Elder Bednar said, “the purpose of our mortal journey is not merely to see the sights on earth or to spend our allotment of time on self-centered pursuits.” I have found even my efforts to become more spiritually minded a self-centered pursuit lately. Going home after work and reading in the scriptures or watching church movies is good, but probably not as good as going and serving other people. I can become as spiritual as I want, but what good does it do me if it does not make me give more of myself to others? In the mission field, there were a few hours each morning that were allotted for personal study and reflection, but the real meat of the day was spent serving others. And that is when the most growth happened anyway. This week I will spend a little less time working on myself and a little more time working for somebody else.
“My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”
- 1 John 3:18
Sunday, February 24, 2008
French Toast
French toast on a Sunday morning is next to cleanliness which is next to godliness. Plus the sun is shining and Spring is finally beginning to peek its shy little head in the door and that means Sunday walks through the park. French toast and walks through the park combined are greater than cleanliness. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what God does on Sunday mornings.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
ஷ்ளோம்
To the Elders that left their homes to teach Alan and Joyce Smith
To Alan and Joyce Smith for raising Penny in the truth
To the countless missionaries who softened Robert’s heart
To a pragmatic bishop who buried Robert in the font
To Robert and Penny for falling in love
To Robert and Penny for loving enough to adopt
To Penny for working quietly with a broken heart
To the parents of dozens of children that let me into their homes
To Marc and Annette for daring to care
To Brooke for daring to try
To Brooke for giving me Ellie
To Ellie for loving her father
To Ellie who had a beginning but no end
To a life built on the shoulders of those courageous enough to love
Shalom. What love forges…
To Alan and Joyce Smith for raising Penny in the truth
To the countless missionaries who softened Robert’s heart
To a pragmatic bishop who buried Robert in the font
To Robert and Penny for falling in love
To Robert and Penny for loving enough to adopt
To Penny for working quietly with a broken heart
To the parents of dozens of children that let me into their homes
To Marc and Annette for daring to care
To Brooke for daring to try
To Brooke for giving me Ellie
To Ellie for loving her father
To Ellie who had a beginning but no end
To a life built on the shoulders of those courageous enough to love
Shalom. What love forges…
Monday, February 18, 2008
today's testimony
This life is sweet and personal and glorious and beautiful and today I was absolutely humbled and grateful to be living it. This Gospel has never been so true and I have never been so blessed to have it. Today I closed my eyes and let the Spirit like a breeze sift through me and ruffle the edges of my soul and I haven't been able to stop smiling since. Christ is coming and I can't wait to meet him. Today I love everybody and I hope everybody gets to read this.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday Message - O Pioneers!
Do a google image search of the name Kim Ho Jik and only one relevant picture will come up. A tiny image of the man standing with his family. But while this man may be a complete unknown here in the US, he is the George Washington of Korean Latter-day Saints.I will spare you a complete biography of this man. It is enough to know that he was the first Korean Mormon ever. Baptized in the Susquehanna river (like Joseph Smith) in 1951, he took the gospel back to war-torn Korea that same year. In the short 8 years between his baptism and death, Dr. Kim was president of several colleges and served in the cabinet of president Syngman Rhee as vice minister of education. He used that position to convince the Korean government to officially recognize the LDS church and then to allow LDS missionaries to proselyte. In the church, he served as District President and taught Sunday School until the day he died. An entire nation was opened to the gospel because of this man's faith and courage. He is a father and a pioneer.
I'm sorry this entry is so boring. But I am inspired every time I learn about this man and hopefully you'll recognize his name and pay attention the next time you hear of him.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Here's the essay you requested
Dripping to Death
I can still remember the sound of Ellie trying to suck in air between fits of crying. The inward gasps were worse than the screams that echoed through the house, not because of any particular sound they made, but because I could feel the exhaustion in her lungs, in her flexing arms and legs and fingers and toes. I remember thinking that I was just as spent as she was and wished with selfish sympathy that she would stop for me. Stop for Dad. But she wouldn’t. She was six months old and, though it seems like a lie now or at very least a reckless memory, she had never stayed up to cry in her life. But she was sick then and What to Expect the First Year pointed us to a general explanation: the flu. I was contented with the diagnosis but Brooke was not convinced. She held onto our baby with the same prayerful grace that she held onto her father with just before he died. I hovered around mother and child trying in an uncomfortable effort to say I understood, to say that I was there in case it was serious. But after an hour or two of awkward fatherness, I went to bed. I know Brooke has forgiven me for falling asleep through Ellie’s cries, but I wonder sometimes how she feels about a father that slept through those helpless inward gasps.
