Are bikinis immodest?

This was an interesting video.  I remember something from a sociology class, or maybe somewhere else, I just don't remember where, about objectification of women.  It's fascinating that when men are showed pictures of women in bikinis, they are more likely to view them as objects than as persons, as compared to women in modest bathing suits.  I'd like to find this guy's article on the subject...

The youtube page had a link to a site on chastity, called (coincidentally) http://www.chastity.com/

Hidden Wedges (II)

And here's President Monson's version:


Hidden Wedges
THOMAS S. MONSON
First Counselor in the First Presidency

Let’s not pass to future generations the grievances, the anger of our time. Let’s remove any hidden wedges that can do nothing but destroy.
In April 1966, at the Church’s annual general conference, Elder Spencer W. Kimball gave a memorable address. He quoted an account written by Samuel T. Whitman entitled “Forgotten Wedges.” Today I, too, have chosen to quote from Samuel T. Whitman, followed by examples from my own life.

Whitman wrote: “The ice storm [that winter] wasn’t generally destructive. True, a few wires came down, and there was a sudden jump in accidents along the highway. … Normally, the big walnut tree could easily have borne the weight that formed on its spreading limbs. It was the iron wedge in its heart that caused the damage.

“The story of the iron wedge began years ago when the white-haired farmer [who now inhabited the property on which it stood] was a lad on his father’s homestead. The sawmill had then only recently been moved from the valley, and the settlers were still finding tools and odd pieces of equipment scattered about. …

“On this particular day, it was a faller’s wedge—wide, flat, and heavy, a foot or more long, and splayed from mighty poundings [—which the lad found] … in the south pasture. [A faller’s wedge, used to help fell a tree, is inserted in a cut made by a saw and then struck with a sledge hammer to widen the cut.] … Because he was already late for dinner, the lad laid the wedge … between the limbs of the young walnut tree his father had planted near the front gate. He would take the wedge to the shed right after dinner, or sometime when he was going that way.

“He truly meant to, but he never did. [The wedge] was there between the limbs, a little tight, when he attained his manhood. It was there, now firmly gripped, when he married and took over his father’s farm. It was half grown over on the day the threshing crew ate dinner under the tree. … Grown in and healed over, the wedge was still in the tree the winter the ice storm came.

“In the chill silence of that wintry night … one of the three major limbs split away from the trunk and crashed to the ground. This so unbalanced the remainder of the top that it, too, split apart and went down. When the storm was over, not a twig of the once-proud tree remained.

“Early the next morning, the farmer went out to mourn his loss. …

“Then, his eyes caught sight of something in the splintered ruin. ‘The wedge,’ he muttered reproachfully. ‘The wedge I found in the south pasture.’ A glance told him why the tree had fallen. Growing, edge-up in the trunk, the wedge had prevented the limb fibers from knitting together as they should.” 1

My dear brothers and sisters, there are hidden wedges in the lives of many whom we know—yes, perhaps in our own families.

Let me share with you the account of a lifelong friend, now departed from mortality. His name was Leonard. He was not a member of the Church, although his wife and children were. His wife served as a Primary president; his son served an honorable mission. His daughter and his son married companions in solemn ceremonies and had families of their own.

Everyone who knew Leonard liked him, as did I. He supported his wife and children in their Church assignments. He attended many Church-sponsored events with them. He lived a good and a clean life, even a life of service and kindness. His family, and indeed many others, wondered why Leonard had gone through mortality without the blessings the gospel brings to its members.

In Leonard’s advanced years, his health declined. Eventually he was hospitalized, and life was ebbing away. In what turned out to be my last conversation with Leonard, he said, “Tom, I’ve known you since you were a boy. I feel persuaded to explain to you why I have never joined the Church.” He then related an experience of his parents which took place many, many years before. Reluctantly, the family had reached a point where they felt it was necessary to sell their farm, and an offer had been received. Then a neighboring farmer asked that the farm be sold to him instead—although at a lesser price—adding, “We’ve been such close friends. This way, if I own the property, I’ll be able to watch over it.” At length Leonard’s parents agreed, and the farm was sold. The buyer—even the neighbor—held a responsible position in the Church, and the trust this implied helped to persuade the family to sell to him, even though they did not realize as much money from the sale as they would have if they had sold to the first interested buyer. Not long after the sale was made, the neighbor sold both his own farm and the farm acquired from Leonard’s family in a combined parcel which maximized the value and hence the selling price. The long-asked question of why Leonard had never joined the Church had been answered. He always felt that his family had been deceived by the neighbor.

