Something I learned In My Illegal Drugs Health Class.....

    As most of you know who read my blog, I went back to school this summer, and for the fall semester I have been taking two classes. One is a required social science class, and I did really well with Sociology in high school, so I took that class, which has been great. I also need three credit hours of health credits, and the Illegal Drugs Health class. At this point in time, I am getting As in both classes. I have really been enjoying them, besides the extra reading and writing for the drugs class.

    Anywho, last week we studied Marijuana and it's effects on the brain and body. Now, I am a member of the LDS church, and we have what we call The Word Of Wisdom, which tells us that we should stay away from drugs and alcohol, and other little things like coffee and stuff like that. Sometimes in the church, people take suggestions and make them sound like they are laws. There is also things we used to say when I was a missionary in Detroit, Michigan.

    There is something called the letter of the law obedience. Letter of the law means you take everything said, make it official doctrine in your mind, and you never deviate from that teaching. Then there is the Spirit of the law. The Spirt of the law means, I know there is something that has been said, but missionaries aren't in contact with the Mission President, or the Mission President's missionary assistants, and there were sometimes on my mission where we chose to live by the spirit of the law, and not the letter of the law. 

   

    For example, When I was in Tecumseh, Michigan, you could knock on every door in the town in under two weeks, so one night my missionary companion and I said a prayer, and when we woke up in the morning, we got a call from a church member in the ward we covered. He had purchased a horse and needed help building a little stable for it because it was cold, and needed something to hold the horse in. We decided to drop door knocking for a few days and went and helped him out. 

   

    If you don't know Tecumseh, Michigan, (Which, by the way, is probably the most beautiful place in the world to visit during Autumn.) there are a ton of people with farms, and some of the farmers were having a hard time that year while I was there. We were told they were thinking about closing the area and not replacing us with different missionaries. They said that no one has investigated the church with missionaries in almost seven years, and that it was a dead area. 

    So, my missionary companion and I prayed and asked for guidance of what we should do. We woke up in the morning, and it had snowed a lot. We looked out the window, and there was a farm we could see where the farmer was out but was having a hard time. I looked over at my companion, and I told him, look, door knocking isn't working here in Tecumseh...like, at all. What if we went out and did farm chores for the people in town because this snowstorm has left them up a creek......a very frozen creek, lol.

    Now, the letter of the law would tell us to go door knocking and only do four hours of service a week, however, nobody wanted to talk to us door knocking, and so we dressed up in clothing that wasn't our suits, clipped our missionary tags to our coats, and we went and asked if people needed help, and just about everyone was desperate for any help they could get. So, we went around helping the community to get those farmers in a place where they felt confidant that they didn't need us anymore, and then we would move to the next farm. 

    When you are a missionary for the LDS, you aren't allowed to watch TV (Unless we went to a church member's house for a dinner appointment, and they turned on a sporting event), we didn't listen to any music except the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and classical music once a week on our preparation day, which most missionaries call P-day. It's the day where we rest, write letters, clean the apartment and did laundry. We really weren't supposed to have a newspaper subscription. The church wanted us to be focused on studying our scriptures and preparing for discussions with people we would teach about the church we used with people who would be super nice and listen to us every once in a while. 

    

    I tell you that stuff because we lived in a small town right next to Michigan International Speedway, and there were only a very small amount of people living there, but on NASCAR Weekend, there were a billion people there, so we would go and mingle, or have people telling us we were going to Hell, (We got that a lot!), but when we did farm chores, the farmers only wanted to talk about NASCAR, so a couple of days later, I told my companion we needed another prayer. It was another Spirit of the Law idea. I prayed for the both of us at bedtime, and when I woke up, I told my companion, "Look, these farmers are grateful for our help, but we weren't well acquainted with NASCAR, so I told my companion that we should start going to the store and buy some NASCAR magazines and newspapers, and there used to be an old 1-000 phone number, and it would have sports scores, and we would push the number to prompt the NASCAR rankings after every match so that when we did service with farmers, we were able to talk to them about NASCAR and understand it. 

    This opened up questions from the farmers saying " I know that you are Mormon missionaries, but you haven't told me anything about you. You have been coming over daily to help me do things I wouldn't be able to do or get done in time. What do you believe?". We ended up have six people start the discussions with us that ended up joining the church. Six people from a small little farming town that hadn't seen a baptism in over eight years. And it was only possible because we knew to follow the spirit with our feelings, and although there were a couple of rules we were breaking, not door knocking, for a couple of hours a day, and the other was to only do four hours a week of service. We knew those rules were there for a reason, but we also learned to feel the promptings of the holy spirit that was helping us realize what we could do to win the trust and respect us, and then opened up the doors for more of our gospel messages. 

    I say that because for some reason people in the church think that the word of wisdom is letter of the law, but there is nowhere that states in our doctrine that teaches that the word of wisdom has to be followed by the letter. 

    So, here is my dilemma. I am taking pills for my anxiety and insomnia, and the pills I am taking aren't the best for my body, and that certain strains of Marijuana that would help me with my anxiety and insomnia, and the pills I am taking are starting to make other parts of my body sick, but I would be down with to try it for medicinal purposes, not recreation, and it would only be used at bedtime. 

    In my personal opinion, the word of wisdom would normally be kind of against legal marijuana, but when I think of the word of wisdom, it's supposed to keep us safe and healthy, and the medical drugs I am taking now are worse for my body. They make me dizzy and nauseous