Two years before Ellie got sick, Brooke’s father died. I had only had a year to avoid Marvin Heath’s steely eyes before I lost the chance to find out what was behind them. The Multiple Myeloma cancer ate his bones from the inside out, but he ultimately died of kidney failure and starvation. The man my new wife loved even more than her husband wasted away to an empty chrysalis, and I know for a time she was left with nothing. I did not know how to be there for her. I did not even know where there was.
We all hovered for days before it actually happened. I was on the outside looking in. My tears weren’t Heath tears and I did not want to pretend I understood, even if I did. I was scared to mourn as Marvin’s wife mourned, as his children mourned. His bread of life. I did not want to intrude on something that was uniquely theirs. My feelings became transient and I found myself crying when I was alone. Not crying out of loss or pain. Just crying. Perhaps I should have intruded. I should have let them know I feared and mourned and understood in some small way. Or perhaps they found some unifying solace in their distaste for my distance. I won’t ever know now. The time is past and the subject is as welcome as a gravestone in a flowerbed.
That was the first and only time I have ever been around death. It is a process like the melting of an icicle. The memory goes, the body withers, the mind drips drips drips until there is nothing left to hang onto. One day, expectedly but quite arbitrarily, what is left crashes to the ground and it’s over. I spent the majority of the only year I knew Marvin Heath standing in the hallway outside his bedroom while his family watched him die within. He is the white walls of a dimly lit hall in my memory. He is gone. And all I hear are the echoes of dripping.
It has been two months since Ellie kept her mother awake and I slept two doors away. After having taken her to see a pediatrician, Brooke rushed Ellie to the emergency room while I was at school. When I came home six hours later, there was a note on the cupboard. Come to the hospital as soon as you get home. Brooke. I tried to concentrate on simply pushing the air in and out of my lungs, pushing the echoes out of my head, as I drove the fifteen miles to the hospital. I got there in time to hear the doctor say the word serious twice. Ellie has a serious bone infection called Osteomyelitis. It helps that you caught it early. It’s a serious condition. It is an unfair word for a doctor to use. It cuts. It cuts whatever tendons or muscles hold your heart in your chest. Does it mean long term illness? Does it mean paralysis? Does it mean amputation? I looked at Ellie’s little legs and tried not to imagine their absence. Ellie was not crying anymore and Brooke was holding her in that way again. That watchful, prayerful, terrified way again. And I knew what serious meant. It meant eating from the inside out. It meant melting and withering. It meant drips.
Time in the hospital was marked by blood tests and beeps. Ellie gained strength and we finally took her home with just an IV in her arm and a six-week treatment to show for her scare. She has been up and down since then, mostly up, and the word serious has disappeared. But there are still nights when I look at her fragile baby body lying in her crib and I am forced to consider what death might mean. What will it be like when I’m on the inside? When there are no white walls to hide behind? I can sense it at times. It flattens me out. It is an ice storm. It freezes then shatters my heart and my lungs. Will I be left with nothing like Brooke was two years ago?
I think on the times when Ellie is laughing. When mom and dad and baby are dancing with our home wrapped around us, dancing in each other’s arms like leaves in a whirlwind and baby squeals with angelic bliss and mom starts crying, smiling and crying like her very essence might burst with joy and anguished ecstasy. I will not be left with nothing. I will have this. And I finally understand that prayerful grace that Brooke holds Ellie with. That same embrace that she gave her father. It is her dance. Her moment. She was not left with nothing.
Ellie is sleeping and there’s an echo in my head. No dripping. Just the sound of my baby breathing.
I can still remember the sound of Ellie trying to suck in air between fits of crying. The inward gasps were worse than the screams that echoed through the house, not because of any particular sound they made, but because I could feel the exhaustion in her lungs, in her flexing arms and legs and fingers and toes. I remember thinking that I was just as spent as she was and wished with selfish sympathy that she would stop for me. Stop for Dad. But she wouldn’t. She was six months old and, though it seems like a lie now or at very least a reckless memory, she had never stayed up to cry in her life. But she was sick then and What to Expect the First Year pointed us to a general explanation: the flu. I was contented with the diagnosis but Brooke was not convinced. She held onto our baby with the same prayerful grace that she held onto her father with just before he died. I hovered around mother and child trying in an uncomfortable effort to say I understood, to say that I was there in case it was serious. But after an hour or two of awkward fatherness, I went to bed. I know Brooke has forgiven me for falling asleep through Ellie’s cries, but I wonder sometimes how she feels about a father that slept through those helpless inward gasps.
