On New Year's Day, I went roller skating with my family. It's a yearly tradition and is always a lot of fun. I'm certainly not a professional skater, but I do ok and I rarely fall. Even so, I'm smart enough to take precautions to make sure that if I do fall, nothing bad happens. I typically keep my phone in my back pocket, but I made sure to leave it in my purse so that it wouldn't break if I ended up falling.
Somehow, though, my phone still ended up in my pocket. I don't really remember how or when, but I must've grabbed it to take a picture and stuck it in my pocket out of habit. As luck would have it, I fell. On my butt. Big time. Once I crawled out of the rink and got past the shocking, throbbing pain in my rear end, I realized there was a a huge crack in the screen of my phone. I panicked, kicking myself for putting it there and dreading the cost of replacing a screen. I showed it to my dad and brother, asking their opinion and hoping to goodness that it was just a crack in the glass screen protector and not the actual screen. Nope. They were both pretty certain it was in the screen itself. Good job, Kaley. Maybe you should think things through before you decide to fall like a fool.
Still with a tiny thread of hope intact, I took the case off my phone and then nervously peeled off the screen protector. It was cracked for sure - the crack growing as I pulled it off the screen. Once I had removed it, though, I realized with great relief that my screen wasn't damaged at all. Perfectly clear and intact. I said a silent (or maybe vocal) prayer of gratitude and then ran over to my family members to show off my new hero - my glass screen protector. Never have I been so grateful I spent ten dollars.
I've thought about this experience since and have jokingly commented on occasion that I have a testimony of screen protectors. I'm not sure you can have a testimony of an object, except maybe the Book of Mormon, but in that case your testimony would really be in the words and principles contained within, rather than in the book itself. So I guess I don't have a testimony of screen protectors, but I do have a testimony of preparation and protection. Just like I mentioned in my last gospel application post, the spiritual preparation that we engage in ensures that we are prepared for whatever life brings. It's so easy to convince ourselves that skipping one day of scripture study won't matter. Or we don't need to be in Relief Society or Priesthood classes - we can just read the lesson on our own. But our spiritual strength comes from consistency. We are not necessarily studying the scriptures because we need those words today, but we are adding to our spiritual protection - the layer of protection we're putting between ourselves and the world. Before New Year's Day, I had that screen protector on my phone for about five months and it had never cracked. There had never been a need. I could have looked back over the previous five months and thought, "This is dumb. I've never needed this. It's getting in the way of seeing my screen clearly. I'm taking it off." All of those things would have been true, but I would've ended up with a cracked screen and an expensive replacement bill.
When I was a teenager, the leaders in our ward (congregation) extended a challenge to us to read the scriptures for 1,000 days. I'm always up for a challenge, and if you completed the challenge you got your name on a plaque and I'm definitely always up for some recognition. I completed the challenge and I honestly don't even remember if I got my name on the plaque. But that almost three years of reading the scriptures every day established a habit that I have never dropped. Sure, I've missed a few days here and there, but I have read my scriptures almost daily for the last fifteen years. After my mission, I had a few rough years spiritually. I made some mistakes and got myself into a few situations I didn't want to be in. I wasn't nearly as spiritually strong as I had been as a missionary, or even a teenager. I stopped doing a lot of the things I knew I should be doing. But one thing I never stopped doing was reading my scriptures. Most of the time during those years, my scripture study was lame at best and I rarely got anything out of it. But I continued to do it. At a time when I'd let so much of my spiritual self go, I couldn't let go of that habit that I'd worked so hard to establish. I came out of those years, and I credit it to my scripture reading. All of those years of preparation became absolutely essential for my spiritual welfare. My habit of scripture study became the tether that kept me close to the Gospel and close to the Church. Even though I was really struggling spiritually, I never went inactive because I had the scriptures (and probably a lot of people's prayers) holding onto me, keeping me from drifting too far. There's no way I could have known as a fourteen year-old girl that the habit I was developing of studying the scriptures would save me from a lifetime of sin and heartache. But when I needed it most, that consistency came through for me - just like my screen protector.
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