June 26, 2019

Elders,

Good morning! It is just another beautiful day here in the Highlands. These are the best days of the summer, when you can sleep with the windows open with a slight cool breeze. You have an anticipation of the heat to come but for now the evenings are so pleasant.

This past Sunday was tumultuous. We had a beautiful sacrament service as we learned and felt the events that the youth and leaders experienced during youth conference. As difficult as the situation was, I believe that everyone is coming through it with a deeper reverence for the forces of nature and a stronger bond of unity and a testimony of miracles. The darkness has turned to day and both Scott and Chloe are recovering so quickly. Chloe was home last Saturday and Scott could be home as early as today. 

We had a great lesson and discussion in our quorum meeting as well. Ken led us as we talked about President Nelson’s talk “We can do better and be better”. We had so many great comments and ideas. Members suggested multiple different points of view that I had not considered. I came away better for the discussion. 

We talked through how the word repent and repentance has such a strong and powerful feeling of being punitive. It brings up negative thoughts, feelings, and images. The word has dark overtones that we all seem to fall into. It is really about an invitation to change and to improve. It isn’t a demand for perfection or a terminal sentence. It is a process that we can go through to become a little more like our Heavenly Father.

Ken posed the question “What does repentance look like on a daily basis?” There were lots of comments and insights. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll share mine.

I am a software engineer by trade and one of the patterns that we follow is Agile-Scrum. This is a way of time boxing your work and efforts so that (in theory) at the end of every Scrum (usually 2 or 4 weeks) you know you have worked on the most important pieces of the project and have something that is delivered and could potentially be deployed. Inside of the Scrum you have various “ceremonies” that you participate in as part of the development process. You have a daily standup, sprint planning, backlog grooming, sprint review, and sprint retrospectives. These ceremonies enable the process to be self-sustaining and continuously improving.

We can take a look at this from a spiritual perspective. We have a one week sprint that culminates in our opportunity to take the sacrament each week. It gives us a time to review and reflect (sprint review and retrospective) on our week and think about the successes and how we might do things better. Each day we get to have a daily standup which for me is an opportunity to say what happened yesterday, what I’m planning on today, and what is in my way. For me, it is in studying the scriptures and prayer where this occurs. And for me this is what daily repentance looks like. It is the quick daily checkin, discussion, and plan that I have with God. It isn’t that I don’t have big things to deal with and big issues that I need to work on, but those elephants in my life  can be broken down into elephant carpaccio and the changes can occur in small ways every day.

Maybe this is just the software engineer geek in me coming out, but I see this process of continuous improvement working not just in software design and development, but in my life as well and the daily small wins and conversations help me “do better and be better”.

This Sunday is a 5th Sunday and we’ll join forces with the relief society and hear from the bishopric. They always have great things to share and things to teach us. I hope to see you all there.

It is a privilege to get to rub shoulders with each of you. I learn so much by your examples. Thank you for being men of God and worthy holders of his priesthood. You are great men.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

President Oldroyd
801-573-6828