Most of my friends, mormon or not tend to be somewhat free spirited like myself. This leeds to a distain for rules, regulations and yes, even commandments. No one really likes to be told what to do.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I called my wife from Costco to ask for permission to buy a Vita-Mix (basically a glorified blender that could bring world peace and cure cancer if everyone had them). She actually said yes and I've been proving it's worth to her ever since then.

Having grown up in the Jerusalem my wife loves Middle-Eastern food so I decided to show her how well our new Vita-Mix could make hummus. I've never fallowed recipes and I thought I could do hummus just fine without the recipe as well.

What a disaster! I basically made a big pile of poo! I asked Sara to get me the recipe, bought more garbanzo beans and tried again fallowing the recipe. It turned out wonderfully and was incredibly easy.

I thought about it afterwords. If you want to make good hummus, you've got to fallow the rules for success. Who makes those rules? Well, in this case that doesn't really matter. They've probably been passed down from the person who created hummus in the first place. That being noted, God created us in the first place. As part of my Mormon faith, I believe that we chose to come down here to earth to grow and to learn. We wanted to be successful at life just as I wanted to be successful at hummus.

God's commandments and the "rules" of the gospel of Jesus Christ are simply a recipe for a successful happy life. Now, all the ingredients I used the first time were good ingredients, they just weren't the right ones or the right amounts in every case. It's easy for us to focus on one aspect of the gospel and feel likes it's restricting. It may take years to understand why the Bible or the Book of Mormon teach us not to do some things that we may want to do, but the information in the scriptures is a perfect recipe for happiness, passed down through prophets from the very creator of all things, from us to this earth to this galaxy and beyond!

I've met plenty of unhappy people who haven't fallowed the recipe, and I have met plenty of happy people who do fallow the recipe. More importantly, I am always happier when I am fallowing the recipe. As Alma in the Book of Mormon says "wickedness never was happiness".

It's amazing how much we are like hummus!