Cupcake eating Pigs and Holland

Find the Joy Heavenly Father Wants for You

By Elder Alan C. Batt

Of the Seventy, Idaho Area

From a devotional address, “Is This What You Want Your Life to Be?” given at Brigham Young University–Idaho on November 1, 2016. For the full address, visit web.byui.edu/devotionalsandspeeches.

One of my childhood friends had a pigpen behind his house. Sometimes we would sit on the fence and watch the pigs. This might seem like odd behavior, but it wasn’t really much different from watching reality TV today.

One day my friend’s father pulled into the yard with his pickup truck overflowing with doughnuts, bread, and cupcakes that had passed their expiration date. He backed up to the pigpen and shoveled his cargo into the muck. The pigs began to devour the food, wrappers and all. Each mouthful was filled with cupcakes and doughnuts, their plastic wrappers smeared with mud and manure. It was disgusting.

Each time we watched this happen over the next few weeks, it became less repulsive and more entertaining. One day I told my friend that if we could figure out a way to get some doughnuts and cupcakes out of the pigpen without the pigs attacking us, we could have free treats. We took a rake and pulled a large blob of mud, manure, and cupcakes from under the fence. We washed off the wrappers, climbed up on the fence, and ate away with the pigs.

Isn’t this exactly how Satan works? He serves up something that is dirty and disgusting, and over time we start to accept it as entertaining, desirable, and good. The next time you think of doing something foolish, imagine yourself sitting on a fence eating cupcakes with the pigs.

Another story ....

Emily Kingsley wrote an essay that compares her unexpected challenge, having a child with Down syndrome, to getting on a plane for a vacation to Italy, only to have the plane land in Holland. She has the following imaginary conversation:

“Holland? What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

The flight attendant replies: “But there’s been a change in the flight plan. You’ve landed in Holland, and there you must stay.”

But then you meet others who are going to and coming from Italy. “And they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.’”

“But,” Kingsley concludes, “if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.”1