Juggling

I just went through a crash course of juggling. Why? A friend of mine told me to. I don't even remember how it came up, or why, but I did it. It was tough. Juggling is harder than it looks (which is surprising because it looks pretty dang hard to me). I didn't have very long to figure it out either, but I took a jab at it. Some lessons I learned are worth mentioning.

First, I had a good teacher. Elder Ben Winter was mine. He can juggle like a clown (there might be more to his past than some of us might know). He was good at giving me tips, and didn't let me give up, because I sure wanted to. We have great coaches in life that want us to succeed, but none more than our Heavenly Father.

I learned you have to start slow. One at a time. Throw up one and catch. Then do two, then three, then four, etc. Don't move on until you get it down. You can't just decide to learn and start throwing balls up in the air at the same time. That really stuck out to me because right now I have fifty million things I have to do. It's hard to balance the many new responsibilities and still fulfill my old ones at the same time. Learning to juggle put it in a real life example of taking your time and handling it one at a time.

Being patient and calm will make or break you. If you throw one ball too far, you have to recover. When I would do that, I would panic, which would make the next ball off and it continued in a downward spiral resulting in me dropping all of the balls on the floor. We can adjust when life throws us loops and causes us to make changes on the fly.

Little things in life can reveal to us the tender mercies of the Lord in our lives. What can you learn from today?

See more council from one of the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, L. Tom Perry, here!