*
Two years before Ellie got sick, Brooke’s father died. I had only had a year to avoid Marvin Heath’s steely eyes before I lost the chance to find out what was behind them. The Multiple Myeloma cancer ate his bones from the inside out, but he ultimately died of kidney failure and starvation. The man my new wife loved even more than her husband wasted away to an empty chrysalis, and I know for a time she was left with nothing. I did not know how to be there for her. I did not even know where there was.
We all hovered for days before it actually happened. I was on the outside looking in. My tears weren’t Heath tears and I did not want to pretend I understood, even if I did. I was scared to mourn as Marvin’s wife mourned, as his children mourned. His bread of life. I did not want to intrude on something that was uniquely theirs. My feelings became transient and I found myself crying when I was alone. Not crying out of loss or pain. Just crying. Perhaps I should have intruded. I should have let them know I feared and mourned and understood in some small way. Or perhaps they found some unifying solace in their distaste for my distance. I won’t ever know now. The time is past and the subject is as welcome as a gravestone in a flowerbed.
That was the first and only time I have ever been around death. It is a process like the melting of an icicle. The memory goes, the body withers, the mind drips drips drips until there is nothing left to hang onto. One day, expectedly but quite arbitrarily, what is left crashes to the ground and it’s over. I spent the majority of the only year I knew Marvin Heath standing in the hallway outside his bedroom while his family watched him die within. He is the white walls of a dimly lit hall in my memory. He is gone. And all I hear are the echoes of dripping.
*
It has been two months since Ellie kept her mother awake and I slept two doors away. After having taken her to see a pediatrician, Brooke rushed Ellie to the emergency room while I was at school. When I came home six hours later, there was a note on the cupboard. Come to the hospital as soon as you get home. Brooke. I tried to concentrate on simply pushing the air in and out of my lungs, pushing the echoes out of my head, as I drove the fifteen miles to the hospital. I got there in time to hear the doctor say the word serious twice. Ellie has a serious bone infection called Osteomyelitis. It helps that you caught it early. It’s a serious condition. It is an unfair word for a doctor to use. It cuts. It cuts whatever tendons or muscles hold your heart in your chest. Does it mean long term illness? Does it mean paralysis? Does it mean amputation? I looked at Ellie’s little legs and tried not to imagine their absence. Ellie was not crying anymore and Brooke was holding her in that way again. That watchful, prayerful, terrified way again. And I knew what serious meant. It meant eating from the inside out. It meant melting and withering. It meant drips.
Time in the hospital was marked by blood tests and beeps. Ellie gained strength and we finally took her home with just an IV in her arm and a six-week treatment to show for her scare. She has been up and down since then, mostly up, and the word serious has disappeared. But there are still nights when I look at her fragile baby body lying in her crib and I am forced to consider what death might mean. What will it be like when I’m on the inside? When there are no white walls to hide behind? I can sense it at times. It flattens me out. It is an ice storm. It freezes then shatters my heart and my lungs. Will I be left with nothing like Brooke was two years ago?
I think on the times when Ellie is laughing. When mom and dad and baby are dancing with our home wrapped around us, dancing in each other’s arms like leaves in a whirlwind and baby squeals with angelic bliss and mom starts crying, smiling and crying like her very essence might burst with joy and anguished ecstasy. I will not be left with nothing. I will have this. And I finally understand that prayerful grace that Brooke holds Ellie with. That same embrace that she gave her father. It is her dance. Her moment. She was not left with nothing.
Ellie is sleeping and there’s an echo in my head. No dripping. Just the sound of my baby breathing.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Three pokes of a thistle
I went to President Hinckley's funeral on Saturday and I left feeling 3 things: first, I was most moved and impressed when President Hinckley's daughter spoke. She spoke of him as a father first and a Prophet second. And the Spirit reaffirmed to me that being a husband and father is the most important thing on earth, even more important than being the Prophet. Second, I missed Nicole like crazy during the funeral and wanted to tell her that I love her for the whole day afterwards. I am not sure why exactly, but I do know that the pit was enormous in my heart. Which is funny because Bishop Burton (I think) spoke of having a gorge dug into your heart and filling it with compassion. That is God's main purpose for heartbreak I think. It makes you more understanding and more capable of loving in the future. And third, I felt grateful that I'm alive and that in the end, everything works out for the best. President Hinckely knew it, President Eyring knows it, and I'm becoming more and more sure of it everyday.
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