Week 11

I really liked President Thomas S. Monson’s talk from 1996 called “Formula for Success” that was in this week’s reading.

He said, “I share with you a formula that in my judgment will help you and help me to journey well through mortality and to that great reward of exaltation in the celestial kingdom of our Heavenly Father.

First, fill your mind with truth; second, fill your life with service; and third, fill your heart with love.”

He talked about how to fill your mind with truth. He suggested that when we search for truth, we search among those books and in those places where truth is most likely to be found. He said we can find truth by studying the words of our Heavenly Father. 

He said, “You and I have the responsibility to learn the word of God, to understand the word of God, and then to live his word. By so doing, we will find that we have learned and accepted the truth.”

The second part of the formula is to fill our lives with service. In the Book of Mormon it reads, “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17). 

The third part of the formula is to fill your heart with love.  He shared a story from baseball. I like sports so I will remember this story for a long time.

He said, “I remember watching on television a very exciting baseball game between evenly matched teams. One of the teams had one of the greatest home run hitters of all time. After the game a reporter interviewed him. He didn’t talk too much about home runs or runs batted in. He talked about his father. The ball player was Hank Aaron. He did not have very much of this world’s goods when he was a young boy, but he loved baseball. It consumed his life. He said that he and his father used to sit in an old, abandoned car that was in the rear of their lot and talk for hour after hour. One day Hank said to his dad, ‘I’m going to quit school, Dad. I’m going to go to work so I can play baseball.’ And Herbert Aaron said to his son, ‘My boy, I quit school because I had to, but you’re not going to quit school. Every morning of your young life I’ve put fifty cents on the table, that you might buy your lunch that day. And I take twenty-five cents with me, that I might buy my lunch. Your education means more to me than my lunch. I want you to have what I never had.’ Hank Aaron said that every time he thought about that fifty-cent piece that his father put on the table every day, he thought how much that fifty cents meant to his father. It conveyed to him how much his schooling meant to his father. Hank Aaron said, ‘I never had too much difficulty staying in school when I reflected upon the love my father had for me. As a result of reflecting upon the love of my father, I obtained my schooling and played a lot of baseball.’ That was putting it mildly from the greatest home run threat that ever stepped up to a baseball diamond—Henry Aaron.”

I really liked this formula, and I hope to apply it to my life.