He confided to me following our conversation that he felt a great burden had at last been lifted as he prepared to meet his Maker. The tragedy is that a hidden wedge had kept Leonard from soaring to greater heights.

I am acquainted with a family which came to America from Germany. The English language was difficult for them. They had but little by way of means, but each was blessed with the will to work and with a love of God.

Their third child was born, lived but two months, and then died. Father was a cabinetmaker and fashioned a beautiful casket for the body of his precious child. The day of the funeral was gloomy, thus reflecting the sadness they felt in their loss. As the family walked to the chapel, with Father carrying the tiny casket, a small number of friends had gathered. However, the chapel door was locked. The busy bishop had forgotten the funeral. Attempts to reach him were futile. Not knowing what to do, the father placed the casket under his arm and, with his family beside him, carried it home, walking in a drenching rain.

If the family were of a lesser character, they could have blamed the bishop and harbored ill feelings. When the bishop discovered the tragedy, he visited the family and apologized. With the hurt still evident in his expression, but with tears in his eyes, the father accepted the apology, and the two embraced in a spirit of understanding. No hidden wedge was left to cause further feelings of anger. Love and acceptance prevailed.

The spirit must be freed from tethers so strong and feelings never put to rest, so that the lift of life may give buoyancy to the soul. In many families, there are hurt feelings and a reluctance to forgive. It doesn’t really matter what the issue was. It cannot and should not be left to injure. Blame keeps wounds open. Only forgiveness heals. George Herbert, an early 17th-century poet, wrote these lines: “He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven, for everyone has need of forgiveness.”

Beautiful are the words of the Savior as He was about to die upon the cruel cross. Said He, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” 2

There are some who have difficulty forgiving themselves and who dwell on all of their perceived shortcomings. I quite like the account of a religious leader who went to the side of a woman who lay dying, attempting to comfort her—but to no avail. “I am lost,” she said. “I’ve ruined my life and every life around me. There is no hope for me.”

The man noticed a framed picture of a lovely girl on the dresser. “Who is this?” he asked.

The woman brightened. “She is my daughter, the one beautiful thing in my life.”

“And would you help her if she were in trouble or had made a mistake? Would you forgive her? Would you still love her?”

“Of course I would!” cried the woman. “I would do anything for her. Why do you ask such a question?”

“Because I want you to know,” said the man, “that figuratively speaking, Heavenly Father has a picture of you on His dresser. He loves you and will help you. Call upon Him.”

A hidden wedge to her happiness had been removed.

In a day of danger or a time of trial, such knowledge, such hope, such understanding will bring comfort to the troubled mind and grieving heart. The entire message of the New Testament breathes a spirit of awakening to the human soul. Shadows of despair are dispelled by rays of hope, sorrow yields to joy, and the feeling of being lost in the crowd of life vanishes with the certain knowledge that our Heavenly Father is mindful of each of us.

The Savior provided assurance of this truth when He taught that even a sparrow shall not fall to the ground unnoticed by our Father. He then concluded the beautiful thought by saying, “Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” 3

Some time ago I read the following Associated Press dispatch, which appeared in the newspaper. An elderly man disclosed at the funeral of his brother, with whom he had shared, from early manhood, a small, one-room cabin near Canisteo, New York, that following a quarrel, they had divided the room in half with a chalk line and neither had crossed the line or spoken a word to the other since that day—62 years before. What a powerful and destructive hidden wedge.

As Alexander Pope wrote, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” 4

Sometimes we can take offense so easily. On other occasions we are too stubborn to accept a sincere apology. Who will subordinate ego, pride, and hurt—then step forward with, “I am truly sorry! Let’s be as we once were: friends. Let’s not pass to future generations the grievances, the anger of our time.” Let’s remove any hidden wedges that can do nothing but destroy.

Where do hidden wedges originate? Some come from unresolved disputes, which lead to ill feelings, followed by remorse and regret. Others find their beginnings in disappointments, jealousies, arguments, and imagined hurts. We must solve them—lay them to rest and not leave them to canker, fester, and ultimately destroy.

