\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I seriously doubt whether there will be anyone in the celestial kingdom who is not kind.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153An important measure of our efforts for the celestial kingdom is how we treat others.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n (Elder Jensen, Regional Conference meeting, September 7, 2008).<\/p>\n
Elder Jensen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s talk for the Utah\/Wasatch County, Utah regional conference meeting last Sunday was inspiring. He told two powerful stories, one about his disabled brother. Neighborhood children took his brother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ice cream cone and let a dog lick it before returning the cone to the innocent child and laughing as he continued eating it. The cruelty of some makes me cringe. Elder Jensen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other example of unkindness was a woman who bore her testimony and commented how grateful she was that Heavenly Father \u00e2\u20ac\u0153trusted\u00e2\u20ac\u009d her to raise her three children. Perhaps she did not know that there were couples unable to have children in the audience or perhaps she simply did not consider what her words implied. She likely did not mean to be unkind, yet she still hurt others.<\/p>\n
I wish my short re-telling of a few quotes and his stories could come close to conveying the message and Elder Jensen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sensitivity. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how anyone could walk away without feeling dedicated to being more kind and compassionate.<\/p>\n
So I was a little surprised to receive a demanding email from a student today because all my students should have been attending the same regional conference. But I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t too surprised because demanding, bossy, insensitive, and\/or rude email is relatively common. In fact, when my colleagues and I get together, we inevitably discuss pushy students. One teacher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s solution is to print a copy of the email, call the student in for a conference, hand the paper over, and invite the student to read the message out loud. To date, no student has been able to make it through his\/her email message, no matter how short. That tells me that sometimes it is the form of the message that makes the difference.<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just BYU students and email. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blogs and text messages and IMs and whatever else we can figure out how to work. The casual familiarity (read: rudeness) bred by technology is almost too clich\u00c3\u00a9 to discuss. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wondering why we do it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just na\u00c3\u00afve enough to believe that most of us are trying to be kind and charitable, so why does that all break down when we use technology?<\/p>\n
All I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m saying is that I would never walk up to a casual acquaintance, introduce a volatile topic, and proceed to argue my point vociferously into the ground, name-calling and mud-slinging if need be. I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it to a friend, either, and certainly not to someone whose name I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to be good people, right? Then why is it so easy to be mean online?<\/p>\n
For what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth, it turns out that the email didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come from one of my students. A young BYU freshman wrote a demanding, bossy email to an unknown library instructor and somehow mistakenly replied to the entire faculty of freshman writing courses. Does it make it better or worse that the rude student didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know the person to whom he was writing and, in fact, ended up sending his message to close to 40 people he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know at all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I seriously doubt whether there will be anyone in the celestial kingdom who is not kind.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An important measure of our efforts for the celestial kingdom is how we treat others.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Elder Jensen, Regional Conference meeting, September 7, 2008).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6171,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771\/revisions\/6171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}