Let me tell you a story about a time I was hanging out with a girl. Not just any girl mind you, this was a girl I had a crush on since I was in the sixth grade. Back then, being the extremely smooth and confident 11-year-old that I was, I decided that the best way to express my feelings was to see how many little balls of paper I could get stuck in her hair during class. It became quite the game, and even though I could often find other boys to play this game with me, I held all the high scores.

Over the years after that we became good friends and we had even been on a few dates. One day when I was at her house we were sitting on the couch and talking. She reached up and touched my hair and said, “You should use a little less gel in your hair”. Now in my defense, it was the 90’s. That is just what you did with your hair back then. But when she said those words, my teenage mind heard, “your hair looks stupid”. Here I was sitting with this girl I had had a crush on for years and she thought my hair was dumb, and she thought I was dumb, and she wasn’t going to want to hang out with me anymore and any chance I had at eternal happiness was going to be shot forever! Yup, that was my rational teenage thought process.

Have you ever seen the movie Inside Out? In that movie, there are little people who represent your emotions running everything from a control room in your mind. Well, my mind started to panic. I am sure my little thought people were panicking along with me. And I am not talking about a tense discussion around a table. Oh no. This was full on chaos. They were tables being flipped over, food was being flung, there was a fist fight in the corner, I think a small goat probably ran through at some point. Just utter chaos. And then I can just see this one little guy up there in the midst of this chaos. He knows something has to be done so he stands up bravely, walks to the mic that controls my speech, and says, “Ya my mom put too much in”.

……

Let’s just pause here and examine this moment, shall we? Consider that control room in my head. I am pretty sure that scene of chaos suddenly came to a screeching halt. You could hear a pin drop up there. Everyone froze, even the ones fighting in the corner with their hands still locked around each other’s necks, and everyone turned and just stared at this little guy at the mic. Even the random goat looked over at him and just shook his head back and forth. I had just told the girl I had a huge crush on that the reason there was too much gel in my hair is that at age 16 my mom still did my hair and it was her fault. Now let me be very clear here, that wasn’t true at all. But I had panicked. She didn’t buy it. I didn’t know what else to do though so I just stuck to my story. Yup blaming mom. I honestly don’t even remember what happened after that, although surprisingly we continued to hang out. But that 30 second complete and absolute adolescent train wreck is still burned into my memory.

I wish I had said almost anything else. I could have laughed, agreed, and made a joke about being concerned I might put out her eye. I could have jokingly claimed it was a rare genetic disease that made my hair turn stiff like stalks of corn. I think anything else would have been better.

Luckily for me, I learned two things as I got older. One, I learned how to talk to girls without making a complete fool of myself, well at least most of the time. Don’t ask my wife about it. She agrees with me. I promise. And two, I learned it’s a lot better to take responsibility for your mistakes, even when they can be embarrassing, or they have consequences that you don’t want to experience.

Taking spiritual responsibility can be difficult too. Sometimes we need to admit to ourselves and to our Heavenly Father the mistakes we have made. Sometimes we need to speak with our Bishop to fully take responsibility for our sins and seek forgiveness.

Elder Lynn G Robbins of the Presidency of the Seventy spoke at the BYU Campus Education Week in 2017. He shared some of the ways Satan tempts us to avoid taking responsibility. He called it the anti-responsibility list. I’ll share part of the list here but if you want to read the rest of the talk you can get it here. His list includes Blaming others, making excuses, covering up, denying or lying, and those are just the ones that apply to my crunchy gel-filled hair.

Elder Robbins said, “The danger of the anti-responsibility list consists in the fact that it blinds its victims to the need for repentance. Laman and Lemuel, for example, didn’t see a need to repent because it was all Nephi’s fault. “If it’s not my fault, why should I repent?” The one blinded can’t even take the first step in the repentance process, which is to recognize the need for repentance.”

Don’t let Satan convince you not to take responsibility for your mistakes. It doesn’t show weakness to admit your failings, it shows courage and strength. Repentance is not something to be avoided. It is the divine process we have been given to examine where our current flaws are so that we can correct them.

I may not have been all that good with girls and taking responsibility as a young man. But I am much better today than I was then. And that is all that matters. Did you hear that with your spiritual ears? If you are better today than you were last year, or last month, or even last week, that is all that matters. The perfection we seek does not come from never having had flaws. It comes from acknowledging our flaws and correcting them, one at a time, over the course of a lifetime.  Then one day when we stand face to face with him again, “we shall be like him”.