A lovely lady of more than 90 years visited with me one day and unexpectedly recounted several regrets. She mentioned that many years earlier a neighboring farmer, with whom she and her husband had occasionally disagreed, asked if he could take a shortcut across her property to reach his own acreage. She paused in her narrative and, with a tremor in her voice, said, “Tommy, I didn’t let him cross our property but required him to take the long way around—even on foot—to reach his property. I was wrong and I regret it. He’s gone now, but oh, I wish I could say to him, ‘I’m so sorry.’ How I wish I had a second chance.”

As I listened to her, the words written by John Greenleaf Whittier came into my mind: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” 5

From 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon comes this inspired counsel: “There shall be no disputations among you. … For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another. Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.” 6

Let me conclude with an account of two men who are heroes to me. Their acts of courage were not performed on a national scale, but rather in a peaceful valley known as Midway, Utah.

Long years ago, Roy Kohler and Grant Remund served together in Church capacities. They were the best of friends. They were tillers of the soil and dairymen. Then a misunderstanding arose which became somewhat of a rift between them.

Later, when Roy Kohler became grievously ill with cancer and had but a limited time to live, my wife Frances and I visited Roy and his wife, and I gave him a blessing. As we talked afterward, Brother Kohler said, “Let me tell you about one of the sweetest experiences I have had during my life.” He then recounted to me his misunderstanding with Grant Remund and the ensuing estrangement. His comment was, “We were sort of on the outs with each other.”

“Then,” continued Roy, “I had just put up our hay for the winter to come, when one night, as a result of spontaneous combustion, the hay caught fire, burning the hay, the barn, and everything in it right to the ground. I was devastated,” said Roy. “I didn’t know what in the world I would do. The night was dark, except for the dying embers of the fire. Then I saw coming toward me from the road, in the direction of Grant Remund’s place, the lights of tractors and heavy equipment. As the ‘rescue party’ turned in our drive and met me amidst my tears, Grant said, ‘Roy, you’ve got quite a mess to clean up. My boys and I are here. Let’s get to it.’” Together they plunged to the task at hand. Gone forever was the hidden wedge which had separated them for a short time. They worked throughout the night and into the next day, with many others in the community joining in.

Roy Kohler has passed away, and Grant Remund is getting older. Their sons have served together in the same ward bishopric. I truly treasure the friendship of these two wonderful families.

May we ever be exemplary in our homes and faithful in keeping all of the commandments, that we may harbor no hidden wedges but rather remember the Savior’s admonition: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” 7

This is my plea and my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Hide References

1. In Conference Report, Apr. 1966, 70.

2.  Luke 23:34.

3.  Matt. 10:31.

4.  An Essay on Criticism (1711), part 2, line 525.

5. “Maud Muller,” The Complete Poetical Works of Whittier (1892), 48.

6.  3 Ne. 11:28–30.

7.  John 13:35.

Hidden Wedges (I)

I just found this version while researching President Monson's use of the same story.  I like what President (then-Elder) Kimball says here.

HIDDEN WEDGES

Spencer W. Kimball
of The Council of The Twelve

Published by Deseret Book Company
Salt Lake City, Utah
1974

Last night, I lay awake some hours thinking of the problems of the day. Through my office all week had filed people—wonderful people, but folks bowed down in grief, sorrow, anguish of soul; folks learning repentance through life's penalties; people frustrated in their marital upsets; in their moral aberrations, in their financial reverses, and in their spiritual deficiencies.

I wondered why all these frustrations and sorrows in a world intended to be so desirable and happy. As I pondered, I concluded that most of these people were good people basically, but as they traveled along the highway of life, they had found difficulty in staying on the main highway and had deviated in the side roads; they had forgotten promises and covenants; they had postponed putting into effect the good resolutions which were determined by them in their sober moments. They had been selfish and they had procrastinated.

And my mind wandered back to a childhood experience which seemed to relate to these serious problems of life.

When I was a little boy in Arizona, in the red brick home with its large rooms and high ceilings, it was my chore to bring in the wood, which included chips from the woodpile and dry twigs from tree trimmings to keep the home warm, with a wood box always full. The wood range with its six holes, its hot water reservoir, its large oven and big fire box seemed to have an insatiable hunger. Its consumption of wood seemed to me unreasonable when I related to it the play-time I had to give up to supply its hungry mouth.

There was also the fireplace which would take chunks and larger-sized logs and the smaller stoves with isinglass fronts in the sitting room and the parlor which also demanded fuel. The bedrooms were never warm except by the summer heat. We just piled on blankets and quilts for comfortable sleeping.

