Proud Papa

Utah Canyonlands Trip

2010-10-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

We saw things we've never seen before. It's embarrassing to admit this since we have lived in Utah so much of our lives. Why have we never seen this before? Hopefully it's not the last time.

It was a similar experience when we visited LDS historical sites. Why doesn't every member go out of their way to see this at least once in their lives? Palmyra and Navoo should be like Mecca.

Zion is amazing! Standing at the base of 1000 foot vertical cliffs...! It's difficult to depict in a single image. Click on the following to see it full-size.

That's Carolyn at the bottom. I'm standing behind a sheet of dripping water from the "Weeping Rocks."

Zion is eminently available just by stepping out of your car and looking up.

Bryce, on the other hand, is much less available that way. You have to walk to it. I want to come down here again and spend days just hiking the trails through the fairy land. Carolyn says I have to bring Lawrence with me -- or someone. Besides her.

I would have had Carolyn take a picture of me standing on top of it, except for....

Glen Canyon Dam's a bit intimidating for someone like me who suffers from vertigo. I had to sneak the camera over the edge and take a picture straight down without actually looking myself.

Just looking at the picture gives me the willies.

You can both drive over and walk over this bridge, as seen from the top of the dam.

We decided not to walk over it. (Driving was bad enough.)

Huge Lake Powell, created by the dam, has more coast line than the Pacific coast of the US. It's difficult to get a feeling for it from any single picture. It was considered an environmental disaster in the 60's. You don't hear anything about that today, and you won't hear about it from any guide, history, or presentation here, either.

We drove rather quickly through Monument Valley.

Mexican Hat. Photographer: Carolyn Callister Head
This one's going to find it's way onto our wall someday.

Our brand new, luxury, gold Taurus went over 100,000 miles in Blanding.

Our final (and my true) destination: The only Utah temple I hadn't ever been to:

Monticello Temple

And then the angel spake, saying... (Lorna Learns a Lesson)

2010-08-08T07:19:00.000-07:00

[Taken from The Only Gift, © 2010. Used by permission.]

Raymond opened his hand and revealed a luminous golf-ball-sized orb cradled in his palm. It's luster exceeded Raymond's own and it seemed to have no definite surface.

“Oh!” said Lorna, wide-eyed. “It's beautiful! What is it?” She reached out to touch it.

“It's a universe,” said Raymond.

“What does that mean?” She reached as far as she could, but her fingers didn't seem to be getting any closer. She withdrew her hand, examined it and frowned slightly.

“You can't touch it,” Raymond was saying. “The space-time continuum's a bit contorted.”

“But what is it?”

“A universe.”

“So you said. What's it mean?”

“It means it's a universe.”

Lorna glowered at him from beneath her well-groomed eyebrows. He grinned.

“A universe,” she said. “Like ours. Only you can hold it in your hand.”

“Like ours,” he agreed, “a tenth of a nanosecond after the big bang.”

“If you say so. Where did it come from?”

“It's part of me.”

“What part?”

“It's a particle of my body. It's one of my cells – like the cells in your body.”

“You mean your body is composed of millions of these?”

“You've got more cells than that.”

“I've never counted them. Billions?”

“Try trillions.”

“Trillions,” said Lorna. “OK. Suppose, hypothetically, that you're not pulling my leg. That lovely little bauble contains all the matter and energy of an entire universe?”

He nodded.

“And your body consists of trillions of them.”

He nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Now we've got that straight. With all that mass, why're you not creating a black hole where you stand?”

“Very good question.”

“And your very good answer?”

“First, I can control it better than that.”

“Naturally.”

“Second.... Well, it's a bit technical.”

“Try me.”

“OK. Gravity is a multi-dimensional field. Each higher dimension dilutes its strength by many orders of magnitude. Your unified field theorists calculate that it must be operating over at least eleven dimensions to be as weak as it is.”

“Eleven.”

“At least.”

“Spacial.”

“So they say.”

“Uh, huh. I can't comprehend a fourth spacial dimension, so it's no difficulty at all not being able to comprehend seven more.”

“My body's a nineteen dimensional object.”

“Why not.”

“That dilutes gravity's strength to where it nearly controls itself.”

“Perfectly clear.”

“This little ball is simply one cell of my body that has been compressed down to six dimensions.”

“Obviously. Why's it just sitting there?”

“I'm constraining it.”

“Of course. What if you weren't?”

