Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Paying the Price

I've been thinking about the price.

What is the price for the things I want?

Is the good, better, best question a question of price? In choosing one thing, we must remember the cost, not only of what we choose, but the cost of not choosing something else.

What am I willing to pay for? What is so important to me that I am willing to pay the price?

An example of paying the price - Bruce R. McConkie:
“Dad paid a price to learn,” says his son Mark. “He knew gospel understanding comes to people who earn it—it’s not some sudden flash that comes without effort. Even though he had already read the scriptures many times during his life, he reread the entire standard works, taking notes on everything that was messianic in nature, before writing The Promised Messiah. Then when he wrote The Mortal Messiah, he read the entire standard works again and wrote down everything that was helpful in analyzing the life of the Savior. For The Millennial Messiah, he read the entire standard works a third time and wrote down everything that was millennial. Some people may not appreciate the intense labor that went into it.”

"A daughter once asked him how he learned the gospel. When he was a young man, he said, about eighteen or nineteen, he went through the Book of Mormon verse by verse, studying and cross-referencing, and rewriting each verse in his own words. He covered the entire Book of Mormon in this way and had a stack of papers over a foot high when he was through. “I asked him what he did with those papers, and he said he threw them away—it wasn’t the stack of papers or what he wrote that was important, but the discipline and understanding it gave him. This is the way he taught himself.”

I've been reading the book "Change Your Questions, Change your Life." It is good to ask the questions, and even better to take the time to discover the answers.