We grew our own wood. From the orchard came the tree trimmings, and having stuck in the ground cottonwood poles, we always had big trees for larger wood. Most of the limbs we hauled in the wagon, but the larger trunks we dragged with the horses to the wood yard, and since they were too large to split with the axe, here was where I used the wedge. Often, as I split the heavy pieces of wood, I remembered the story of Abe Lincoln's youth and it comforted me—a little.

We started the iron wedge in the log by tapping lightly and then with the sledge hammer and mighty blows, drove it into the heart of the log until it split it wide open. Sometimes, there were cedars from the foothills and mesquite from the desert above the canals, and all gave way into proper-sized pieces of wood when the wedge, the sledge hammer and strong muscles cooperated.

And, as I lay sleepless this night reminiscing, there came to my mind an article from the pen of Samuel T. Whitman titled "Forgotten Wedges," which stirred me and from which I wish to quote:

The ice storm wasn't generally destructive. True, a few wires came down, and there was a sudden jump in accidents along the highway. Walking out of doors became unpleasant and difficult. It was disagreeable weather, but it was not serious. Normally, the big walnut tree could easily have borne the weight that formed on its spreading limbs. It was the iron wedge in its heart that caused the damage.

The story of the iron wedge began years ago when the white-haired farmer was a lad on his father's homestead. The sawmill had then only recently been moved from the valley, and the settlers were still finding tools and odd pieces of equipment scattered about where they had been lost or abandoned.

On this particular day, it was a faller's wedge—wide, flat, and heavy, a foot or more long, and splayed from mighty poundings. The path from the south pasture did not pass the woodshed; and, because he was already late for dinner, the lad laid the wedge, edge up, between the limbs of the young walnut tree his father had planted near the front gate. He would take the wedge to the shed right after dinner, or sometime when he was going that way.

He truly meant to, but he never did. It was there between the limbs, a little tight, when he attained his manhood. It was there, now firmly gripped, when he married and took over his father's farm. It was half grown over on the day the threshing crew ate dinner under the tree. A corner of the blade still protruded when he reorganized the yard and left the tree in an out-of-the-way corner. After that, it was forgotten, except at rare intervals. The farmer's hair turned white. Old age beckoned just around the corner. Grown in and healed over, the wedge was still in the tree the winter the ice storm came.

In the chill silence of that wintry night, with the mist like rain sifting down and freezing where it fell, one of the three major limbs split away from the trunk and crashed to the ground. This so unbalanced the remainder of the top that it, too, split apart and went down. When the storm was over, not a twig of the once-proud tree remained.

The next morning, the farmer went out to mourn his loss. "Wouldn't have had that happen for a thousand dollars," he said. "Prettiest tree in the valley, that was."

Then, his eyes caught sight of something in the splintered ruin. "The wedge," he muttered reproachfully. "The wedge I found in the south pasture." A glance told him why the tree had fallen. Growing, edge up, in the trunk, the wedge had prevented the limb fibers from knitting together as they should.

Forgotten wedges! Hidden weaknesses grown over and invisible, waiting until some winter night to work their ruin. What better symbolizes the presence and the effect of sin in our lives.

This brings to my memory some verses I heard long years ago:

Jim Died Today

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city which has no end;

Yet, days go by and weeks rush on
And before I know it a year has gone.

And I never see my old friend's face;
For life is a swift and terrible race.

He knows I like him just as well
As in the days when I rang his bell

And he rang mine. We were younger then
And now we are busy tired men—

Tired with playing the foolish game;
Tired with trying to make a name;

Tomorrow, I say, I will call on Jim,
Just to show I'm thinking of him.

But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes;
And the distance between us grows and grows

Around the corner! Yet miles away—
Here's a telegram, sir — "Jim died today!"

And that's what we get—and deserve in the end—
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

Then comes to me a paragraph from Phillip Brooks as he addressed his congregation:

You who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them; you who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy which you mean to give him some day; if you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that `the time is short'. How it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do!

My thoughts picked up this friend of mine. He was well regarded in his community and honorable in his business dealings, and everyone spoke well of him. He was my trusted friend. He had one weakness. He admitted it to be a weakness. Most of the people with whom he traveled were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and did not use tobacco, but he was a chain smoker. Always a cigarette hung between his lips. It seemed to be as much a part of him as was his ear or nose or finger. Sometimes we joked about his inseparable companion. He always chuckled and said, "Everybody has to have one weakness." And then in more sober moments, he would become pensive and say, "Yes, I know it is not good but it seems to have hold of me like an octopus. Someday, I'll conquer it." Someday, he would gain command and throw it away. Yes. Someday!

But the days sped into years, his hair became thinner, his complexion more sallow, and there finally came a cough—a little hacking cough. It worried us who appreciated his good qualities, but there was little we could do. I moved to Utah and saw him no more for many years. Time put on its running shoes and years piled up, and one day I was on assignment in Phoenix when a mutual friend, knowing my affection for this man, said, "Did you know he is in the Good Samaritan Hospital in very bad shape?" Dropping everything, I rushed to the hospital but almost too late. There he lay propped up in his bed the better to breathe, for his breathing was irregular and came in painful gasps. I was so glad he recognized me but it was for but a moment; then his forced smile gave way and was gone and the light faded and went out. There would never be another cigarette. He had certainly intended to overcome the habit. Many times he had given it up but returned to serve his master.

Here he had lain, sad, alone, fearful. The surgeons had not operated. They said the cancer was too deep, too scattered, too entrenched.

And I—I saw him die. My friend of thirty years. I saw him die when he might have lived yet many years in health and happiness. And as I stood with bowed head and pained aching heart, I seemed to remember of another great tree which could not stand the storm and wedges, forgotten wedges, slow, death-dealing wedges. Tomorrow he would have thrown his cigarettes away, but now that always recreant tomorrow, that procrastinating tomorrow which never comes had in reality come. The wedges had done their work. Tomorrow was here and the cigarettes were finally gone. The wedges had seen to that. And then there came to me the words of Ralph Parlett:

Strength and struggle travel together. The supreme reward of struggle is strength. Life is a battle and the greatest joy is to overcome. The pursuit of easy things makes men weak. . . .

My thoughts shifted and settled upon a little boy in Arizona with curly hair—he sat upon my knee half a century ago. His smile was beautiful and his laugh contagious. He grew into handsome manhood, but as he went through his teens, he carelessly threw into the forks of his walnut tree a bottle which certainly he would remove some day. Yes, in his sober moments he admitted it was bad for him. Tomorrow, he would discard this little devil, his master. Tomorrow!

When he was married, the bottle wedge was still in the tree and the fibers were encasing it. With a hollow laugh, he passed it off and said he would remove it tomorrow. The cursed thing was there when the children came. How they loved this handsome dad! Yet sometimes there were strange situations they could not understand. They could hardly believe it was their daddy, so different he was at times, and the times became more and more frequent.

This bottle-wedge was still there when the children were in their teens. Even with their increasing understanding of life, they could not comprehend how their father could be Doctor Jekyll yesterday and Mr. Hyde today. He was such a wonderful father when he was sober. Procrastination again was the thief of time and the bottle-wedge became deeper and deeper in the tree. Indeed, the tree had grown over it. The point of no-return had come.

He came into my life again. I did not recognize him. His hair was gray, his body sloppy, his eyes bleary. His children were now on their own—it had been years since any of his earnings had bolstered the family budget. One son had died in a tavern, one had married and divorced three times, the other two were respectable members of society. His wife supported herself and the family and some of her hard-earned savings had found their way into that bottle-wedge, too. One day, I found him in the gutter. Self respect was gone, resistance had waned, the storm had come, the habit was too deeply entrenched. Yesterday, with self control, he could have defeated his enemy, but the yesterdays became tomorrows and tomorrow failed to come until now; his tomorrows are today. He is in a mental institution and his doctors say he will live there till he dies there. And, as I saw him fettered and enslaved, there came to my memory a paragraph from a modern writer, which I paraphrase:

History, which had yawned for thousands of years, stirred on her dust-covered couch, opened her eyes and saw one more son of God become a fettered slave. She signed, sat up, shook the dust from the pages of her voluminous book, glanced at the long list of victims, turned a fresh page, took up her pen and moistened it and wrote another name.

"It is an old tale," she said, tiredly and hopelessly as her old bones moved wearily to record again. "Millions have followed this highway through the ages of the past," she said, "depriving spouses, neglecting children, corrupting lives, destroying character." Then, she remonstrated, "Why can I never sleep? Why must I continue on recording distorted lives, corrupted civilizations—will men never learn?" (Taylor Caldwell, The Earth Is the Lord's, p. 414.)

