Wednesday, October 12, 2016

The Ordinary is Extraordinary

Ever sense I got the Magic card Aetherflux Reservoir, I wanted to blog about its flavor text:
While most power is used for ordinary, everyday tasks, one shouldn't underestimate its potential for the extraordinary.
I wanted to take the message, reverse it, and apply it to spiritual things. Even though we usually think of the power of God as being used to work great miracles, it is also frequently used for ordinary things. Among those "ordinary things," I included the gaining of testimonies, the softening or strengthening of hearts, and the conveying of short, quiet, inspired messages. However, when I told a friend about my planned message, she replied that those "small, ordinary things" are actually extraordinary; we just don't realize how extraordinary they are because we've become accustomed to them.

President Uchtdorf seems to agree. In the first talk of the Saturday Morning Session of the October 2016 General Conference, he spoke of becoming accustomed to technology to the point where we take it for granted:
It seems to be human nature: as we become more familiar with something, even something miraculous and awe-inspiring, we lose our sense of awe and treat it as commonplace.
 He then warned us against making the same mistake with spiritual matters. He spoke of personal revelation, of our knowledge of the Plan of Salvation, and of the fact that prophets are on the Earth. For those of us who were raised in the church, these things are almost normal to us. We grew up knowing about prophets, about the whisperings of the Spirit, and about God's plan for us. President Uchtdorf worries, probably with good reason, that we may be taking these extraordinary blessings for granted.

Albert Einstein is quoted as having said that "there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Everything is miraculous. Everything is extraordinary, especially the spiritual things, even if we've seen it often enough for it to appear ordinary to us.

No comments: