and my teacher, Norm Nemrow, is wonderful! We had a lecture about the more spiritual side of accounting yesterday and it was so amazing. Here are a few of my favorite things he talked about. (I know it is kind of lengthy, but it truly is great advice and would be worthwhile to read and ponder-I wish everyone could have been at the his lecture because it was very insightful. I did my best to paraphrase)
God lends us everything. Our life is God's gift-the money, the possessions, the talents, the time, our bodies, our breath is all being lent to us by our loving Heavenly Father. We are here, on Earth, by the grace of God. He can easily take it all away from us which is why we don't necessarily own anything, we are just the stewards. The only thing we have to give is our submission to His will. It is the only thing we truly have control over. Agency gives us the power over our minds and thoughts and those are the two things God cannot take away. In giving 10% of our income to God we are technically receiving a 90% gift since it is all God's money in the first place. We must do what God would have us do with His money-desire wealth with the intent to do good with it.
Live modestly. Don't spend more than you need, save up, being rich doesn't mean you need 5 cars if only 3 people in the household drive. It doesn't mean having a 8 bedroom house when only 2 kids are living at home. Wealth isn't measured by what you spend and the possessions you have, it is measured by the money you have saved up. Many people can never been financially independent because they spend everything they have when they get it, they live "rich" lives but have nothing saved and therefore will never be able to stop working and enjoy their rewards-they live pay check to pay check because they are choosing to not live modestly. Don't let that happen! You ought to be joyful in life-worldly possessions are HIGHLY over-rated. Don't give up joy and happiness (in career especially) for money. Don't become slaves to your job or possessions. Don't work for the money-work because you love it. If you don't NEED a lot of income (to pay for all the "wants") you have complete freedom. The key is to live modestly-not needing a lot of money.
God allowed you to make money, He made it happen. Don't think that you can do anything you want with the money "you" make-because it's not yours. It is so seductive to think "it's mine, I deserve this." That is precisely why it states in the New Testament that for a rich man to get into Heaven it is like a camel going through the eye of a needle.
President Hinckley counseled to choose what makes you happy-Income is important but happiness is better. You need enough to get along. Read full article here. (Excerpt below)
Choose a vocation where you will be happy. You will spend eight and more hours a day at it through all the foreseeable future. Choose something that you enjoy doing. Income is important, but you do not need to be a multimillionaire to be happy. In fact, you are more likely to be unhappy if wealth becomes your only objective. You will become a slave to it. It will color all your decisions. You need enough to get along on. You need enough to provide well for your family. It will be better if the husband becomes the provider and the wife does not work when children come. That situation may be necessary in some cases, but if you choose wisely now, it is not likely to become a requirement.
Choose a field in which you can grow. You need the stimulation of new effort and new ambitions, of new discoveries and new challenges.
Get all the schooling you can to qualify yourselves in your chosen vocations. In this world, competition is terrible. It eats up people. It destroys many. But it must be faced; it is something with which we have to deal.
Choose something that will be stimulating and thought-provoking and that will carry with it the day-to-day opportunity to do something to improve the society of which you will become a part.
These are the great days of your preparation for your future work. Do not waste them. Take advantage of them. Cram your heads full of knowledge. Assimilate it. Think about it. Let it become a part of you.
But with all of this, in choosing a vocation you should bear in mind that there are other things in life that are of tremendous importance also. The greatest task of all, the greatest challenge, and the greatest satisfaction lie in the rearing of a good family. There must also be time for service in the Church. Otherwise these very important dimensions of your life will be relegated to a back burner.
Life has a way of moving us in our vocational work from one thing to another. This likely will happen more in the future. The education you receive can become a solid foundation on which to build a career that may cover many fields of endeavor.
