Week 5: When He comes.

Take Heed and Watch:

Mark tells us about some instruction in chapter 13 concerning the second coming of Jesus Christ. Our Savior tells us to heed His words at least four times in this chapter, and we know that in the scriptures, that if something is mentioned more than once you'f better sit up and listen (we probably should have been listening anyway).

So what's up? What does Christ want us to "take heed and watch" for? I noticed that Christ talks about deceit a lot, but he also mentions other things. Signs that will come to pass such as wars and rumors of wars, false Christs and prophets, and persecution of the saints.

This reminds me a little about an experience I had this week. I'm training for a relay race in August, and honestly I've had so much going on that I haven't been preparing for it (and feeling guilty), so naturally when the team captain invites me to a run, I accept the invitation. I've never run where we were running before, I knew it was longer than I'd ever run before, and the route was unfamiliar.
One of my team mates explains that the run was rough and explains a little about what we were going to experience, then we are off!
The first mile was 500 feet up. To make a long story short, they got ahead of me. I had been told signs to watch for so I could get back to the car, but I hadn't listened as well as I should have, and by the time I got to where I needed to remember, I was tired. I had no means of communication, so I just had to remember what I was supposed to watch for and take the actions accordingly. Eventually, I was able to remember, and made it, but I got to run around an unknown town a little more.

That's how life is! We're running, and sometimes the hill is steep. There are forks in the road, things we need to avoid, sometimes a road can be a little misleading but we have to keep going. We will be confronted with people that want to deceive us, even the best of us will be fooled. We will need to know when to stand our ground, such as with issues such as euthanasia, or the family (D&C 87:8).  Unlike my run, we do have a means to communicate, because the road is constantly changing, we need to listen (take heed), and keep running. Christ tells us all that we have to watch continually.

Life is like preparing for the relay, except we don't know when we will actually have to run the race, but you can't just pick up and run six or seven miles, we have to have been doing that already, we have to stay in spiritual shape. We might recognize patterns in the trails that we run, so we won't get confused.
Christ has invited us to run. Let's go for it!