“It would expand at the speed of light, annihilate Earth in a few milliseconds, the solar system in a few hours, this galaxy in a few hundred thousand years, and continue wrecking havoc in the universe for billions of years.”

“Sounds undesirable. I assume you won't do that.”

“Actually, I couldn't.” He closed his hand and the orb disappeared. “There are forces beyond me who are protecting Earth.”

“That's a relief. So it's just a jewel. You can't do anything with it.”

“Except create a universe.”

“How? They won't let you.”

“I'll create it somewhere else.”

“There's a somewhere else?”

“Lots of somewhere elses.”

“Naturally. The universe is not universal. And I suppose you can visit these somewhere elses any time you want.”

“Pretty much.”

“And you're free to create universes there. Full size. No one complains.”

“No problem.”

“Sure. How?”

“I'd move the orb to a plane in a different dimension. One that doesn't overlap this universe. Or any other universe. Even gravitationally.”

“Tricky. How would you find such a place?”

“Not tricky at all. There's an infinite number of them.”

“Naturally. How many universes have you created?”

“None, so far. Not permanently. We talk to people. See what they've done. Work with them. Play around with parameters. Get advice. Copy things we like. Great fun. We'll settle on a design one of these days.”

“Sure. Give yourself a billion or two years to get the hang of it. Who's 'We'?”

“My wife and I.”

“You've got a wife?”

“Eloise. You've never met her? She spends her free time nest planning. She's the artist. She'll probably create our first universe herself. Without my help.”

Lorna pursed her lips. “You know, some of that I almost believe. I've seen you do amazing things. You're gods. Two gods.”

“Hardly.”

“Why do you hang out with us?”

“You're important. All our projects are important. One of Father's children is more important to Him than any or all universes.”

Lorna rolled her eyes.

“Secondly, we're not gods.”

“You create universes.”

“Your point?”

“You can create trillions of universes.”

“That would deplete our bodies a little.”

Lorna giggled. “Do all cosmics have bodies like that?”

“Yes.”

“And all released luesenes become cosmics when they resurrect?”

“Just as you will,” said Raymond.

“Spare me.”

“You don't want to?”

“Absolutely not!”

“What kind of a body do you want?”

Lorna didn't have to think long. “One just like this one, except that I want it to be healthy, beautiful, and eternally young.”

“You're describing the kind of body received by Father's least worthy children.”

“Perfect fit.”

“One would think you mean that. Lorna, you're a mortal luesene! Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah. It means I'm blessed – far above my worth.”

Raymond shrugged. “That's true enough. For all of us. OK, when it comes your time, you'll get the body you want. But don't get too smug about your current modest body. It's composed of tightly encapsulated packets of incredible energy, relatively speaking.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know Einstein's energy equation?”

“E=mc²? Of course. Everybody knows that.”

“And you weigh... what? 50 kilo?”

“120 pounds,” she said.

“OK, 54. Plug that into Einstein's equation. Then compare the results with the known yield of nuclear weapons. If all the energy of your body were to be suddenly released, it would be like hundreds of America's largest nuclear bombs going off at once. Or dozens of Russia's. It would wipe out northern California and probably plunge the world into nuclear winter.”

Lorna was finally silent and wide-eyed.

“You've already got a powerful body,” continued Raymond. “And that would be another choice you might have, a bit better than the comfortable, beautiful, young body of the least worthy. Honorable but not fully dedicated people will get the comfortable, beautiful, young body but will also be able to access its power. Not quite cosmics, but much above the dishonorable. Anyway, in mortality, the body doesn't suddenly give up all its energy. These packets are tight! And are held together by strong forces. Scientists in your world are able to free only a tiny portion of this energy from a small set of elements. The 'universe' packets in my body are also tight and they are held together by forces a few orders of magnitude stronger.”

“Are there higher bodies than yours?”

“Many.”

“What are they composed of?”

“You mean like Father?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let's explain it this way. Scientists in your world – both planes – have characterized the universe down to 10^-43 seconds after the big bang, 10^-36 meters in diameter. That's a particle smaller than anything that could be seen in your most powerful microscopes, much smaller even than the cells in my body. Earlier and smaller than that...? Well, they know of no laws of physics that give a clue as to what the universe was like then.”

“What a surprise. But you know.”

“Well, some scientists theorize the universe could have started infinitesimally small.”

“10^-36 isn't infinitesimal enough?”

“We're talking infinitesimal.”

“OK,” said Lorna, shrugging.

“And those scientists are right.”

