Musicals: a treasure trove of life's lessons

So, I have decided that musicals are a great place to learn good things about life. You learn the importance of vanilla ice cream and optometry in She Loves Me, how you can be cranky as long as your friends are cranky and then together if you work in a garden you can become less cranky together from The Secret Garden, and never to feed any of your plants blood from Little Shop of Horrors. All important lessons. The (more serious one) I have been thinking about recently comes from Aida.

Let me give you a little background. I am on a committee to help plan my stake's Relief Society Conference for which part of it we are helping to furnish an apartment that a refugee family is moving into. It has been fairly stressful and involves a lot of communicating and planning with people that I don't really know. We are down to the last week and a half before this happens and today was crazy with the amount of texting and coordinating that needed to be done.

I don't particularly love this type of planning. I don't like texting people I don't know and I don't like how much energy it takes out of me to do so. I feel lazy when all I have done all day is text people, yet I feel so tired from doing nothing. Needless to say I have been in a mood today and complaining to all the people I do know. (I'm sorry if any of you who I have been whining to read this) Then after a last little bout of whining to my mom I was laying down on her bed listening to the quiet in my parent's room and these words from Aida (with a little bit of a change) came into my head,

"If you don't like [how you are feeling] change it. You are your own master, there are no shackles on you." 

In my Psychology class I took a couple semesters ago we talked about all the things that happen to us before we feel something. First we have to have a sensation, then that sensation goes into our mind and takes into account what is happening to us now, our past experiences with similar sensations, and a myriad of other things, then we make a judgement and perceive things which produces feelings. (Or something along those lines, I mean, it was a while ago when I studied this) The point of this was to explain how we have the wonderful ability to change how we are feeling about things. 

I might hate texting people but that doesn't mean that I have to feel grumpy when I am doing a lot of it. I can choose to use other experiences to change my perception. I can think about how the refugee family my ward is trying to help would probably love to have a phone to text people with. I can remember that I had a wonderful dinner and I didn't even have to worry about it, meals just happen every day for me when I know around the world people worry every day about where their next meal will come from.

I hope that I can remember how wonderful it is that I have the opportunity to help a family in need and that this isn't about me. It is about how I can look outside of myself and see other human suffering and do my part in helping to alleviate that suffering now matter how uncomfortable or hard it feels at the time. That is what Christ did. He saw us and saw our suffering and did His part to make it better for us, even though it was hard and excruciating for Him. That is the biggest filter I can use to help me change my thinking. I am grateful that I can take this opportunity to learn more about my Savior.