Spanish fresco restoration again

I wrote about the story of the lady in Spain who painted over the fresco of Christ. She over estimated her talent, well now she is requesting compensation for it which she will give to charity.

I'm really not sure what to think. She claims that since there has been increased tourist traffic to the Church to see her "restoration", she should be given a portion to do with as she wishes. My guess is that it is more of a mockery than anything. They are not going to admire artistry, but a person going beyond themselves and making light of a monkey depiction of the Savior. Not a fan if that is the case. Hopefully I am wrong.

Makes me want to double check where I think my own skills are. And if I should be as confident as I thought.

Forgetfulness and Self-introspection

I am unsure why last week was so hard to blog. I just completely forgot with everything going on. I'm not sure it was particularly busy, though a lot did happen. I think mostly I fell out of the habit of looking for things.

I taught Elders Quorum yesterday and really enjoyed the discussion. One of my favorite quotes from Pres. George Albert Smith was:

A man once said to me—or remarked in a place where I happened to be—“Why, these people here seem to think I am full of the devil, but I am not.” And I said to him, “My brother, did you ever know anybody that was full of the devil and knew it?” That is one of the tricks of the devil: To get possession of you and keep you from knowing it. And that is one of our difficulties. (source)

I like how it strikes at a fundamental issue we all face. Nobody wants to look at themselves and think, I am wrong or bad. We think we are generally good and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Its that old adage about how we judge ourselves by different standards than we judge others. My new favorite example of this is Judge Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. He considers himself the ultimate example of piety, but we learn through his actions that he is the true monster of the story.

As a class we came up with some solutions to protect ourselves or at least fight against this tendency: self-introspection, humility as the main issue here is pride, and listening to friends we trust. I think these are all good ideas and I know I could do better at all of them.

A new future

So it has been a rough start for the blog. I have a goal to make it a habit of publishing regularly, the problem is I am afraid that regular, but not every day will make it difficult to establish a habit. In researching what it will take to establish a habit I thought first of the general statistic of 21 days. Apparently this was based off of completely unrelated issues (how quick an injured person could adjust to the loss of a limb). In 2009 some research showed that on average it takes 66 days, but depends on the task in question.

Well lucky for me I can combine the two :) I recently had spinal surgery and while I didn't loss a  limb I now have a neurostimulator with a remote that feels like a limb and I am slowly learning to rely (more on that soon). So hopefully somehow that will help me with my unrelated goal of blogging.

I think I was over-analyzing the blogging thing, I know now I needed to just relax, at least in my mind, lets see how well it translates to my emotions. As a result I think some of the posts will be sort thoughts (with bad spelling) and others will be more fleshed out ideas. Like a censored and sometimes extended journal. I do have a few analogies/parables I have been working on and hope to share shortly.

So here is day 1 of 66!