Unique teaching methods

A new movie burst into my top five tonight.  I'm not sure which one it knocked out, so maybe my top five has six, but that's not the point.

I spent the last six hours or so working via a virtual private network (I love being able to do that).  Luckily the work is mindless enough that I can watch movies and other things to keep myself entertained as I work.  I had watched several episodes of M*A*S*H, but I felt need for a more in-depth, cohesive storyline, not something that changes every 25 minutes.  So I plopped myself in front of my parent's DVD cabinet (hence the need for the VPN--working for a Utah-based company while in California can get pretty tricky) and searched for something new to watch.

I chose Charly a movie written by an LDS physics professor that I heard was "sappy" and "a total chick flick."  Never having been too put off by such things (although most chick flicks are trash) I decided to watch it.

It is a definite tear-jerker and would have elicited more from me if I had not been partially focused on my work.  I'm kinda glad I didn't see it for the first time with a girl because I may have lost all semblance of manliness in her eyes if I had.  However, experience shows I may not be much better the second time around.

To move to my actual thoughts: the story is not about the love Sam and Charly have for each other.  Their love is the vehicle for the underlying message: when love is founded in true principles, it can be eternal.  That is, "happily ever after" is not a fairy tale.  It can be reality if both individuals want it and work at it.

Some sort-of spoilers follow, but knowing what happens won't change the powerful emotional effect the movie has one you.

Movies that elicit powerful emotions quickly jump to be among my favourites.  The last forty minutes (as I saw it--your experience may differ) is about a man who loves his family so much he will do anything, include acting contrary to God's will (a belief he holds very strongly) to try to ensure that family can live together.  Sam takes every step he can think to hold onto Charly and Adam for as long as he can.  But Charly's illness proves to be terminal.

Sam is a powerful example to men of how strongly they ought to love their wives.  Together he and Charly teach the viewer how a couple must foster a relationship so it can last longer than "as long as you both shall live."  Part of this is belief in correct principles, part of it is the continuation of courtship beyond marriage.

One symbol pervades the story: a ferris wheel.  When Sam meets Charly, they ride the ferris wheel for hours, mostly annoyed with the other (you gotta watch it to understand why they would torture themselves like that). Here the wheel symbolizes the futility of their conversation and even their relationship to that point.  It symbolizes a happy-go-lucky girl stuck in a constant state of college party and a too-old man (only within a certain culture ;) ) constantly stuck in his boring ways.

The first time they return to the ferris wheel (maybe the second?--I was working) they actually are engaged and each has progress toward the other.  Now the ferris wheel symbolizes potential.  They dream of creating a relationship that will last forever, a relationship that death cannot terminate.

Later they again return to the ferris wheel (the practical person in me wonders how it is still there, given the transient nature of most ferris wheels) and it symbolizes their immediate hope for an eternal relationship together.  It is their last time to ride the wheel together.  But it symbolizes eternity--the ride has no end.  There is no beginning or end to a circle--there cannot be.  Thus the ferris wheel symbolizes their hope and faith in an eternal relationship--what they worked so hard to create and what they look forward to when they are reunited after their deaths.

After Charly is buried, Sam takes Adam for a ride on the ferris wheel.  The story begins again, but in a slightly different place.  This last visit moves the circular story into three dimensions and we realize what was a circle in two dimensions is a helix in three.  Throughout the story Sam and Charly have been circling on this ferris wheel, but each time they come back to it, they are on a higher plane--they are closer to both God and each other.  This last time introduces Adam to the ferris wheel and begins his symbolic journey to mimic what he parents created.

Thus the author actually uses the relationship of Sam and Charly to teach the principle of eternal marriage.  And hey preys on people's emotions to make the story hit home.  Realizing how similar I am to the characters and how similar my life could be draws me into the story and makes their emotional roller coaster one I must experience, and one I should prepare for.  I pray I never have to leave a young wife, and I pray I am never left by my wife when I am young, but I know I can overcome the trial with faith in God, with faith in His teachings and His gospel.  No matter how many nights I end up crying myself to sleep if that happened to me, I know that pain will be replaced with joy, because I will be married for eternity.

What is perhaps my favourite line of the movie came after the credits ended, and summarizes my belief of life on earth and whether this is the totality of existence.  I cite it verbatim:

Not The End

Christmas

Christmas is about potential.  We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, who grew up to be the Saviour of all men.  We collect as families and close friends to celebrate what will be.  Maybe I'm not making sense.