“Who'd of guessed it? So the universe did start out as an infinitesimal.” She thought for a second. “And are you saying that God's body is composed of these infinitesimals?”

Raymond nodded.

“Packed infinitesimally close, I presume.”

“Insightful,” he said.

“That's true?!”

“Your words.”

“But that means His body is composed of infinite mass and energy!”

“And complexity,” he added.

She stared.

“Stunning, isn't it.” He grinned.

“Terrifying,” she said. “I'm not sure I can ever talk to Him again. Even in hallucination.”

“You'll get used to it. It's reality. It's the way things are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take this universe. You find it so amazing. The Hubble telescope is going to reveal secrets that will astound humanity. Released level one scientists are following its results as closely as the mortals because they think it may help reveal the secrets of far-jumping. But the universe is a vaporous and tenuous thing. Relatively small bits of mass and energy, like this...” He opened his hand and the orb reappeared. “...spread out over a volume a few billion light-years in diameter. It gets its stability from its size. What happens in one place scarcely affects the rest of it. But, locally, in any given small area, it's fragile.”

“But why does it exist? As an incubator for earths?”

“There's only one earth.”

“What?!”

“OK. Let me restate. There are trillions of earths. Trillions of trillions. I don't know how many. But each has its own universe. There's only one in this universe.”

“One? Why all the wasted space?”

“It's not wasted.”

“It's not?”

“No. Look. This earth has already emitted tens of millions of cosmics, myself included. In the near future I'm told it will emit billions, yourself included. Lorna! Sh! Don't say it!”

He touched her slightly open lips with his finger.

“Our primary job, as current cosmics, is to help nurture this huge set of emerging new cosmics. That's what I'm doing now. With you.”

He looked at her pointedly. She rolled her eyes.

“All of you,” he continued, “will have dramatic new powers you won't know what to do with nor know how to handle. New cosmics are like toddlers. They have to be watched constantly. Otherwise we've got the cosmic equivalent of smashed china, deleted word-processing files, speaker wires pulled off the amplifier, Mommy's watch flushed down the toilet, and, of even more concern, the risk of them falling into the swimming pool, running out into traffic, or ingesting cleaning solvents from under the sink. The house has to be baby-proofed and it's best to shut them up in a place full of brightly colored toys that fit together in interesting ways and produce intriguing sounds and flashing lights. I assure you, this universe is none too big to provide such controlled environments for billions of newly minted, half-baked cosmics. Present company not excepted.”

Lorna was laughing.

“The universe is already lighting up like a fireworks display,” he continued. “In a few million years, the light from this display will start arriving at Hubble.”

“OK,” she laughed. “Are you a toddler?”

“It's not been that long ago. I could tell you stories! But now I'm more like a grade-schooler. I can leave home once in a while for education. I can watch the babies, change their diapers, feed them, play with them, keep them from killing each other. I'm not quite up to the full, near-adult, baby-sitting qualification of a teenager. In fact, I still need baby-sitting myself. But I can help.”

Lorna was still giggling.

“Are you still worried about having a cosmic body?” asked Raymond.

“Maybe not,” she laughed. “I feel quite... toddlerish.”

Claire Full of Suprises #2

2010-07-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

Jameson got a hair cut. He now looks like a little boy. Is he still as cute?

The jury is still out on that.

Meanwhile, however, we oo'd and ah'd about how different he looks. He's not the same little boy. Who is the little guy running around our feet? He seems to know us. He runs around the house as though he knows where he's going and how to most effectively get into trouble.

We just don't know him.

And then we notice Claire crying.

"What's wrong?" we ask.

"Since Jameson got his hair cut, nobody loves him!" she sobs.

We found out that we simply cannot make such comments. She either breaks down crying, or she gets mad at us. She does it with her parents, too, we notice.

Claire Full of Suprises

2010-07-11T09:48:00.001-07:00

The other day (June 21st) I did my morning constitutional run around the base of Grandeur Peak. A half hour up the side and a half hour back down -- a respectable single day's workout for which I was well equipped with walking sticks and detachable spikes to prevent slipping.

This is a beautiful time of the year. Everything is green and the wild flowers are a profuse delight. In a few weeks, everything'll be brown and dead -- this being Utah and all. I wondered if Claire would enjoy it. We like (and she likes) to do something together every day she's with us.

How to get her up on the mountain? The last few times I've tried to take her geocaching with me, she's been decidedly unenthusiastic about even the idea.

"Would you like to go on a picnic with me, Sweetheart? There're beautiful flowers and a most delightful view."

