Chapter 11- A “Pickles”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how pickles are made. A pretty bland vegetable gets placed into some brine of garlic and other spices and after a long period of time marinading in the brine, it becomes a pickle. But what if you were to put the cucumber into sugar water? What might it become then? Not a pickle, but something sweet. Simply by changing the ingredients of the marinade- you change the outcome of the cucumber from something sour to something sweet. Add wasabi to the marinade and now everything taste like wasabi. You get the idea.

 Now I don’t know if you soaked a pickle long enough in sugar if it would reverse it’s taste to something sweet, but I do know it can be done with people! You’ve heard the adage- “You are what you think...or as a man thinketh, so is he.” Those who were formally marinated or consumed in all the negativity and skepticism of life have changed what they spend their time doing and seeing and listening to and have become something else entirely. Sweet with purpose, optimism and peace. It’s not enough to take yourself out of the brine, you have to put something else in its place, (especially with meaningful things. Things that build repour, that make a difference in the personal lives of others, that lifts people up. Things that are, quite frankly focused outward) but it can be done! And it doesn’t take as long as one might expect.

 Never has there been a day when we have access to so much that can grab our attention away from that which is most important! I know the headlines are bleak! It’s all unfolding just as was foretold. However, nothing is yet so dark as it was for Moroni after he’d watched the complete destruction of his society and war decimate his people. No time could have been more desperate and darker. Yet Moroni writes that hope does not mean ignoring or being naïve about the world’s problems; it means having faith in heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, whose power is greater and more everlasting than those problems! He’s essentially saying, don’t let the reality of world events “weigh you down unto death; but may Christ lift thee up, and may his ...mercy and long-suffering, and the hope of his glory and of eternal life, rest in your mind” instead! (Moroni 9:25) 

 It’s a choice we make! We can choose to “marinate” in the despair, ugliness and distrust of the world; weighed down by their heavy cares, OR to “marinate” more in those things that lift us and others up; changing our environment, trying to bring others some measure of peace and charity. I can tell you by practice and witness of others who do it, the latter taste so much better!