How we define

I read an online comic called Dumbing of Age. Set at Indiana University, college freshmen - including one girl raised in a religious fundamentalist home - encounter people with different backgrounds, beliefs, races, genders, orientations, and it is a learning time.

For Joyce, part of that has been seeing the good in others who don't share her faith, including those with no faith, and seeing flaws with the exclusion and condemnation that were a part of her church. This is a recent strip:

http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/episcopalian/#comment 

My first reaction was thinking that there are churches that are way more hippie than Episcopalians. I like the comic, but I also will always at least scan the comments, because they get some good discussions going. One on this strip was about how it can be easy to define yourself by what you are against, and what you can't even get close to because your whole thing becomes being against it.

It struck me because I have known for a long time that you don't want to be defined by the negative position. There is more light in being for something, and being for the right things. This is especially true because fear becomes so much a part of being "against".

That is where the idea for the next blog series came from, but I am going to explore the idea a little more first.

At girl's camp once (so this goes back many years), I remember Brother Winwood teaching us about motivations. He used taking out his wife as an example. He could do it because he was scared not to, or because it was something he should do, or because it was something he wanted to do. He pointed out that doing things from love and desire is better, but then it was something I thought about a lot on my own.

Fear can help you make reasonable decisions sometimes, but it is not an ideal state. Duty has good things about it too, but it can be a grind. Love always sounded better. It feels better. It sustains you better. Love is the way to be.

In thinking about how to define myself, the obvious thing would be to try and be like Christ. I am not defined by trying to avoid evil, but by actively trying to be good. That's something we preach anyway, but it can be good to take a look at it again, and this seems like a good time to go through the scriptures and remember what he did and how he related to people, because that's how I want to be.

That will mainly be pulling from the four gospels, but I will be using other scriptures, because I can, and I think that means that next week I am going to start with 3rd Nephi, mainly because that works well with where I was in my personal study anyway. Besides, if I tried to go in straight chronological order, I'd be sure to miss something and then get all irritated with myself. I am just going to take this as it comes.