So, some time ago, I made a video and I was showing my rock wall. I have a retaining wall that I've built out of rocks, hence the rock and the rock wall.
And I was using it as an analogy for repentance. And I guess the analogy just wasn't as solid as I thought. Get it? Solid rock. if it's not all cracked up
because it's very cold outside. And I want to talk through this a little bit more. And what I'd like to do here is basically make repentance a lot easier
than I think it seems for most people. So it turns out that in the book of Elma, Elma's counseling his sons and he says in in two places he he says, "Look,
really hard. And it helps to have a friend with some external perspective that can help to calibrate your guilt. That's actually a very important duty in
instead of talking about how to do it. So getting back to this rock wall, when we think of repentance, we think of, well, there are a couple of options.
Sometimes people say, well, I have this one sin that I need to get rid of. Usually it's something that we need to stop. Sometimes it's something we need
then if you flip that lever and you start talking about the universal sense of repentance, people get overwhelmed very quickly because they think, well,
it it was a hard enough idea to think about changing this one behavior and now I have to change my whole life. Well, yes and no. On the one hand, if if you
and out of the scriptures and into real life. And when you do that, all these things start making a lot more sense and they become a lot more practical.
So let's set aside this idea of repentance and religion for a second and let's talk about if you were my employee and your job was to build a rock wall
possible, but if you've been doing this for a while and you're not the brand new guy on the job and and the rock wall is actually standing because if you do it
Maybe at least the rocks themselves are okay to reuse and we could get into the details on this. But the point is you could look at that and be completely
overwhelmed and say, "Oh, you know, any feedback that's constructive about this is just going to be too much for me to implement because I have to change my
whole life. My whole life is coming down with this rock ball." Uh, no. It's just part of the job. First off, you're getting paid. Second, you've ostensibly
got the correct equipment. It's just going to take a little bit of time to do it the right way. But guess what? If you don't, very bad things will happen. That
So, in real life, we deal with things like this every day. Maybe you've never built a rock wall before, and that's fine, and good for you. I'm sure your
elbows thank you. But you do things like this every day, and you don't sit there and ring your hands and say, "Oh, the report I did at work. My boss said it
could be a little better in this specific way. My life is over. What am I going to do? I can't deal with this." No, you just you put it in the pipeline.
to actually be like Jesus. But this fake one's really easy because we've got a couple rules of things that we care about. And as long as you check those
And there's not so much savings between checking the boxes and doing the real thing. It turns out because people start dropping things through the cracks and
we got bamboozled at some point and it's time to get back to the real thing, but we tried to do the real thing in the old way. And the old way is broken. It
this this rock wall is really long. That's not the whole wall. You can take down just that part and make it right. If you have a a a limitation where it's
again, this is like a gauge and you can be too far one way or the other. If you say, "Oh yeah, I know it's a problem and I'm going to get to it one day." That's
not the same thing. That's not what I'm talking about. This is where a lot of the tools that I have given you in the book Joy on purpose come into play. If
you have a specific plan uh or in in the book through faith, I call this a plausible plan. If you have a plausible plan of action, then it's just as good
When it's time to act, you actually have to do the thing. You have to have a plausible path. You can't just say, "I'll get to it one day." None of those
affected by that video. And he said that he's dedicated his life to building a business and he thinks that he has made that business into his heaven. and he
So when you have a rock wall there are rocks that must go away sometimes but but even then in the most extreme case of this rock cannot be on the wall. You
There are some rocks that are cracked and you need to recognize that crack and you probably can't put as much weight on that rock, but it doesn't mean it has to
Maybe there's a rock that's on the top that needs to be on the bottom, or rock that's on the bottom that needs to be on the top. So, Rob, can you can you make
I doing?" and you make a list. It could be mentally, but it's better to write it down. You say, "Well, why am I doing the those things? What's the intent?"
Then you reverse it for each why. You look at the what and you say, "Is this the best way I know of to do this? Is it working? Do I need to find something
else? Is there something I'm already aware of?" And you make the changes again in an organized and sensible way. A lot of times we can have things that
are ranked poorly. This is in life, not just business. All of this applies to everything. We can have motives that maybe aren't as good or as pure as we
thought. And I just need to spend a minute talking about purity. Purity is not a synonym for goodness. Those are not the same word. If something is pure,
for a while and you couldn't just set up on a soap box 247 and preach the gospel. you had meetings that you could organize and then there was a lot of downtime.
So um that didn't mean that that that because he was a missionary he had to abandon the fact that he knew how to make tents. He still had that skill and
when it came in handy, he applied it, but he never let it take priority over preaching the gospel. He wasn't like, "Oh, I have to go to Macedonia, but I'm
need to hear this from me. You already know this. You've probably already experienced the limitations of seeking for money for its own sake. Money is all
about what you can do with it. And businesses are more than just money. They're they can be a very powerful tool to help people in extremely direct ways
bunch of weirdos out there like myself who've dedicated dedicated their lives to one-on-one interactions and helping people instead of making money. And you
can help people like me through donating your money. And it's not hard to find situations where you can find people who take that dollar and transform it into a
meaning in your day-to-day labor, you may find it becomes a great source of strength when you face challenges in your life, whether those be at work or
home or anything else. If if you end up getting terminal cancer, you can look back at the the things that you did for other people through your business and
wanted to bring up uh the movie Nacho Libre because it I think it's a there's so much in that movie that's just a wonderful example of uh or or that are
wonderful examples of gospel principles, believe it or not. And uh it's a it's a wonderful example of finding truth in strange places. But in the movie, there
is a monk who really likes wrestling and in his order it's forbidden, but he sneaks out and becomes a secret wrestler anyway and hilarity ensues. But in the
But repentance, when you're in a state of repentance, you're also in a state of continuous improvement. So it's it's you're always changing. You're always
for that are justification which is the initial dedication to God and then sanctification where we maintain that dedication while we learn more about him
there with a scalpel and start making surgical corrections. And like I said, this I love the rock wall analogy. A lot of times that means pulling off a
couple of rocks, taking out one that's not so great, finding a better one to put in its place, changing the priority order of what we do in our lives. But
most often, it's a question of why we do what we do and making tweaks to that. And here's the crazy thing. Like in the movie Nacho Libre, you can have this
do and why you do it and really put time into asking the question,"What about me can be better? What about what I do or why I do it could be improved?"
Make a plan and get used to this plan and these changes being something that never stops. And always try to make your life as good as it can be. And to do the