I was proud of my cleverness. It worked, too.

She loved it, enthralled by the green lushness, the beautiful flowers, and the ever broadening gorgeous perspective on the world. We found a shaded place to sit on a large towel and eat our lunch and she sidled up close to me for stability since we were on the side of a mountain.

"This is just right!" she said. "It's fun and it doesn't cost anything. We have to do this when the cousins come in August."

She wasn't particularly thrilled when I pointed out that, by August, the only thing living here would be the scrub oak.

She wanted to climb continuously higher and she scrambled ahead of me, often on all fours, chattering animatedly the whole time while I huffed and puffed trying to keep up with her. Soon we were beyond the half-hour point I had reached earlier that morning, but now I had neither walking sticks nor spikes. I was not expecting to come up this far nor into an area this rugged. She was fully equipped with flip-flops.

I tried to talk her into believing that we were amply high enough, but I was unconvincing. "Let's just go a little higher," she said. I seldom say no to anything she suggests.

But this time I had to lay down the law. "See those rocks up there?" I said. "That's as far as we should go."

"OK," she agreed.

Soon we were at the rocks. "OK," I said. "This is as far as we go."

"No, it isn't," she said. "You said those rocks up there." She pointed to a huge outcropping way above where we were.

On we went. Soon we were higher than I have ever been on that trail and before we reached the outcropping the trail petered out completely. We continued climbing and finally stood on the rocks.

Then she was freaked out a little, realizing we were higher than she has ever been on the side of a steep mountain. She almost immediately realized that getting down was harder than getting up. But she followed me down, slipping and sliding and whimpering slightly. I was slipping and sliding, too, and was amused.

Half way down, she decided she needed to call Mommy, which she did, chattering with her for a while and feeling much better.

She was very proud of herself. "We got almost all the way to the very top!" she told people.

"Not by a long-shot," I tried to tell her, but she believes her eyes over accepting my words.

What am I to do with you, little boy?!

2010-05-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

I brought in the mail one day a couple of weeks before General Conference. It included our tax return. We were supposed to review it and approve it for filing. How on earth does our simple financial situation warrant a half-inch stack of paper? It always alarms and confuses me. I stood at the kitchen counter and examined it trying to understand it. I looked at each page and tried to figure out what it meant and why it was relevant.

Finally, after several minutes, I understood it as well as when I started.

Then I looked up and saw Jamison sitting right in the middle of the kitchen table. He had spread various things around him and had a salt and pepper shaker in each hand. Everything was covered with salt and pepper. It looked like a dirty snow storm. And he accomplished all this right in front of me while I was facing him.

I hit myself in the forehead and said, "What am I to do with you, little boy?" Then I said, "Your grandma is going to be so mad at me."

Sure enough, a few minutes later when I was in the middle of cleaning the mess up and Jamison was trying his persistent best to climb back up onto the table, in walked Grandma. She took one look at us, hit herself in the forehead and asked, "What am I to do with you two guys."

Fast forward a couple of days. I was coming out of the Bountiful Temple after a multi-hour temple meditation and worship session. The topic for this meditation turned out to be the Invictus Response. You know: discovering that the Lord is the master of my fate and the pilot of my soul -- or rediscovering it or discovering it for the first or something. Anyway, I was pleased at the insight and quite proud of my spiritual progress.

I came out of the dressing room -- or I tried to come out -- and went around the corner just in time to see a man turn around and start a conversation with an ordinance worker. The ordinance worker was outside the dressing room and I was inside, and this man stood right in the middle of the entrance way facing out. You couldn't get around him without pushing him aside with an "Excuse me!" which I didn't do.

The Master of my Fate had placed me in this inconvenient situation and I was completely OK with that and I responded with absolute patience -- with silent absolute patience -- quite unusual for me. And I was proud of my advanced spiritual development. I was almost a finished work, shiny, beautiful to look at, my calling and election nearly made sure, the second comforter ready to settle around me and embrace me with arms of love and joy.

All I did was sidle up close to the man so that, as soon as he finished his discussion, he would turn around and immediately bump into me and recognize how severely he had inconvenienced me. And I was proud of the diplomatic way I was handling the situation and feeling quite righteous.

And it worked out just as I engineered it. He finished his conversation, turned around, bumped into me immediately, was appropriately apologetic, and disappeared into the dressing room.

And it was Elder Richard G. Scott.

I stood there for a second, then hurried after the ordinance worker who had been talking to him.

"Was that Elder Scott?!" I asked.