Here were bottle wedges! The winds and whirlwind wedges! Broken trees split open, branchless tree-made skeletons. And I sorrowed and remembered wedges, hidden wedges, forgotten wedges, postponed wedges. Always tomorrow wedges!

I pondered again. There is a book. A book which gives in plainness the everlasting gospel of the Son of God. Last year, a million copies of this lifesaving book, the Book of Mormon, went into a million homes. Through the years, millions of other copies of this book have lodged in libraries. A relatively few have absorbed it. Many have pushed it into a shelf among their books and have said to themselves: Tomorrow, I will look it through. But years accumulate and books get dust covered and cobwebs get woven. If the millions of people knew what that book could do for them, they would pull it from their shelves, dust it, put it in gold covering and read it avidly for its truth. But that is tomorrow, and tomorrow comes with leaden feet. The storm of life falls and great limbs split and break away and great souls go into eternity to meet their Lord, never having yet read this powerful testimony of his life and works and saving-exalting program. And I remember the tree and the wedge and the bottle and the cigarette and know that even great trees cannot stand with hidden wedges, forgotten wedges.

Again there are true servants of God who have encircled the globe with their testimonies of the truth of the restoration of the all-encompassing gospel. Constantly, for one hundred thirty-six years, thousands of missionaries have borne testimony to millions of people, and numerous of those people in many lands have heard the testimony, have trembled as the Spirit bore witness to their spirits, and have believed in varying degrees the message but have postponed acceptance of it. Some have hesitated to disturb old family moorings; some have been unwilling to transform their lives as the gospel requires; some have been unprepared to live the rather strict requirements of the gospel; and in many cities and countries there are good people who felt the pull of the restored truths, had a conviction of its truth but who have waited till tomorrow to accept it. Many have married a member of the Church and have been close to the Church and have heard the great message many times, and yet because it was inconvenient or difficult or embarrassing, or financially or politically inexpedient, they have waited. Many good people have expressed their conversion and deep feeling for the Church and the gospel, yet have excused themselves by saying, "I think I can do more good for the Church on the outside than I could do inside." But the call of the Lord—the call of the Church—the call of the truth requires that each individual must save himself at all costs. I see these numerous people who have felt the power, who have experienced the inspiration of contacts, and yet they tarry and postpone and disregard the powerful appeal of the Lord Jesus Christ, who said, "Come unto me." Then I remember the story of the broken, destroyed walnut tree; then I remember the postponed wedges, procrastination-wedges, and I wonder how such people will square themselves with their Lord, who gave to them some assurance of the divinity of the program. Yet they wait and wait and fail to obey.

A cultured and intelligent couple in a little city of a southern land heard the message of eternal life from two young so-called "Mormon" missionaries. This man and his wife were impressed with the young ministers, and more so with the truths they had taught.

They entertained the young men in their home, fed them, attended their meetings, defended them. Mentally and heart-wise, they recognized as truth the message they brought, but because of their prominence in the community, their friends, their families, they postponed doing what their hearts told them they must do—they procrastinated the action which their Lord demanded of Nicodemus, true birth of the water and of the spirit by authorized official priesthood bearers of the Master. They were convinced of its truth. Someday, they would be baptized—someday they would follow their inner urge. But today? Not today—some later time! Because of war and reduction of missionaries, no elders returned. This man and his good wife were not located again. Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. But for them, the ravages of age came on them, and for them, tomorrow did not come. And we remembered the wedges of procrastination, the wedges of resistance to the Spirit, the wedges of delay. They had not remembered that the Lord said, "My spirit will not always strive with man," and the light which had emblazoned the truth and opened their souls to the truth had flickered and gone out. Wedges, hidden wedges, forgotten wedges. How tragic these wedges which estrange, cover up.

He was a prominent attorney. He had done some work for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had sat in numerous meetings, heard the objectives of the Lord's true Church, had seen the leaders in action, had read much about the doctrines. There had come a warm feeling, he admitted, as he contemplated the revealed and restored truths as taught by the Church. He heard the command of his Creator: "Repent and be baptized." His heart said yes, tomorrow, soon, today, but it was not convenient just now. His wife was not ready. His law-partners would wonder; his social group would think him fanatical; his relatives would be grieved at his leaving the old established church. He was sure he must, but tomorrow, maybe, tomorrow.

He moved to the north. In the large city he might not be found but he would look up the missionaries someday. Yes, it was truth. It was the celestial way. It was God's true kingdom on the earth. Someday he would take the time and trouble. But this tree also grew over the wedge, and time passed and candles burn low and out, and warmth cools off, and "the summer is past and my soul is not saved."

To postpone vital action—to forget how easy to forget. How easy to yield to immediate pressures. Hidden wedges. Forgotten wedges, procrastinated wedges!

And then, I remembered the verse of Percy Adams Hutchison (1878- ) in his "The Swordless Christ" (Vicisti Galilee, Stanza I):

Ay, down the years, behold he rides,
The lowly Christ, upon an ass;
But conquering? Ten shall heed the call,
A thousand idly watch him pass.

Procrastination is the thief of time!

And I wondered how many tens of thousands did hear His voice, felt an inner twinge of heart, wanted to follow, felt impelled to do his will, but waited, paused, lingered, postponed, procrastinated. The deep impression faded, the memory lingered a moment and died in a world of pressings, immediate realities and demands.

How many thousands saw him pass and saw his smile and were impressed?

How many heard his sermons on the mount and were pricked in their hearts but stopped to eat food, and sleep and work and do other things, and failed to heed?

Numerous have jostled him in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, and turned around and looked the second time at him whom they had touched, but went on their way to daily tasks and missed their opportunity.

How many heard the story of his walking on the water but were too busy with their selling fish in the market or herding sheep or harvesting grain to ask the vital reasons and fathom the deep powers?

How many saw him hanging there upon the cross and saw only wood beams and nails and flesh and blood and made no effort to penetrate the purposes and the reasons—how one could choose to die such an ignominious death, how one could be so controlled in time of such excruciating pain, what was the reason behind such treatment; what were the deep purposes, what it was that could cause a person to give himself for others and make no effort to escape; who was this "author of eternal salvation unto all those that obey him." (Heb. 5:9.)

How many felt the stir which comes in human breasts when truth pressed in upon them but, pressured by minor exigencies, remain far away from his eternal destiny?

And then I think: Procrastination—thou wretched thief of time and opportunity!

When will men stand and be true to their one-time inspired yearnings? When will men cease throwing into their life trees the wedges which deprive and weaken and cause loss and power?

Let those take care who postpone the clearing of bad habits and of constructively doing what they ought. "Someday I'll join the Church," says one. "I'll cease my drinking soon," says another. "One day, I'll smoke no more," others pledge. "Someday we'll be ready for our temple sealings," promise a delayed-action husband and wife. "Someday, when they apologize, I'll forgive those who injured me," small souls say. "Someday I'll get my debts paid." "We'll get around soon to having our family prayers, and next week we'll start our home evenings." "We shall start paying tithing from our next pay check." Tomorrow—yes, tomorrow.

And then, we quote more lines from Whitman:

Pride, envy, selfishness, dishonesty, intemperance, doubt, secret passions—almost numberless in variety and degree are the wedges of sin. And alas! Almost numberless are the men and women who today are allowing sin to grow in the heart wood of their lives.

"The wedge is there. We know it is there. We put it there ourselves one day, when we were hurried and thoughtless. It shouldn't be there, of course. It is harming the tree. But we are busy so we leave it there; and in time, it grows over and we forget. The years slip swiftly by. Wintertime comes with its storms and ice. The life we prized so much goes down in the unspeakable loss of spiritual disaster. For years after the wedge had grown over, the tree flourished and gave no sign of its inner weakness. Thus it is with sin. Many a fine house on many a fine street has a wedge of sin within its elegance. And many a man who walks the streets in pride and arrogance of worldly success is an unrepentant sinner before God. Nevertheless, the wedge is there and in the end of its work is a fallen tree, split and shattered and worthless."

May the Lord bless us all that we may early recognize and remember and remove all wedges before they wreak their havoc in our lives, I pray.

In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

How Will You Measure your Life?

So, this guy was quoted multiple times in General Conference.  Then this month, an abridgment of his article showed up in Reader's Digest, so I managed to find it.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

The Class of 2010 (Located at the end of this article)

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.

The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.

This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”

I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.

In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Choose the Right Yardstick

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Elder Christofferson re Daily Bread

I'll be adding the text to this when it becomes available.  Clorinda put this on today, and I was really enjoying it.  I'll need to read it before being able to really comment on it.