Do More, Be More

Do More, Be More

Advice to My Sister (and everyone else)

Today I had the opportunity to help my brother on the farm. I was just sitting in a fuel truck pushing on the brake, while he ran around to different parts of the truck and opened valves, or something. To be honest, I don’t even know what he was doing, but he did. After trying to figure out the problem for about 45 minutes, with my brother receiving many calls from people from our church, he jumped in his truck and gave me a ride home.

            Riding home in the passenger seat of his truck littered with tools and fast food wrappers, I just thought about my brother. I thought of him sliding into his seat wearing a pair of jeans stained with manure and grease, his hands on the shift stick and steering wheel covered in grease and cuts and tanned from long hours in the sun. I thought back to him climbing into the hood of that fuel truck, answering a phone call and talking about visiting and helping the people in the ward. I thought about him talking about all the things he needed to do before the end of his work day. I thought about how Gabe inspires me to be more and mostly to do more.

            Then I thought about me. I thought about how I want to be diverse and do many different things. I want to be the girl that can make a mean home-cooked meal, run a marathon, break out some dance moves, balance a check book, paint a beautiful landscape, milk a cow, fix a flat tire, patch a hole in my jeans, and hold a full-time job.

And how am I going to become this girl? Well, I’m going to have to practice my cooking and baking skills, run countless miles, rehearse dance moves, crunch numbers, mix thousands of paint colors, go to a dairy farm, learn about lug nuts, develop my sewing abilities, and study and gain experience in something I enjoy. If you want to be great, you are going to have to do great things. If you want to be diverse you need to do diverse things. And while you are doing all the things you want to do, I hope you don’t forget that the real thing you need to be doing is become. 
Through all the things you do, you need to become a great person. So go do more, and be more.