Thursday, January 25, 2007

Seeking the Spirit

As I've discussed over at my Book of Mormon Inspection blog, I started writing my thoughts about each chapter I read when I was a missionary. Now I'm posting them and sharing them with the Internet world. Some entries were better than others. Sometimes I'd get so caught up in what I was going to write rather than on learning. When I focused on feeling the Spirit and learning something, then the writing part was really easy. And so it went that if I didn't focus on what I was getting out of the scriptures, my entries were poor. But when I really focused on learning from the scriptures, I found that I thought of many things I wanted to write about.

The same thing happened today at lunch. As usual, I read a chapter and then write some commentary on it or how I can apply the teachings to my life. After reading 2 Nephi 15, I didn't really get much out of it. I read a few things from the LDS.org gospel library as well as gospeldoctrine.com, but I wasn't feeling inspired. But I thought some more and waited for the feeling to come. As I reviewed 2 Nephi 15:4, Elder Holland's talk came to mind. I didn't remember what talk it was or which General Conference it was, rather I remembered the feeling I had when I first listened to that talk. The Spirit made such an impression on my spirit that I've not fogotten it. And so I went and found the talk and read it over again and felt the same spirit as when I first heard it.

We can't simply expect to have spiritual experiences come to us every day. Sometimes they will, but more often than not, we must seek them out. If we exercise a little faith, then those experiences will come every day.