(back to Norm's lecture)
Find your PASSION! You'll become excellent in that area because you love it, you'll want to work on it and get better. You'll naturally rise. Passion breads excellence, excellence brings opportunities. You'll be motivated to improve, more motivated than others who aren't as passionate. If you want to be a school teacher-it's your passion-but you're worried about the income it's better to live everyday happy, doing what you love, than hating work just to get the salary you want. Opportunities unimaginable will come if you chase your passion and excel. There isn't much excellence in the world so naturally the excellent will rise to the top. Herold B. Lee said that the way you live your life is one step at a time!
Those in school still trying to find their passion-don't just pick something to hurry and get it done. Enjoy college, you'll wish you'd taken more classes! Education is NEVER a waste of time and money. It is GOOD to be well rounded and educated. If you find your passion now, you'll be happy later! Take the time to search and discover what you truly want to do, where your talents and passion lies. "Don't pick the shortest path of education. It is okay to take time to find your passion."
Be flexible, live modestly, don't become a slave to possessions.
I also had to read this article for my Accounting class and I thought it was great!
Neal A. Maxwell, "Insights from My Life," Ensign, Aug. 2000,
(Excerpt)
Submission of the Will
I am going to preach a hard doctrine to you now. The submission of one's will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God's altar. It is a hard doctrine, but it is true. The many other things we give to God, however nice that may be of us, are actually things He has already given us, and He has loaned them to us. But when we begin to submit ourselves by letting our wills be swallowed up in God's will, then we are really giving something to Him. And that hard doctrine lies at the center of discipleship. There is a part of us that is ultimately sovereign, the mind and heart, where we really do decide which way to go and what to do. And when we submit to His will, then we've really given Him the one final thing He asks of us. And the other things are not very, very important. It is the only possession we have that we can give, and there is no lessening of our agency as a result. Instead, what we see is a flowering of our talents and more and more surges of joy. Submission to Him is the only form of submission that is completely safe.
This ought to be more obvious to us than it is sometimes, brothers and sisters, because developmentally, as well as doctrinally, all the other commandments hang, as Jesus said, on the two great interactive commandments:
"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
"This is the first and great commandment.
"And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22:37-40).
Now, we don't think about it enough in the Church, but the first commandment is first for a reason. And the second commandment is second for a reason. True, the second commandment is like unto the first, but it isn't the first commandment. We worship the perfect object of that first commandment, God, because of His spiritual supremacy. We do not worship our neighbors. We are to love them but not worship them. This recognition of God's supremacy on all counts is why that commandment is first and why it is completely safe for us to submit to Him.
That first commandment includes all of our heart, soul, and mind. The mind must surrender to God too. It is my impression, looking about the world, that there are comparatively more knees bent in reverence to God than there are minds bent in reverence to Him. Such human stubbornness tends to show up in terms of our unwillingness to submit our minds to Him.
C. S. Lewis put it well when he said: "We are bidden to put on Christ,' to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want" (The Problem of Pain [1962], 53). Hence it is so vital for us to be submissive because we'll be puzzled when He gives us what we need in order to become more like Him and the Son, unless we are submissive in mind.
Now, that grand key, therefore, is why we will have missed the train if Jesus is a stranger and far from the thoughts and intents of our heart. Because of his intellectual submissiveness, Enoch learned about what Paul called "the deep things of God" (1 Cor. 2:10). I love that phrase of Paul's. Enoch personally saw the tears of the Lord. He personally heard the Lord's lamentations about the human family. God recited how He has given us our agency, commanded us to love and to choose Him and likewise love one another. Here again are the two great commandments. Yet we mortals so often choose evil or let the cares of the world crowd out the important things.
Instead of choosing God and His ways, we get busy with the cares of the world, and that is when neighbors get excluded too. So obeying that first great commandment permits us to acknowledge and love the Lord and to accept His love of us, brothers and sisters, including the timing and shaping of us. Remember Nephi's meek acceptance of God's will: "I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" (1 Ne. 11:17). We don't know the meaning of all things, but we know that God loves us, and that is sufficient to get us by and through anything.
