For Days When Your Best is Nowhere Near Enough...

A beloved professor of mine once pointed out an interesting principle in human terminology. The phrase "Do your best" seems to have a skewed meaning. Said professor admitted that when he was a kid, and his parents would tell him, "do your best" he always knew that what they really meant was "do THE best".

"So which is it, that seems like a pretty crucial conjunction!"...

There is a world of difference between doing ones best and doing (or being) the best. Take, for example, the following (made up) scenario:

Timmy was SO excited for his first day of Kindergarten. He had watched so many of his older brothers and sisters go to school and come home toting their little backpacks brimming over with intriguingly colored pieces of paper, chewed up pencils, dime store calculators, and "Good Job" sticker plastered homework assignments. Now it was his turn to shine.

"Good luck, honey" Timmy's mother said with a perfect smile. "Now remember, whatever happens, just do your best!"

Timmy wanted very hard to please his mother, so he toddled into the classroom, walked promptly over to the shelf, pulled down a grammar book and proceeded to pour over its pages, thus simultaneously learning how to read and write properly in one fell swoop! But that was just before the first recess! Surely we can expect more than just this simple task from our little protagonist! When he reentered the classroom after having mastered the games of kickball, t-ball, tether ball, and foursquare all in fifteen minutes, he pulled a book of elementary mathematics off of the shelf, and used his newly acquired reading skills to hone his math skills, until he had conjured up a fairly sophisticated (if not world changing) modified quantum model of the atom. Imagine how proud little Timmy was hanging THAT up on the fridge. Surely little Timmy had done his best, and the world all was as it should be.

So many people think that if this does not describe their first day of kindergarten, they must not have done their best. What about a less dramatic scenario, that takes my argument to a different level.

Sally was nervous for her first day of school, but she pulled the shoulder straps of her pink barbie backpack tightly over her shoulders, nodded when her mother yelled "do your best", and marched into the classroom. That day, poor Sally broke four pencils trying to learn to write the letter "A", suffocated the class pet fish, and spilled the contents of her pencil box all over the room. But that was only before the first recess! After fifteen minutes made up of 1.2 seconds of jump roping, .8 seconds of falling, and 14 minutes and 58 seconds of nursing a scraped knee, Sally reentered the room determined to make the most of the next few hours. She made the most of them all right! Those few after-recess hours were more than enough time to be laughed at for singing off-key, dropping the chalk under the teacher's desk while trying to write the never-to-be-mastered letter "A" on the blackboard, and accidentally erasing part of Timmy's great quantum equation that was already on its way to winning the Nobel Prize. (Luckily for Sally, Timmy already had the equation memorized before he wrote it out, so it was no problem for him to write it up again. He wasn't even mad! The very picture of magnanimity!)

So! That means that one of the children did their best and the other didn't, right? I mean, COME ON!!! How can both of the children have done their best, when one graduated from seven Universities with honorary PhD's four days later, and the other finally learned to recognize the letter "A" in the same amount of time? Open and closed case...

Unfortunately, life is not that simple. The tricky thing with humane statements such as, "do the best with what you have" or "not everyone's best is the same" is that such statements carry such profoundly complicated truths in them that we will never fully understand their meaning in this life.

Both of the children may or may not have done their best. What if Timmy purposely left some of the information out of his model because he wanted to be able to claim the prize next year as well. OR what if Sally really did know how to write the letter A all along and she was only selfishly trying to get attention from teacher?

BUT, what if Timmy has an inferiority complex because his older brother has won 32 Nobel prizes, and his mother says that he cannot eat until he gets at least 2? What if Sally is severely neglected at home and does not know proper ways to get attention from others without acting out?

You see, it's even more complicated than what we think! Not only is everyone's best different, but there are not surefire ways of telling from the outside what someone's best is.

To take it even further, an individual's best may vary from day to day. Some days I get to the library first thing and read several chapters and take several quizzes before class. I then go to six hours straight of classes with no breaks, take meticulous notes, and make insightful comments. After that, I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in the library reading assignments, pouring over Spanish poetry and working on research for a long paper. I then go home, eat a healthy dinner, do Yoga, read my scriptures, write in my journal, get ready for bed, send a pick-me-up text to a friend who is having a bad day, and lights out. Wow, I must have done my best that day!

