Jose L Alonso of the Seventy spoke this last General Conference on "Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time, without Delay". He talked about doing service to others. He spoke of finding the "lost children" and helping them find their way back. To illustrate, he told a story when he and his young family were shopping for cloths in a very busy city. His youngest son disappeared and was lost from sight. They eventually found him, but he spoke of the urgency they felt to find him and how quickly they acted once they realized he was missing. He emphasizes that they didn't even need a planning meeting. They simply acted with great urgency.
Elder Alonso's story reminds me of a time when Cedar was lost at a very young age. We were at the beach after my Reach the Beach bike ride. There were thousands of people at the finishing point as more and more people finished the ride and as others waited for family members and friends to finish. After a moment of celebration for having finished the ride we noticed that Cedar was not around. With the same urgency I'm sure that Elder Alonso felt we began to act and search. It took several minutes, but our urgency did not waver. When I found her I was both very relieved and somewhat frustrated with her that she would just wonder off, but my relief greatly outweighed my frustration.
After finding her and picking her up to make sure she wasn't going any where my next urgent feeling was finding Annie (for we had split up to search) because I knew the panic and unpleasant feelings she was feeling (I had just had them), and I wanted to relieve her of those. This is the only thing I would add to Elder Alonso's parallel. After finding someone, there is great joy and relief that one wants to share with others and we should feel some of the same urgency to share it. Similar to the prophet Lehi in his dream, we need to share this fruit with others.
One of the things that stood out to me in Elder Alonso's talk was when he said that "no planning meeting was needed". Anyone that knows me knows that I am more of a planner than an actor. I plan way too much even for simple decisions. A quick example is when I went to the store to get some ground beef for dinner. It took me a half hour of standing in front of the ground beef section at two different stores to finally chose one. In my mind I was debating price vs quality. Do I get bulk because it's cheaper even though we didn't need that much, and bulk at a different store is actually cheaper? With my mind flooded with questions only satisfied by the analysis of data I finally just closed my eyes, held my breath to keep me from hyperventilating, and chose one. ... Was it the best choice? Does it even really matter? Probably more importantly was I lost a half hour of valuable time. Some would say I have a pretty severe case of "analysis paralysis".
Between Elder Alosno's story and the experience that I had with Cedar I realize some decisions in life are easy and more of a reflex even than a decision. What's funny is many times those are the most important decisions. Why then do I spend so much time analyzing things when the outcome has little or no consequence. Anything worth spending the time to make the right decision is either an obvious decision and is probably more of a reflex, or one that Heavenly Father will help us make.
I know decision making isn't what Elder Alonso's talk was about, but this is what stood out to me, and I'm sure it was the spirit influencing my train of thought. "Save time by not wasting it on decisions that don't matter. Focus on important things."
