Here are a few thoughts I came across while listening to an old BYU devotional while while cooking dinner yesterday. They remind me that the everyday tasks of being a parent might seem mundane, but they can actually bringing me closer to God (if done with the right attitude). If I ever feel like my life is boring or there should be more to it than loads of laundry and grocery lists, I just need to read this talk again.
"Routine, like trials, can bring us closer to God, or move us away from Him. What seems common place, seldom is."
In the same talk, Elder Maxwell also said:
"Occasionally I see individuals who are meeting life's challenges reasonably well but who unfortunately fail to appreciate the general adequacy of their response. They let the seeming ordinariness of life dampen their spirits. Though actually coping and growing, some ask the quiet inner-soul satisfaction which can steady them. Instead they seem to experience a lingering sense that there is something more important they should be doing or that their chores are somehow not quite what was expected, as if what is quietly achieved in righteous individual living or in parenthood is not sufficiently spectacular.
Feeling unrequited as to role and feeling underwhelmed do not occur, however, because of a structural failure in this divinely designed second estate. Rather they occur because of a lack of love, for love helps us to see and to respond to those opportunities which have been allotted to us and which lie unused all about us. Before we complain about the curriculum in mortality, or more particularly our current class schedules, we would do well to remember who designed the curriculum and to allow for however many other places it has been successfully used."
For the full text of the talk, go here and click on the first talk (it is called Grounded, Rooted, Established and Settled.)
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