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Inspirational Ideas

This is a gallery of good ideas for all occasions and any good company. Good ideas range through all the emotions, situations, happenings, understandings, needs - humour, sadness, hope, dismay, pride, joy.

Good ideas can be for talks, quiet reading, family home evening, auxiliary activities, home and visiting teaching, work, education, academia, fun.

What would you like to share that might make another have a better day!

Post your inspirational ideas to:

inspiration@ldsculture.co.uk

Title	Topic	Author	Notes
Stories	Thinking, sharing, listening, loving	Terry O'Dea	Jerome Bruner, a great U.S. educational psychologist for 40 years writes in 'The Culture of Education' about how crucial gaining competence in forming narrative is , and essentially this is the aim of all teachers for their students in all subjects - to tell the story, and to know hoe to access the story and then to tell it ever so well.
		You!

"Stories"

Do you tell stories? Yes? No? Sometimes? Often? Are you the story teller of you family , or your group of friends? Why do we tell each other stories? Is it just for entertainment - to keep the boredom away in between the the last and the next interesting event we are looking forward to - or is there something more to it than even having a good laugh?

Experts on human culture tell us that because we have language we can explore meanings of things we feel, experience, think about, talk about in ways that are unique to humans. Moreover, we only begin to understand who we are if we tell ourselves and each other our stories - stories of the day., the week, last year, etc.

It's true that sometimes we have to do a lot of thinking to know which way today's story is going. Has today gone to plan, or has some disaster struck and thrown us 'off course'? But, only by having the chance to tell others our story, or if there is no one else around tell ourselves or Heavenly Father, do we begin to properly make sense of what is happening to us.

I can't help thinking about the poor Romanian orphans during the Ceaoucescu period and currently who were and are raised in isolation with no one to pick them up, no one to to tell them stories, no one to listen to them as they learn to tell their own story. Deprivation from telling our own story as we live moment by moment, day by day causes us to experience varying degrees of neurosis, a lack in a self-knowledge and ultimately self-value. Telling our story helps us know where we fit in with everyone else's story - it helps us to know our place in the best sense of that idea. Listening to others stories helps us to compare their experiences with our own and to maybe modify our selves.

So, if you didn't realise it, you were born to be a story teller. What is certain, we all need to go at it daily - perhaps a little more purposefully, in the realisation that bringing our experiences, hopes, feelings, wants, needs, successes, failures to our mind in a narrative form will help us to be more conscious and certain of ourselves. We don't need a degree in rocket science to be intelligent if we spend time alone, with Father in heaven and with each other practicing improving our story-telling life skill. Getting good at this through this life and into the eternities promises some great stories to be coming up. the best is yet to come I believe for each one of us. What a thrilling thought!

Maybe this is why we have been commanded to pray daily. Our loving Father in Heaven just loves us to tell him our story of the day, and to have the opportunity to nudge us here and there in the process towards an even better story to tell him tomorrow, next week, next year! After all, when we imaginatively plan for tomorrow, aren't we composing the story that we want to be able to tell Father in heaven, everyone else and ourselves at the end of each new tomorrow?

By the way, what stories the greatest story teller must have to tell - worth listening to!