Before the world was formed, God had a plan.  His spirit children (us) needed a world to come to and experience life in a body and learn how to master bodies.  He knew we would make many mistakes and needed a way fo us to be able to return to Him.  (He is perfect and imperfect people can't come back to stay.)

Jesus Christ volunteered to come to earth as a mortal, like us, and suffer more than any man had ever suffered.  He would experience the entirety of human experience and atone for all pain, lost, sickness, and sin--all imperfections--so we could return to God and live with Him forever.

We had known Jesus for a long time, and knew He was the only spirit sibling we had who could possibly make good on such a promise.  We supported this and looked forward with faith to His life.

On Christmas day (or what we celebrate as Christmas day), Jesus was born to a virgin mother.  Heaven had such trust in Jesus that angels proclaimed his birth across the world.  A new star appeared, telling everyone the Saviour was born.

It is the beginning of His perfect life we celebrate today.  We celebrate the potential of a tiny baby child; born in the muddy, flea-ridden stable; lain in an animal's feed trough for a bassinet to become the perfect example to all mankind of how to live and how to return to God's presence.

Christmas reminds us of our potential.  Each of us can choose to be like Jesus.  We can live following His example, repenting of our mistakes because He atoned for our sins.  His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary's Cross allows us to repent and have our sins, though as scarlet blemishes on our souls become white as driven snow (see Isaiah 1:18).

Jesus allows us to fulfill God's plan, to fulfill our potential as children of the Most High.  We can achieve limitless heights because He performed His mission on earth.  We each must do the same.  We must follow all His commandments and help other do the same.  We must find and fulfill our purpose of life.

Then we, too, through Jesus' atonement that rights every wrong, will realize our potential as we stand before God and are ushered into His loving arms once again.

Home

The phrase apparently goes "Home is where the heart is."  I believe the phrase was meant to be symbolic of where the subject's thoughts and preferences lay.  I don't agree with that interpretation.

For the last 6 years I've lived away from home.  I spent one year at university, two years in Toronto, and returned to university for the past three years.  Although I love visiting my parents (what the symbolic interpretation of the phrase would imply is "home"), I know this isn't where I live.  However, it is home.  But only so far as I am living here for the next 10 days.  Then I will return to the place I normally sleep and where I pay (too much for) rent and live 96% of the year.

But that wasn't always home.  I've been in three different complexes at university this year.  Each of those places was home for the time I lived there.

So what is my home?  It's the place where my physical heart beats.  It is wherever I am.  Wherever my head hits the pillow at night, that is home.  Home is literally where the heart is.  And to make the symbolic statement true, I have to work to love where I am.

Maybe there's a lesson in that...

Love where you are; you never know how much longer you will be there.

Me, the Bari-tenor

So I love to sing.  Not that I'm particularly talented, mind you.  I just love to do it.  For most of my semi-adult life (age 14 on) I've considered myself a bass.  I've got good low range (I bottom out around D2/C2--deep C or "the C below 'low C'") and I can push myself to reach E4 (F4 on a really good day--just above middle C (C4)).

And then one day, singing in my car I realizes there aren't many cool songs for basses.  Thus I must improve my upper range and become a baritone or 2nd tenor.  Boy, that was fun.  So I've been experimenting with singing tenor in church choir.  Lucky for me, I live in an area where tenors are in plentiful supply (usually good tenors are the hardest to find at church).  Thus I have the ability to hear a good tenor in both ear and match where I need to pitch my voice.

Stretching my limits has been very fun.  I sang a song over summer that required a G4 (a step and a half above my normal max) that I had to falsetto, but it has been fun to learn to hear the higher range of notes.  Bass is easy to pick out because it is the lowest note you hear.

So anyway, I can sing bass better than most, and my tenor is coming along, if a little short on the upper end.  Either way I love it.

Twilight

(Originally dated December 2009)

I honestly can't believe I'm blogging about this. Actually, I can't believe I watched Twilight.

I have mixed feelings about it. Yes. It was as bad an awkward as everyone said. The music was cheesy, and the acting seemed poor as well.

But it other ways, I was very impressed. As bad as Rob Pattinson's performance was (I was reminded of Hayden Christensen's Star Wars performances) both he and Kristin Stewart played the awkward high schoolers perfectly. The script could either be labeled as horrible, or as perfectly representative of high school relationships. Add to that the strangeness of an emotionally troubled girl thinking she is in love with an equally emotionally troubled vampire. (Although you'd think that he'd be a little more in control after "living" for 100+ years.)

