Ripples: September Week 3

Since our historian has no internet for a while, I will post what I learned from our Vanguard day yesterday.  Please add any comments or thoughts about what you learned.  And if you have pictures - post those too! I had my hands full with a baby, so I had to get the pictures from online and none of you are in them :-(

Highlights:

• Beautiful Fall colors and multi-colored leaves
• Hearing the groups present - each group shared their inspirements and collages they brought from home with one another and then made a visual presentation of the principles from the number 1 and letter Aleph as a group.  The rules were: Use something from nature, Use a scripture, Use an object lesson (groups were assigned a pencil, a compass, a straightedge or a paper).  You created some neat collages together and presented them to the group. I loved your insights and deep thoughts.
• Grid drawings - Spencer gave everyone a transparent grid to help us in our sketching of nature and showed us that any task is easier done when broken into small segments.  Jordan and Cassia shard that the grid is like the word of God and if we trust it and draw the lines we see in each square - even if they seem different than what we would think we should draw - the end product will be beautiful.
• Gathering in a circle, singing (you know I love to hear you sing!), and talking about getting back within the circle, with our Father, through the atonement.
• Reflections by the pond about the ripples we are sending out to the world and how to send out the ripples we want to send out.

Here is a blog post I wrote about what I learned:

I came to understand a profound truth yesterday.

I took some amazing youth to a pond. On the way up, as we hiked through the changing autumn leaves, I asked them to find a rock that represented them in some way.  At the end of our time there, I asked them to throw their rock in the pond and watch the ripples and then to sit somewhere and quietly reflect on what sort of ripples they were sending to the world.

As I sat on a rock, with my baby on my lap, trying to write down some reflections while she tried to grab my pen, suddenly the thought struck me:

"There is war raging around you.  Your heart is the price.  Unseen forces want to dwell there. You get to decide who wins the victory.  Your choices will invite one of the two sides in."

As I watched these youth throw their pebbles in the river. I understood why a heart is the ultimate price of victory for these veiled powers. If they can penetrate one heart - their influencing ripples will extend far beyond what we can see.  The heart is power. It's where ripples are made.

When I am rippling anger, frustration, annoyance, selfishness - I can know which side I have let into my heart at that moment.  Because Christ died for me, I have the power, at any minute in time, to repent - to clean my heart from any evil and fill it with God's Love.  What a power! Because of Him, I get to choose who wins each battle for my heart.

I want God's love to win.  I want it to be there so much that it can build fortresses, barricades, watchtowers and strongholds. I want to ripple love into as many hearts within my influence as I can touch.  It is up to others if they will let it in.

What did you come away with?