Johnson & Johnson

I didn't get a lot out of seminary my senior year. This was pretty much entirely my fault, of course. It's a defense mechanism, I think. When you're doing things you know you're not supposed to, you have to sort of shut off your mind to the good stuff. If you take in the good stuff, you'll be inspired to remove the bad. So, if you want to keep the bad, you have to block out the good.

Regardless, I remember one seminary lesson very well. It was in like November, I think. I remember it because it was a day or two before I was supposed to buy and use an "8-ball" of cocaine with a certain German friend of mine.

I was excited. We both were. We'd never tried it, we'd both always wanted to. And here we were with the unique opportunity to have this life-changing experience.

Several times throughout my high school career I had almost done it, but something always got in the way. Not this time, though, I said. This time things would finally work out.

Then, at seminary that day, we came in to find two large brown pieces of paper stretched out on the ground, in between the tables. We didn't discuss them for most of the lesson, but eventually we got into some relevant scriptures (I don't remember what they were) and Sister Hull brought them up.

They were paths, she said. This was no big deal for me, everyone knows there's a good path and a bad path, a straight and narrow and a wide and windy. I sat back in my chair and prepared to tune out yet another lecture on choosing the right and all that jazz.

But then she said something I hadn't really thought of before. "Each of these paths take you to certain place. You can't follow one path, and expect to end up where the other path takes you." This struck me as exactly what I was doing. She gave some examples of people she'd seen do this and more and more I realized that she was basically describing me perfectly. In my head at that time I was thinking, "Yeah, yeah, I'm doing all this bad stuff and spiraling downwards pretty hardcore, but eventually I'll get my life in order and I'll marry in the temple and everything will be great and dandy. I just need this little time of doing bad, but eventually everything will work out fine."

That's not really how it works. If you're trying to get to the north pole you can't just take a southwestern road and say "Well I'll turn around eventually," because the fact is you're just getting further and further away from where you want to be.

I think this applies to non-spiritual matters, too. I've never been a particularly good student, mostly because it's never really been a priority for me. Almost always I'll start out the class with a few good weeks, then stop doing assignments or going to class or any of that. Inevitably, midterms roll around and I have a C or a D. "Don't worry, Ed," I say. "You'll get an A at the end of the semester, you're only halfway there, plenty of time to change it." But, surprise surprise, nothing changes and at the end of the semester I don't have an A. You get X for doing Y, and A for doing B. You can't do B and expect to get X. Or something like that (don't judge my variable analogies, math was one of those classes I didn't get an A in).

The point? Let's all get A's.

And that's the story of the day I didn't snort coke. Yay.