Optimizing your personal life

A few weeks ago I visited a temple in our church. This gave me
the opportunity to ponder on how to balance the various
responsibilities I have in my life and how to be as effective as
possible in using my time. It's nice to sit for hours and have the
ability to simply ponder, consider and organize your thoughts. So it
took me almost four hours to realise what I thought was the most
important changes I could do in my life to improve it.

Since I work a lot with optimisations of computer programs in my
work, I thought it was fun to name this blog optimizing your
personal life. When practicing this new scheme in my life I've
been able to optimize my life by about 15-20% :)

In those four hours I organised all parts of my life which is of no
general interest. However the most important aspect on how to
improve my efficiency that I concluded was around the simple concept
of getting to bed earlier and getting up earlier. My natural
behaviour is similar to most programmers, that is I prefer late
nights and sleeping in the mornings. In my younger years I have at
numerous occasions tried to change this, however what I usually have
failed in is that I have been overzealous in trying to go to far. It's
also very tempting to cut in both ends, go up early, but still being
awake late.

In Doctrine & Coventants the Lord (88:124) instructs "retire to thy bed
early, that ye may be not weary; arise early, that your bodies and your
minds be invigorated". I have had many occasions to find this
admonishment to be true. However it requires a great deal of discipline
to implement in one's life.

In my pondering I felt what I thought was the right time to go to bed
and arise. For me this new routine has worked very well, I have been
able to get up early in the morning and have a few hours of work
already early in the morning when the mind is fresh and foremost
the stress level haven't started rising yet. I have also been able to
schedule some times for relaxing and for some parts in my life which
previously there wasn't any time for.

I have seen the Lord's hand in assisting me implementing this in my
life. I am sure I will meet many more challenges in this area in my
life, but I think the general concept of not trying to run faster than
your mind and body sustain is very wise and seems to be at least one
area where age has given me some more wisdom.

The importance of families

Welcome to my personal blog.

Today in church we had an interesting discussion on the importance
of families. So why are families important?

Jesus said in John 17:3 "And this is life eternal, that they might
know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent".
And we are the children of God, so God has a family which we belong
to. Thus if we want to know God we also need a family. In fact in
Doctrine & Covenants (this is a collection of modern day revelations
to the prophet Joseph Smith and others) 131:1-4 we read that in order
to receive eternal life a person has to enter into the everlasting
covenant of marriage (This means being married or sealed together in
a temple of the Lord).
http://www.lds.org/temples/geographical/0,11380,1899-1,00.html

So Jesus and his prophets have clearly stated the importance, in fact
this has been even more clearly stated recently in "The Family: A
Proclamation to the world". So what are my personal experiences of a
family and its importance.

My experience as a son in my parent's family. It wasn't a perfect
family but I've learned from this experience that the most important
thing a parent can do lies in what's in his heart. If you discover
as a son that your parents really care about you as a person, then
this will be the most important thing you carry with you into life.
Thus my experience from being a son is that everyone that is capable
of loving his children can be a successful parent.

Finally my experience as a husband (no grandchildren yet :)).
This experience has learned me many, many things. Among the most
crucial ones is the ability to say no to your kids:) I've also
learned that love can grow when there is trust, comfort and love
in the relation. The more trust you feel for each other the more
you are allowed to discover about your spouse. I still learn new
things about my spouse after more than a quarter of century together.

I am actually part of many more families, I'm thinking of all the
families of my ancestors. I've done quite a bit of genealogical
research and knows almost all ancestors back 200 year and most even
300-400 years back and some as far back as 600 years back. Quite
interesting that it's possible to get so far given that there is
only swedish farmers and soldiers amongst my ancestors.

This genealogical research has led me to put my heart towards my
fathers as Malaki prophesied in Malaki 4:5-6 "Behold, I will send
you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful
day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the
children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I
come and smite the earth with a curse."

It's amazing to read stories of the sufferings my ancestors have
passed through to build Sweden as we know it today with all the
welfare making Sweden a beacon of nations in many ways today. One
can even imagine a lot about the life they lived simply by reading
about when family members were born, died and were married.

As a good example is a family of one of my ancestors which was
married 1747. They had in total 15 children, of those around 7
died already as small children. When the oldest children was around
a 20 in 1768 a disease spread quickly in the neighbourhood and it
took the 3-4 oldest children and it also took the wife in the family.
What a heartbreaking experience to live to see your kids grow up and
be taken away just one their grown-up life is about to start and your
wife at the same time as well. What makes me especially grateful to
this family is that the youngest child born 1764 was my
mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother. Actually no one
else of my ancestors have had 15 children.

So are families important? They are the most important thing in this
life and I hope I can meet my entire family after leaving this life
and hear all the great stories of their life and experiences. I hope
I can add to those my own experiences, from living in the days of the
world, which prophets of old looked forward so much to, when
knowledge is spread as an ocean amongst everyone.