General Conference Talk Talk: How a competitive cycling strategy can help you reach perfection

 Biblical Detour: this blog has focused a lot on the Hebrew Bible lately, but the Come Follow Me study this week didn’t include any Bible chapters. I read Moses 7, but I don’t have anything much to say about it–mostly I’m just wrestling with a few unsavory pieces of the text. Instead, here’s some writing I did because I was asked to summarize a talk from General Conference for our ward’s 5th Sunday Discussion. 

In Pursuit of Perfection

Do you ever feel like if only you did all the gospel things, you would literally be perfected? 

Like read your scriptures, individually and as a family. Say your prayers. Give an honest tithe. Fast. Give fast offerings. Hold fast to the iron rod. Be fastidious in the work of God 

Feast upon the words of Christ and never postpone a prompting. Do your ministering, higher and holier. Attend all your meetings, and prepare for those meetings, and do whatever the spirit tells you in those meetings. Arise from your bed early and plan out your day. Who are you going to serve and when and how? 

Write in your journal, and seek your ancestors, and take their names to the temple. 

Plant a garden. Keep and rotate food storage, an emergency kit, a rainy-day savings account. 

Stay informed on current issues. Vote according to your conscience, and support causes both local and national for the betterment of humanity. Be watchful unto prayer continually for yourself and your family and the world around you. 

Raise up children in the way they should go, and do so with soft answers and gentle touch. Identify the root cause of misbehavior and tantrums and keep your cool the entire time. 

Stand as a witness of God at all times and in all things and in all places that ye may be in. And follow the commandments, advice of living prophets, and inspiration of the spirit, and you’ll be perfect–even as your father which is in heaven is perfect. 

Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that no amount of faithful work will qualify a person for eternal glory. And it’s important to recognize that no one is likely to do everything perfect, at least not all of the time. There’s a tremendous, unfair burden of perfectionism we sometimes place on ourselves when we think really hard about the doctrine of a perfect savior and exemplar who leads a church in the latter-days. 

But actually, I kind of do believe that doing all those things equates to perfection—salvation, if you will. I believe in a God that doesn’t save us in our sins, but saves us from our sins. I believe in a Christ who doesn’t just promise salvation in the world to come, but promises transformation through the power of his atonement in this life as well. And I feel bad about what I lack in all of the gospel areas, not just because I feel like a slacker, and not because I’m under the delusion that I can be perfected through any of my own individual efforts, but because I feel like if I’m not doing the things the Lord expects of me, as I understand his expectations, then I haven’t allowed the Lord to change me in the way I’ve always believed him capable of doing. 

Perfection doesn’t mean done — to Elder Dunn

I think that Elder Michael A. Dunn of the Seventy is on to something in his talk “One Percent Better” from our most recent General Conference. To jog your memory, Elder Dunn spoke of the British Cycling team who, under the direction of coach Sir Dave Brailsford, implemented a strategy referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which leveraged the culmination of gradual, single-focused improvements over a long period of time. The strategy led to tremendous victories in their sport. And Elder Dunn commends a version of the strategy to our gospel life. “Rather than being stymied by the churn and dramatic swings between sin and repentance,” Dunn asks, “what if our approach was to narrow our focus–even as we broadened it? Instead of trying to perfect everything, what if we tackled just one thing?” 

I want to highlight 3 principles from his talk. 

1st. Repentance, or intentional change, always results in broadening vision–even if we focus on just one change. 

A few different times in the talk, Elder Dunn mentions broadening our vision, but he doesn’t really qualify this bit of his speech at all. So let me elaborate instead: I think that it’s inevitable, that once you start changing one thing in your life, you will notice other things in your life that need changing. And that’s not a bad thing. These words that C.S. Lewis put in the mouth of God have always struck me: 

“Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.” (Mere Christianity)

And that all-or-nothing framework for the gospel path is true and desirable. But the natural, divinely inspired urge to broaden our vision to include everything sometimes needs to be tempered by the principles of Mosiah 4:27 - 

And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.

Even as our vision broadens as a natural result of repentance, we have to keep from overwhelming ourselves by trying to make our actions immediately match our expanded perspective. 

2nd, sometimes change of a single improvement can and should come at the expense of other areas. 

Elder Dunn says that “the Lord . . . taught us the criticalness of the 1 percent—even at the expense of the 99 percent. Of course he was teaching the gospel imperative to seek out individuals in need. But what if we applied that same principle to the very sweet and savory second principle of the gospel, repentance?” (italics mine)

At first, this thought might seem counter-intuitive. A narrow focus that results in the neglect of other important values, seems irresponsible. But I think this principle, combined with the broadening that I described above is both empowering and freeing. It’s okay to allow yourself to lower your expectations in some areas as you focus on specific improvements. After you find your footing in a single, new area, you can find how it incorporates into the balance of all the other areas of your personal progress. It’s okay to let yourself neglect something important while you work on improving something else of equal, greater, or even lesser importance. And I do mean to include lesser here. The temptation is to try to prioritize changes that are most important when you begin to repent, but sometimes choosing something to focus on that is less important can be more manageable and can help establish a pattern of small wins that lead to big changes.  

3rd, progress to perfection is not a linear journey. 

This is related to the last point, but I think it deserves it’s own focus. Elder Dun says “Having experienced the frustration of this in my own life, I know that it can sometimes feel like 1 percent forward and 2 percent back. Yet if we remain undaunted in our determination to consistently eke out those 1 percent gains, He who has ‘carried our sorrows’ will surely carry us.” Just as I think it’s natural to broaden your focus when you repent even narrowly, I think it’s natural to see your progress in the gospel as a direct hero's journey, consistently leading upward to greater and greater achievement. But it’s just not going to happen that way. You have to quiet the voice that tells you that setbacks spell doom for the entire endeavor. You have to quiet the voice that tells you that you aren’t improving if you don’t accelerate your progress without any detours. You have to give yourself permission to fail and to restart, and to reclaim your repentance when you lose your grasp of it. I think it’s true that it’s not how far in your quest for perfection that matters, but the direction you face, and I think that can be qualified even further by clarifying that even if you currently are faced the wrong way, your overall journey can be ultimately in the right direction, even if your path is a bit windey. 

Conclusion

I’m the kind of person who takes things like new years resolutions very seriously. Sometimes that seriousness lasts the whole year and I accomplish a lot. Sometimes it lasts maybe half of the month of January. But I know that my progress in many areas has been best when I have made small weekly or daily goals instead of just long-term visions of who I want to be at the end of a year or 5 or 10. No matter where you’re at in your goals, be they sacred or secular, I encourage you to find one thing to make one percent better today and to find ways to check in on your progress, re-evaluate where you’d like to go in the short-term, and begin leveraging “the aggregation of marginal gains.”