Tutorial 5: Advanced Search

Scripture Notes Tutorial Day 5: Stories and Narrowed Searches

Today’s lesson will be on using the advanced search pane and you’ll be journaling a personal experience into a collection note to help facilitate this. Scripture Notes has a great way to store all your stories and be able to search for them when you need to share them in a talk.

Think of a personal experience you’ve had in your life that has meaning to you. Perhaps it’s something you’ve already shared in a talk or presentation you’ve delivered. I’m going to share one of my stories with you as an example, but if you can think of your own, here’s what to do with it. It’ll be more fun if you watch the video above and just hear me tell it, but there’s some extra stuff below too.

This also works great to store stories you see online from a conference or anywhere.

Run and Not be Weary

My story is from my teenage years and relates to the Word of Wisdom and the phrase “run and not be weary.” Open a search pane and do a search for:

run and weary

Don’t use quote marks so it picks up all the verses that contain both of these words and not an exact search for the phrase. For your own experience or anothers’, try to think of a verse or words that relate to it and do your own searches for verses to start with.

I then create a collection note with these two verses.

In the new collection note window, I expand it and click on Category and check the box for personal experience. I will also check the boxes for Audio, and Article, because as you’ll see below, I pasted a link to another website’s article and it actually contains the audio of Creed Haymond’s story, a young LDS track runner who had a great experience learning about the power of the Word of Wisdom principles. I title this note “My cross-country track experience” and give it the following tags: “Word of Wisdom” and “Sports Story”. This is my story.

My Incredible(-ly short) Track Career

In 9th or 10th grade I had a desire to be on the school track team. I tried pole vaulting but didn’t have the stomach muscles for it, tried sprinting but wasn’t fast enough just starting out to compete with the fast runners, and then had this amazing thought occur to me that I lived the code of health found in the Word of Wisdom and was entitled to the blessings it offers, particularly the one that says we will “run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.” That inspired me to join the cross-country track team thinking it would be instant success. I knew a couple of the boys on the team and thought this would be a great experience, and maybe I thought the Lord would bless me as he had other LDS athletes like Creed Haymond (http://www.templestudy.com/2013/04/13/creed-haymond-story-word-wisdom-words/).

The first day we went on a 4-5 mile run starting from the school and running North through neighborhoods, over a golf course, into the downtown area of my home town, and finally circling back to the high school. The entire run I felt great even though I’d never run a mile all at one time up to that point in my life. I was a soccer player who loved to play but never trained to be in great running shape.

After the run, one of my friends congratulated me that I’d been able to stay with the team during the run. I felt pretty good and my confidence was high that the Lord had blessed me. I went home that night feeling great, confident in my faith, and went to bed.

The next morning I awoke and was excited to get up. I told my legs to swing out of bed like I always did, but they refused to move. I could not bend either of my legs. At all. They were completely locked straight and I discovered that moving anything from my waist down was very painful. Every muscle was inflexible. I slowly sat up and using my hands, gently swung one leg over the edge of the bed and then the other. I very slowly waddled my way around and after several minutes of painful use, tried putting my pants on. That was fun trying to loop the pant leg over my feet when my knees wouldn’t bend. Eventually I succeeded in getting my pants on and was ready for school. My vision of being a great cross-country track star ended that morning and I reflected on what I learned.

1) If it was ever necessary, the Lord could bless me to run and not be weary. :)

2) Without preparation (or a divine mandate), I had no hope of being an immediate success as a long distance runner solely relying on a scriptural promise. :) It’s like Oliver Cowdery’s experience translating when the Lord said in D&C 9:7 “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.”

One doesn’t become the Brother of Jared overnight. It requires preparation and commitment, yet a person can receive treasures of knowledge and God’s wisdom given to him to prepare for those greater experiences.

Your Turn

Create a collection note, add an experience, and find verses and attach to it. This not only saves your experience, but it’s a technique to work backwards into the idea we talk about applying the scriptures to ourselves. Instead of doing the scripture first, you’re doing the experience first and then hunting up scriptures that apply. It’s kind of cool.