But wait! That's not the end of the story... you say that the next day I am overcome by a bout of depression due to some extenuating circumstances in my life, and I can't get out of bed? Some of my hormones have gone out of whack, and I can't stop sleeping? When I do get up, the most I can do is crawl to the couch and watch movies for the rest of the day, not replying to any e-mails of class-mates asking for help on an assignment? Surely this day I did not do my best. By all accounts, I was an utter failure... but then, what if I did?

I believe in my heart of hearts, that when all is said and done, and this life is over, that we will all be greatly astounded at how many things we had working against us. Physical, emotional, psychological, economical, social factors all fighting for their right to be troublesome against us everyday. In general, do good. If you've made mistakes fix them, make goals, press forward, pray hard, love hard, live life to the fullest... when you can.

But when days come when you're not good enough (as they undoubtedly will), when doing your best means that you open your eyes just ONCE and look upward to the ceiling and mumble, "I am not enough today, make it OK, please!" When that has happened, and your inability to be effective in the world that day has been swallowed up in the love of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, pull together all that you have and ask, "Lord, how is it done?" (Enos 1:7). And then when you have heard him say, "Because of thy faith in Christ…wherefore, go to, thy faith hath made thee whole" (Enos 1:8) go to, and do good, and keep fighting, keep praying, keep loving against odds, and hoping against hope-- and never forget that "because of the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, [you] may hope and be assured that the ending of the book of [your life] will exceed [your] grandest expectations." (Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Infinite Power of Hope,” Ensign, Nov 2008, 21–24)

Stop judging yourself and others. Trust that God loves everyone, and that everything will turn out, because it will.

Philosophical Underpinnings of the Atonement

I feel like this post will be a hefty one, especially after only one post attempting to explain what I am trying to do here. But we all know that one of the best modes of defining what something is, is to see it in its context. This being the case, dear reader, take each post as a contextual piece of a definition. An ever-changing collection of what it means to be me, and to be in my mind... for better or worse...
One of the reasons I have come to love studying the Humanities is that it gives me the chance to see other people's viewpoints in a non-confrontational environment. That is to say, it is non-confrontational if I approach each work as it intends to be approached, and with the intent to learn something about another person and their ideas, taking every text for what is actually there. Granted, it is very difficult to do, and I am sure that I fail in that attempt at every turn. That being said, I recently was assigned to do my first reading of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the introduction (written by some well-meaning person, I'm sure) it sounded as though Nietzsche would have liked nothing better than for the whole idea of Christianity to vanish into thin air, or to have never existed all-together. While this may be the case, I was given a quote by him the day after I read some of his works that gave me a new perspective on his thinking.
Now, I am not trying to defend him, or put words in his mouth, or call him a Christian thinker when he did not want to be one, but please read with me the actual text.
The following excerpt is taken from The Gay Science

"This is actually one color of this new feeling: Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit--an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility--the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one's soul with all of this--the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling--this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called--humaneness." (268-69)

I realized after reading this quote that Nietzsche probably had less of a problem with the basic, fundamental ideas of Christianity (which, perhaps, he did not understand on a profound level) and struggled more to grapple with the ways in which Christianity had exuded its power over the human race, and shaped the ideas that had led to wars and conflicts and hatred amongst the peoples of the world. Taking into account all of history and much of what goes on in the present-day world, it is really no surprise that people have rejected Christianity and have thought of it as a failed ideal. Reading this quote strengthened my testimony of the Atonement of Jesus Christ for the simple fact that even while rejecting the ideas of Christianity, a great thinker's mind still brought him to the same conclusion that pure Christian intent has brought many another man. The only way to reach perfection, a pinnacle of humanness (insert charity?) is to feel and understand deeply every experience and emotion that has ever passed through the human mind.
If I had not known who this quote was by before I read it, and had to guess at its author, I would have said C.S. Lewis wrote it in speaking of the Atonement. To say that it made me think would be a gross understatement. I have only begun to delve into the ramifications of this idea. It will undoubtedly prove to be a lifelong journey.