The strange camera angles can be seen as reflecting Bella's troubled mind as well as Edward's mental instability in regard to Bella (actually it was horribly accurate to how I felt around one particular woman).

(I had more to say at the time, but I found this in my draft box and decided to publish this.)

Less inspiring, no less interesting

When I started this blog, I felt it would be important to monitor where my traffic (visitors) came from--or at least how many visitors I had.  I thought that's what the SiteMeter widget would do.  It doesn't.

However, some time between when I last blogged frequently and now, blogger has added a sweet analytics interface to my admin dashboard.  And what I can see is super cool.  Since this architecture was implemented, I can track my most frequently read posts, and the sources that send people to my blog.  Yay for Google buying blogger and integrating GoogleAnalytics into the blog interface!

That said, why is "Unclog the Flow" my most-read post?  Please comment, I'd love to know your thoughts.  (Although if you do so anonymously (i.e. don't have a gmail account for some odd reason (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?)), please leave some hint for me to know who you are.

Jesus Logic

At first this may sound a little blasphemous. It's not, I promise. (As an aside, I freaking hate toaster ovens. I can't even toast things properly.)

In Toronto I met a lot of people whose opinions about Jesus varied. "He was a good guy." "He was a fraud." "He taught good things." "He was the Son of God." "He was a charlatan."

While opinions are well and good, we can know Truth. We can know exactly what Jesus was/is/will be. The Spirit will guide us to this knowledge as we are prepared.

However, what helps me is whether things make sense. Regardless of what my mother claims, I feel I am a logical person whose opinions are based in fact and reason. Thus we shall take a lawyer-influenced look at Jesus and His claims.

We know Jesus taught many things taken as truth and as beneficial. However, are they really? Can we really trust a man who claimed he was the Son of God? In a court case, if a witness is proven to have lied on the stand, even once in hours of testimony, the entire testimony is often discounted and the witness is assumed to have lied about everything. This must happen because picking truth from lies is impossible.

Similarly, we can put the testimony of Jesus on trial. Without doubt, the claim that he was the son of a God and a mortal woman is the most questionable he ever made. If someone can disprove that claim, the entirety of his teachings falls apart. Thus the Beatitudes become useless--for they are obviously taught by a liar, His commands to love one another become unnecessary, etc.

Following that track, any teaching that has come since derived from Jesus' words is also false, any teaching from other perceived great men (Ghandi, Confucius, Mohammad, etc) agreeing or citing Jesus must also be taken as false. As you can see, claim Jesus is only a great man and not 100% what He said He was leads to the disruption of much of the moral code the world follows.

However, if He is the perfect Son of God--a knowledge any willing person can gain--all of His teaching (even the ones you don't like) must be true (because He could not lie) and must be followed in order to gain the Eternal Life He promises to His disciples. This is the case because the Son of God would have full authority to speak on any subject, and His words would be eternal law. Thus evaluating Jesus' claim to divine sonship is the crux of most arguments about Christianity.

So the decision comes to you. Will you throw away the morality of the world by believing He is less than what He claimed to be, or will you discover whether He is the Son of God?

My knowledge is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He died and was resurrected so each person who ever lived may gain Eternal Life by following His teachings. Logic supports it and the confirmation of the Spirit irrefutably confirms it.

Accountability

Any of you who have had an in-depth discussion with me recently know I have been on a kick about agency. You ask me, "what should I do?" and, like a very wise person I know, I answer, "Do what you want." Well, at least that's my answer to most people who already have an idea of what they ought to do. For people who are completely unsure or who I think need guidance I am an endless source of unwanted advice. That said, I still try to end the discussion with "Do what you want."

I take great comfort in the fact we must each answer for our own choices. It makes sense. If my friends came to me for advice and I had to answer to God for their choices, I would not have any friends, nor would I choose to share my opinions. But we will each answer for our own choices. Therefore we have two burdens on us: (1) choose to do what is best for us in all situations and (2) suggest people do the same--this is an action we must answer for also.

So when it comes to you to choose, do what you want. But want to do your best and what God wants you to do.

Mr. Finnagan, Begin Again

Maybe it's time to start this thing up again. But not tonight.