Sunday, May 3, 2009

Your Polar People

I learned an interesting lesson about the time of my mission that has helped me see people more clearly. That is to say that in our interactions with each other, there are those specific people in our lives that are more specifically significant to our eternal welfare than others. I personally believe the Lord places in our lives the very souls with whom he can use to enhance in us our growth and progression and who ultimately bring us the greatest satisfaction and joy.

This introduces what I call the "polar people" in our lives. While we randomly see and hold conversation and communication with a wide variety of acquaintances in our lives, there are those polar people that suddenly stick out from the rest. I call them polar people because they have two sides, a strong attraction for our interests or a strong repulsion of our interests. In this regard, those who are polar people are strongly significant in our lives, and depending on choices made in the interaction between them, they will become your best friends or your worst enemies.

I have met in my life many of my polar influences and have, with almost a sixth sense, recognized their placement and impeccable representation of trials and significant progressive moments that have occurred along my journey. For instance, in the mission I remember one Elder with whom I completely disdained for his lifestyle habits that seemed to directly diverge from my ideals and the standards I held on a pedistle, such as cleanliness, tack, and ambition. And somehow with myself, and through subsequent hints of revelation, I realized that the Lord was going to use this Elder to test me, and a few month later we became companions. Now I believe at this point with our polar people, there stands a strong choice to be made, and depending on our depth of understanding and grappling to the Lord's Christian doctrine, he defines us by our interaction to these significants, and helps us to develop our strong personal opinions of them for good or bad through his own fire. And then, by our faith and use of agency, these polars become either the friends that we would take a bullet for, or the enemy that Fiji could not hide well enough.

By this, I believe there exists a thread of doctrine that is highly useful here as taught us by the Lord. There exists no excuse to not love another. There is no excuse to not love every single being in this world. Through enough faith, endurance, patience, and long-suffering, everyone we would through a carnal estimation esteem as our worst enemy, can and will be changed into the friend we would give our life for, and this because the heart is molded by the humble awakenings of the spirit to envision correctly, as the Lord might. And then we begin to understand how the Lord made it possible to love even the hostile and devilish soldier who derided him, whipped him, and pushed that plate of crowns even deeper into his flesh.