Accountability
This morning I opted to do sets to failure/near failure with my push-ups interspersed with other activities such as putting away dishes and stair intervals (I run up and walk down - today this was timed out by listening to a song, it happened to be Day After Day by Badfinger that popped up and I ran with it). This resulted in a first set of 40 push-ups, a second set of 40 push-ups, and a third set of 37. Morning prayers went like clockwork with making my bed still serving as trigger to remember to kneel and the freshly made bed and offer up the thoughts of my heart to my Father in Heaven. Reading scriptures and praying each evening is still also going well. There have been many nights that I'm feeling tired and I am tempted to skip it, and tell myself it only needs to be one verse at a minimum to lock in the pattern, and then continue to go on and rad a full chapter or several verses at a minimum - with actually only reading one verse being uncommon.
Ponderings
I've been thinking about what it means to let virtue garnish one's thoughts unceasingly. This brings me to wanting to look into the definitions of both "virtue" and "garnish". When I was on my mission I had a companion that was really focused on learning to better understand virtue. He looked at virtue as a state of righteousness, but felt that it didn't line up with the concept of Jesus feeling virtue leave his body when touched by the woman with an issue of blood. Why would righteousness leave his body. As we worked through this together we came to agree for the most part that in this context "virtue" referred to strength - he felt his strength diminish as some sense of physical vitality was tied to spiritual strength that he felt leave him to heal her according to her faith. I understand that Aristotle's view of virtue from a philosopher's perspective is finding balance between extremes - for instance courage being a balance between recklessness and cowardice. It's possible with this idea that the Savior felt himself out of balance. I like the definition for virtue being, "the strength of character that guides a person to act with integrity, compassion, and wisdom."
Garnish on the other had seems to be used to describe either a decorative side of colorful food to spruce up a meal or to withhold payments for a debt that is owed. I admittedly always thought that the use of this term such as garnishing funds didn't really apply, but I actually think it may apply better. If we look at virtue as a garnish as in food, it's sort of an after thought to simply dress things up, not an integral part. If we look as virtue as a means of exercising strength in repentance continually garnishing choices we have been given the freedom to make over to the Lord, unceasingly exercising the strength of character to follow the Lord and not our own hearts (essentially giving over those choices or having them garnished, or as Paul put it being a slave to Christ Jesus) I think this actually makes more sense. As we strive to always exercise the restraint to give our lives to the Lord then we are allowing virtue to garnish our thoughts unceasingly and developing unceasing strength of character as we follow the example of truly unceasing strength.
Be strong!
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Garnish as a withdrawal from a bank account, Hmm, that never occurred to me before but it makes sense. Like in the verse, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” That is an invitation to come and get some help. So there’s a help accused we are invited to garnish it as needed. So why not garnish it without ceasing since it’s an unlimited help account. I guess it won’t hurt to decorate your thoughts with strength either. That’s better than decorating your thoughts with weakness. There’s a thought: keep your thoughts strong. I remember that Obi won kin obi said that it’s easy to overpower weak minded individuals. I’ll do some exercise to Badfinger tomorrow . Interesting name that.
Yeah, I must admit I'd never thought of this in that way before making this observation in this post. Always thinking of garnishing a meal and not wages.