The computer is timing out. I'm talking about time. What luck.

I'm sitting here in the Newark Public library.  Finally, a decent computer.

As I waited for the computer to become available, I was just stunned by how much information we have at our fingertips.  In each bookshelf, we have at least a hundred books, each one hundreds of pages long.  In the bookshelf to my right, we have books of history, the presidency, a seperate book about the president's wives, the civil war, a book about native american tribes, another one listing TV shows from 1995 to 2007, over in the shelves even further to the right, you have two books on D&D. (I checked.  Habit.)  You have Mormonism for Dummies, you have shelf after shelf of paperback romance books, you have Terry Pratchett, and an incredible amount of information.  If you were to live here, and just start reading books, you might finish them all before you die.  Maybe.

There's just too much information here in the world for any one man to process.  That's in books alone.  Then, you have the Internet.  Even if you were to remove all redundant material...Click here for something mindblowing.

As the first little picture there says, if you were to read all of the Internet from one end to the other, it would take 57,000 years reading nonstop.

In all this, it's important to prioritize.  There are things that are downright bad, things that are good, better, and best.  We each have 80 or so years, a gift from God to use as we see fit.  If we choose, we could go to lolcats and read all about certain cats are denied cheezburgers.  We could spend any amount of time reading on forums about webcomics, gaming, books, fantasy, romance.  (I should know, that's how I spent a lot of time three years ago.  Except for the romance part.)

But that wouldn't be best. 

God has commanded us to seek wisdom from the best books.  I know that if we will spend time reading from the best books, something I've interpreted to mean the scriptures, we will have happier lives.

You can find the Scriptures with your local missionaries.  Or, since you're on a computer right now, why don't you check out the scriptures right now?

On Ozy and Millie and Alice in Wonderland

This is a strip taken from one of my favorite webcomics.  My family and some of my friends will probably recognize it as taken from Ozy and Millie.  It's a delightful mix of Calvin and Hobbes atmosphere and style, with a touch of Bloom County adulthood.  Unfortunately, the author and artist decided to end the strip a few years ago. 

In this strip, Millie asks some very important questions: Where am I?  How did I get here?  In a later strip, she asks,  "Where am I going?  What is my purpose here?"

Have you ever asked yourselves these questions?

Wouldn't it be marvelous if everyone knew the answer to these questions?

You see, we really can't get where we want to go if we neither know where we are or where we are going.  It's a bit like part of Alice in Wonderland.  Alice is walking down a path when she comes to a Tee in the road.  There are two paths, both going straight in opposite directions.  The Cheschire Cat appears, and she asks which path she should take.  "That depends on where you want to go," he replies.
"I don't really know," she worries.
"If you don't know where you want to go, it doesn't really matter which path you take," he tells her.

Unlike Alice, we do know where we want to go.  And it matters much which path we take, for the path to heaven is not very wide.  It is a straight and narrow path.  If we do not have faith in Christ, repent of our sins, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and endure to the end, we cannot expect to arrive at our goal.

I've borrowed heavily from a talk given by Thomas S. Monson about a year ago.  I highly recommend that you read it.  It will change your life.  Click here to read it.