Egg On My Face

I'm having another "life cluster" as I call them.

Saturday night I painted the last of four bookcases in our living room. While the paint dried I went through one of the zillion stacks of papers in my zone and discovered a quote I've long loved:

In the gospel of Jesus Christ you have help from both sides of the veil, and you must never forget that. When disappointment and discouragement strike...you remember and never forget that if our eyes could be opened we would see horses and chariots of fire as far as the eye can see riding at reckless speed to come to our protection. -Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

Unearthing something treasured was the equivalent of finding five dollars in a jean pocket while sorting laundry. Just a little bit of unexpected oomph. Plus I love the phrase CHARIOTS OF FIRE. One, I think of the Egyptians coming after Moses; we know how that turned out. Two, I think of the movie. Saw it as a kid and thought it was boring except for the scene where he ran around the courtyard square barefooted. Three, I think of the soundtrack. Chariots of Fire was the only cassette in our VW Rabbit for most of my childhood. It's likely the reason I asked Santa for a synthesizer in 3rd grade. In the opening ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics a children's choir sang "Jerusalem" and I rushed down from the kitchen screaming, "This is from Chariots of Fire!"

We met with a builder yesterday at his home. I tried to pay attention to his spreadsheet but was distracted by five canvas portraits on the living room wall. Nice hair and nicer teeth, his five sons looked well-mannered, like the kind of boys who would carry in my groceries before politely grabbing a bottle of Sunny D from the fridge. Stop checking his kids out. Play with your Kirkland water bottle label. Above the collage sprawled this phrase in vinyl: HE WHO HONORS GOD, GOD HONORS. I loved it. It seemed familiar. Scripture? I made a mental note (a dangerous move with my brain these days) to teach this to Archer. Remember the thing about honor.

Today, after three especially hard weeks of burning the candle at both ends, being ticked I no longer have a wick, and discovering how poorly I act without wax, I wanted to blog about how tough it is to be cheerfully good when life is hard. A quip my old stake president (an ecclesiastical leader) used to say kept surfacing: HOT WATER HARDENS EGGS AND SOFTENS CARROTS. Without a doubt I hardened in the last three weeks of hot water. I felt myself morph from supple to solid in the worst of ways. A starched stone would be softer than my current boiled state. I was a bad egg gone hard.

I've had a nagging feeling since I found the bookcase quote to google Elaine Dalton (my hero) because I vaguely remembered her mentioning the movie in a speech once. Ba-BAM! And I quote:

The movie Chariots of Fire is the moving story of Eric Liddell, the gold medal winner in the 400-meter track event in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Liddell was not only a gifted athlete who held to his convictions, but he lived out his faith to the very end as a Christian missionary in China. He was such an incredible athlete that his goal was to get to the 1924 Olympics in France and run in his best race—the 100-meter race. He trained hard to get in top shape, and his country of Scotland was sure that he would win a gold medal for them. There was just one problem. The heat to decide who would make the Olympics was on a Sunday, and Liddell would not run on Sunday. Due to this conflict he chose not to run in the 100-meter race. Instead he qualified for the 200- and 400-meter races because those heats were not held on Sunday, but no one expected him to come close to winning. Just prior to the start of the 400-meter race, he was given a piece of paper on which was written words from 1 Samuel 2:30: “Them that honour me, I will honour.” Liddell ran with that piece of paper in his hand and held onto this promise tightly. And, to everyone’s surprise, he won the gold medal and broke a world record. Listen to what his character in the film Chariots of Fire said after winning a previous race:

You came to see a race today. To see someone win. It happened to be me. But I want you to do more than just watch a race. I want you to take part in it. I want to compare faith to running in a race. It’s hard. It requires concentration of will, energy of soul. You experience elation when the winner breaks the tape—especially if you’ve got a bet on it. But how long does that last? You go home. Maybe your dinner’s burnt. Maybe you haven’t got a job. So who am I to say, “Believe, have faith,” in the face of life’s realities? I would like to give you something more permanent, but I can only point the way. I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from to see the race to its end? From within.     

After I read this I:

1. Remembered I was supposed to remember something important for Archer.

2. Knew it was a scripture!

3. Went on an all-expenses-paid guilt trip about my poor actions this last month.

Losing my cool when life’s water gets hot is not honoring God. Choosing to harden halts the chariots of fire hastening my way under His outstretched hand. A hard-boiled egg is nothing more than an egg with a hard heart, and hearts harden quickly when they forget God (and his commandments). Carrots, on the other hand, come from a long history of being firmly rooted, standing strong and immovable despite the darkness around them.

Eggs are over easy in the best of times; carrots are soft and sweet in the worst of times.

Elaine S. Dalton, Prophetic Priorities and Dedicated Disciples, BYU Speech given Jan. 15, 2013.