the end of our rope and it was starting to fray.

Nevertheless, the author's point that we shouldn't just take things for granted was, indeed, valid and very well put.