Our Call of Duty

So I have to admit I am no "Call of Duty" junky but I did spend many an hour happily watching my brother Mark play. He was money with the tomahawk and we spent good sibling bonding time together with this past time. I never played, but I did get to know some of the basics. First of all it is realistic as far as games go, second it can be intensely frustrating, and thirdly that it can be intensely rewarding. Although it wasn't fun to get snuck up on or sniped or have the other team get dogs or helicopters, it was very fun to do this things and thus win and thus be on your way to an upper level. As I watched my brother play he explained that you can prestige. You can earn you way through I think it was 50 levels and then you kicked back down to level 1 again. You had to re-earn your weapons and such but you continued to win points to buy more things to make your guy look really cool; camouflage, face paint, etc. I'll be honest that's about as much as I understand about it and you'll have to excuse any inaccuracies, but based off of this summation of Call of Duty I think there are some really good things we can glean from this game about the Book of Mormon.
1-Just like Call of Duty the Book of Mormon is very realistic. In fact, it is real. The people that lived and wrote and learned in the Book of Mormon are real people with real problems and real solutions. As we remember that and build a friendship with these people the Book of Mormon becomes alive for us. When we view them as friends we can better relate and apply the lessons they left for us. They loved us enough to share their knowledge, strengths, and even weaknesses. Let us love them enough to treat them as real and build a relationship with these people and make the Book of Mormon realistic to us.
2-The Book of Mormon can be frustrating at times. When I hit the Isaiah chapters I start to get flustered that I haven't the slightest idea what is going on. I get annoyed that I feel I am reading and its just going way over my head. But just as in Call of Duty we often get killed by our lack of paying attention or lack of being where we should or lack of well, skill, we often have the same phenomenon when reading the Book of Mormon. We aren't going to understand it all the first time through, just as it takes time to perfect the game of Call of Duty. Even as we increase in skill we are still going to have frustrating moments, BUT we cannot let this stop us from reading. The Holy Ghost is with us to teach us "all" things (Moroni 10:5) and we should live worthy of this gift by being where we need to be in life and by paying attention/listening for it so we can avoid most of our frustrating moments while reading the Book of Mormon. I promise that as we seek to live worthy of the Holy Ghost and strive to listen to its promptings, we will have greater understanding and a lot less frustration as we seek to read, learn from, and apply the Book of Mormon into our lives.
3-The Book of Mormon can be immensely rewarding as we read it over and over again. In Call of Duty as we continue to do well we progress through different levels and thus are awarded with new levels and new equipment to play the game with. We are then kicked back down to level one but we continue to gain new skill, equipment, and good memories as we play the game through again. The Book of Mormon does the same thing in our own lives. As we read the Book of Mormon over and over again we will gain new knowledge, truth, testimony, and witness every single time we read it. It never gets old and it never runs out of ways to help us grow. Each reading will open our understanding to new truths we can use as tools or "weapons" to better survive and live in the "game" of life. There is never a top off or end point in reading this incredible Book; we can never stop reading it because it will never stop bettering us. That is the beauty of the Book of Mormon: it is literally a never ending fountain of truth and happiness bringing principles that ultimately guide us back to our Heavenly Father. That is what it is here for.
I promise that if we read the Book of Mormon daily we will receive blessings without end and beyond what we could ever comprehend ourselves. The Book of Mormon is realistic and we can apply lessons from its characters as we treat them as people that really lived because they really did. It can be frustrating at times but we can lessen this frustration as we live worthy of and listen to the Holy Ghost and continue to increase in "skill" as we read and reread it. And most importantly, the Book of Mormon is a book that will bless our lives every time we read it, whether it is the first or hundredth time we have read its pages. It is amazing all that we receive from simply reading the Book of Mormon simply because it is not just a book, it is the pure word of God written for our day. The Book of Mormon truly is our latter day "Call of Duty".