We have a lot of people who partially keep the second commandment more than they truly keep the first. The trouble with just focusing on the second commandment to the exclusion of the first is that we may do some good deed for a neighbor, but it may not mean that we have worshiped God with all our mind. The first commandment sets the high tone, the divine standard. If it were not so, then, as the scriptures say, "Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world" (D&C 1:16). That first commandment is the linchpin for everything else. Even self-centered people find themselves doing good, keeping the second commandment at times, but it is almost a sidebar thing, as though they really have other things to do but are going to do a modicum of service here and feel good about it. We must not, therefore, overlook how crucial that first commandment is.
(Excerpt)
Submission of the Will
I am going to preach a hard doctrine to you now. The submission of one's will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God's altar. It is a hard doctrine, but it is true. The many other things we give to God, however nice that may be of us, are actually things He has already given us, and He has loaned them to us. But when we begin to submit ourselves by letting our wills be swallowed up in God's will, then we are really giving something to Him. And that hard doctrine lies at the center of discipleship. There is a part of us that is ultimately sovereign, the mind and heart, where we really do decide which way to go and what to do. And when we submit to His will, then we've really given Him the one final thing He asks of us. And the other things are not very, very important. It is the only possession we have that we can give, and there is no lessening of our agency as a result. Instead, what we see is a flowering of our talents and more and more surges of joy. Submission to Him is the only form of submission that is completely safe.
This ought to be more obvious to us than it is sometimes, brothers and sisters, because developmentally, as well as doctrinally, all the other commandments hang, as Jesus said, on the two great interactive commandments:
"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
"This is the first and great commandment.
"And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22:37-40).
Now, we don't think about it enough in the Church, but the first commandment is first for a reason. And the second commandment is second for a reason. True, the second commandment is like unto the first, but it isn't the first commandment. We worship the perfect object of that first commandment, God, because of His spiritual supremacy. We do not worship our neighbors. We are to love them but not worship them. This recognition of God's supremacy on all counts is why that commandment is first and why it is completely safe for us to submit to Him.
That first commandment includes all of our heart, soul, and mind. The mind must surrender to God too. It is my impression, looking about the world, that there are comparatively more knees bent in reverence to God than there are minds bent in reverence to Him. Such human stubbornness tends to show up in terms of our unwillingness to submit our minds to Him.
C. S. Lewis put it well when he said: "We are bidden to put on Christ,' to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want" (The Problem of Pain [1962], 53). Hence it is so vital for us to be submissive because we'll be puzzled when He gives us what we need in order to become more like Him and the Son, unless we are submissive in mind.
Now, that grand key, therefore, is why we will have missed the train if Jesus is a stranger and far from the thoughts and intents of our heart. Because of his intellectual submissiveness, Enoch learned about what Paul called "the deep things of God" (1 Cor. 2:10). I love that phrase of Paul's. Enoch personally saw the tears of the Lord. He personally heard the Lord's lamentations about the human family. God recited how He has given us our agency, commanded us to love and to choose Him and likewise love one another. Here again are the two great commandments. Yet we mortals so often choose evil or let the cares of the world crowd out the important things.
Instead of choosing God and His ways, we get busy with the cares of the world, and that is when neighbors get excluded too. So obeying that first great commandment permits us to acknowledge and love the Lord and to accept His love of us, brothers and sisters, including the timing and shaping of us. Remember Nephi's meek acceptance of God's will: "I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" (1 Ne. 11:17). We don't know the meaning of all things, but we know that God loves us, and that is sufficient to get us by and through anything.
We have a lot of people who partially keep the second commandment more than they truly keep the first. The trouble with just focusing on the second commandment to the exclusion of the first is that we may do some good deed for a neighbor, but it may not mean that we have worshiped God with all our mind. The first commandment sets the high tone, the divine standard. If it were not so, then, as the scriptures say, "Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world" (D&C 1:16). That first commandment is the linchpin for everything else. Even self-centered people find themselves doing good, keeping the second commandment at times, but it is almost a sidebar thing, as though they really have other things to do but are going to do a modicum of service here and feel good about it. We must not, therefore, overlook how crucial that first commandment is.
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