I just got married to my spectacular wife, Konrie, nine days ago on Friday, May 20th. She's so much more than I could ever have imagined, and guess what else?? She has four little sisters and a younger brother.
Guys, God answers prayers.
I'm so happy to be an older brother, and what's more, my closest little sister is only five months younger than me! We haven't known each other for very long, but we're gonna be best friends, I just know it. She just got back from serving as a missionary in Argentina (like Konrie and I did in Chile), but while she was there, I wrote her every week with survival tips of the Ned sort—basically just advice and spiritual insights that I had learned that I thought maybe, just maybe she'd find useful. Luckily, it worked! We formed a quick bond, and just like that, I was starting to fill the big brother shoes.
When she was a few weeks shy of coming home, she told me that she didn't want the letters to end, that she wished I could keep emailing her life advice when she got home. As a big brother, it is my duty to fulfill that request.
Hence the new format of my blog:
From now on, no more snobby, grammar snob rantings. At least, I'll try to cut those out. No more high-brow intellectual jibber-jabber that I don't blame any of my friends for not reading. From now on, these are just life letters from a proud big brother.
Dear Sister,
I come from a family of self-asserted T.V. critics. We literally can't shut up when something is going wrong onscreen, from my cop father's "They would never bring in a K-9 unit for this case" comments to "That 'Harley' is actually a Honda" and "That was actually a penalty what he just did there." Yes, I know that movies are fake, but at least represent real life somewhat accurately!
That's my first advice from a big brother to you: don't flat-line.
When I was a kid, I thought I knew everything. When I was eight and everyone in Primary had to pass off the 13 Articles of Faith for a prize, I was the only one who could recite them all the first day. My freshman year of seminary, I passed off 11 of the 25 required scriptures on my first day of class—some because I already knew them, and others because I'd memorized them in class while the teacher taught a lesson I felt I already knew. When I was 13, my Sunday School class was divided into two teams every week: "Smart People" (my friend Sara and me), and "Everyone Else." First of all, that was horrible of the teacher, but also, imagine what that does to everyone involved. The "Everyone Else" kids felt dumb, and Sara and I felt singled out and embarrassed. In all of these circumstances, you realize after a while that people don't want you to be that smart. "Does anybody besides Richie know the answer?" even when I hadn't raised my hand. "I know Richie knows, but who else can tell me...?" every Sunday from Primary through Priests Quorum.
That changed on my mission. After nearly five years after I'd given up on learning any more than I had to, I found myself surrounded by smart people. I met enough of them that I soon realized they were normal people, and that's when it hit me: they were smart for a 14 year old, but in the last five years, my obscure Gospel trivia had become common knowledge to people in my age group.
It's not that I needed to be the smart one, but I realized I had missed out on years of study, learning, understanding, application, and growth. I had stood still for five years, and I was weak. I was normal. I wasn't what God knew I could become. I had buried His talents in the ground, and I was missing out on my potential. I had companions who amazed me with their knowledge, and I knew I could've gotten there if I had only tried. I knew the Book of Mormon, but they knew that and the words of the Living Prophets. I knew a lot about baptisms for the dead, but they knew that and the endowment and sealing. Because of pride, laziness, and contentment, I lost five years of growing closer to the Lord.
So flat-lining. Don't let yourself fall into stagnation—standing still. You don't have time for that. You can have breaks if you want them, and you need them occasionally, but once a break becomes a habit, you're in trouble. You need to keep moving, keep working. If the electric charge is the Spirit of God, no matter how high the current is set, it will have no affect on you unless you're giving something. It doesn't have to be a lot; it doesn't have to be your full capacity, 'cause some days you just can't get there. But as long as you're trying, as long as you're getting a couple of beats in, that charge will send a current through your body, bringing life to your soul that you could never have dreamed was possible.
Take it from me, little sister. You don't want to fall into a flat-line. Keep moving forward.
~ President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (2008 - )
Konrie's Korner:
I don’t know if anyone else has ever felt that they were too spiritual or too obedient or too whatever that they no longer were able to fit in. I struggle with that; I have struggled with that for years. My solution? Limit my potential—hold myself back to what I knew I was capable of and just try to be like everyone else.
I am grateful to the mission because it taught me that there was a reason I was different, there were people that needed a “Konrie,” not a “Konrie pretending to be a Kate.” Christ didn’t better the world and change the way people saw him by just being like everyone else. He did what no one else did—He healed the blind, He raised the dead, He stood out, He shone, and He helped people.
The world needs us to be our best selves—not to make others feel bad or to say we are better, but because there is good that only we can do, even after the mission. There are still people that need our words, advice that others are too scared to give because they don’t want to step on toes or offend. Well, I also learned to show first and foremost how much I love and value the person as they are and then let them see that I want them to also be their best self and “voilà!” we are both able to be our best.
