heart & death

Several years ago, my wife and I served as mission leaders in Tokyo, Japan. During a visit to our mission by then-Elder Russell M. Nelson, one of the missionaries asked him how best to respond when a person tells them that they are too busy to listen to them. With little hesitation, Elder Nelson said, “I would ask if they were too busy to eat lunch that day and then teach them that they have both a body and a spirit, and just as their body will die if not nourished, so will their spirit if not nourished by the good word of God.”

It is interesting to note that the Japanese word for “busy,” isogashii, is made up of a character with two symbols (忙). The one on the left means “heart” or “spirit,” and the one on the right means “death”—suggesting perhaps, as President Nelson taught, that being too busy to nourish our spirits can lead us to die spiritually.

L. Todd Budge

"Seek Him with All Your Heart" General Conference October 2024

labor-saving machinery

You call your thousand material devices "labor-saving machinery," yet you are forever "busy." With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. You have a machine to dig the raw material for you..., a machine to manufacture [it]..., a machine to transport ]it]..., a machine to sweep and dust, one to carry messages, one to write, one to talk, one to sing, one to play at the theater, one to vote, one to sew... and a hundred others to do a hundred other things for you, and still you are the most nervously busy man in the world... your devices are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.

"An Oriental Writer", as quoted in Wise Men from the East and from the West by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany. Houghton Mifflin. 1922. As found in Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1963. Fortress Press Gift Edition 2010. p. 72, 73

you are the product

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

This is a quote about television advertising from the 1970s. The earliest known reference is from this YouTube video.

The original quote actually is, "The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience."

Television Delivers People by Richard Serra

1973 | 00:05:55 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video

Television Delivers People is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power—the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world. By appropriating the medium he is criticizing—using television, in effect, against itself—Serra employs a characteristic strategy of early, counter-corporate video collectives—a strategy that remains integral to video artists committed to a critical dismantling of the media’s political and ideological stranglehold.

business talents... spiritual gifts

D&C 53:4 …be an agent unto this church…

Sidney Gilbert was an able business man. The crucified Redeemer asks him to give his business talents to the Church. The Lord was about to gather His saints in a new locality, even in Missouri, and they needed men like Sidney Gilbert to transact business for them. Business talents, when consecrated to the service of mankind, are just as good and necessary as so-called spiritual gifts. It is only when they are used to serve the purposes of selfishness and greed that they become a snare and a curse. In the service of the Lord they are a blessing. As an agent he could help in building up the Church.


Doctrine and Covenants Commentary by Hyrum M. Smith and Janne M. Sjodahl. Deseret Book. 1965. p.313

the pound of flesh

D&C 42:54 Thou shalt not take thy brother’s garment; thou shalt pay for that which thou shalt receive of thy brother.

Business must be coupled with humane considerations. Do not exact the “pound of flesh.”


Doctrine and Covenants Commentary by Hyrum M. Smith and Janne M. Sjodahl. Deseret Book. 1965. p. 233

Partnerships often finish in quarrels, but I was happy in this, that mine were all carried on and ended amiably, owing, I think, a good deal to the precaution of having very explicitly settled in our articles everything to be done by or expected from each partner, so that there was nothing to dispute - which precaution I would therefore recommend to all who enter into partnerships, for whatever esteem partners may have for and confidence in each other at the time of the contract, little jealousies and disgusts may arise, with ideas of inequality in the care and burthen of the business, etc., which are attended often with breach of friendship and of the connection, perhaps with lawsuits and other disagreeable consequences.


Benjamin Franklin - (1706-90), U.S. statesman, scientist, inventor and writer. Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin, edited by Russel B. Nye. 1949. p.101