"Yes, it was," he answered.

Oh.

I didn't feel so righteous anymore.

In fact, I seemed to hear the Lord saying, "What am I to do with you, my son?"

My response was, "Well, my Lord. If you'd have let me recognize Elder Scott from the back side, I'd have treated him differently. I'd have stood back and given him room enough to turn around and perhaps he would have favored me with one of his loving smiles I've seen in the Salt Lake Temple."

And I seemed to hear the Lord say, "My son, when you eventually give yourself to me to be the pilot of your soul, you will treat everyone you meet as though they were all Elder Scott. You are still a work in progress, my son, with much left to do."

And as I stood there in the temple being chastised by the Spirit, I realized that our infinite Heavenly Father possesses infinite patience and he will continue to work with me and with others of us who are still works in progress for as long as it takes.

Tinga (a Mexican Recipe)

2010-03-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

Continuing the series of delicious, easy, crock-pot, conforming meals at the Jeff and Amy house, we have "Tinga". Which means... who knows? (Amy says it's not normally made in a crock-pot, but it couldn't have been better made any other way! And it's much easier in crock-pot.)

In crock-pot:

Bunch of pieces of boneless chicken (>= 5 breasts)
Lot of onions (5+?) sliced (not chopped) previously sauteed on stove top
Generous amounts of garlic also previously sauteed
Chicken boullion(?) to taste (generous)
1-3 t chopped chipotle (a pepper) (canned) to taste
1/4 cup veggie broth

Cook on low 6 hours

Shred the chicken. Remove most of excess juice. Taste juice to see if it's to taste. Add components that may need enhancement.

Continue cooking for another hour.

Serve on tostadas liberally sladdered with sour cream.

Delicious!

Jeff (and Amy's) Gluten-free Pancakes

2010-02-27T10:55:00.001-08:00

Jeff's Sat a.m. pancakes (OK, Amy says she found the recipe):

In food processor (!) blend

0.4 C Gluten-free oats
0.5 C cottage cheese
Some Splenda brown sugar
1T oil
1t vanilla
pinch salt
2 eggs

Jeff quadruples or quintuples the recipe

Fry

Serve with fruit stuff made from various food-processor-processed frozen fruits and berries.
Peanut butter also helps.
Mushed bananas are a great addition.
For best results, swim in whipping cream.

Amy's Chicken in a Pot

2010-02-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

Amy's wonderful gluten-free chicken stuff:

In crock-pot:

Several chicken breasts (or other bone-out chicken pieces)
2T melted butter
Packet of gluten-free Italian dressing seasoning

After a bunch of hours in crockpot and an hour before serving, cook on stove top:

2T butter
1 chopped up onion previously sauteed in the butter
(some) chopped up garlic (also previously sauteed)
8 oz cream cheese
(some - half cup+) gluten-free veggie broth (or chicken broth)
spoon fulls of sour cream

heat to melt cream cheese and mix together

Break up chicken in crock pot

pour everything together in crock pot and cook for another hour.

Serve over brown (whole-grain) rice (if desired and you don't mind the carbs).

Wonderful!

(I'm told that celery and/or other veggies can also be put in -- sauteed with onions.)

Stunning

2009-06-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

Elder Maxwell gave two BYU devotionals (that I'm aware of). One was in 1990. The other was in 2004. He looked quite different in the two. Understandably. The one in 2004 was given 4 months before he died of leukemia.

The themes of these two devotionals were quite different, but a significant point he made in both involved the nature of God. Put his intellect together with Elder Scott's particle-physics background and you get an insight into the nature of God that is shocking. It is similar to the insight to which I have belatedly become aware and which I have mentioned in the last few blogs.

Elder Maxwell calls this insight "stunning."

I called it terrifying.

That this insight keeps coming up in scripture, in prophetic writings, and in journals is attested to by common scriptural description of the discomfort and even terror of the wicked as they are brought before God. They will want mountains to fall upon them to hide them from His glory. And the oft-quoted statements from early 19th century brethren that if an angel were to appear in their room, they would be out the window in an instant even if it meant leaping to their deaths.

These brethren had a very clear view of the nature of God and His glorified servants.

As mentioned in recent blogs, this insight has bothered me. It makes me nervous. It scares me. I've never been scared of Heavenly Father before. To whom am I praying? To whom have I prayed for 70 years? How dare I?

With relief, I grasped at the image of Christ. He's definitely loving, gentle, accessible. He reaches out a comforting arm and puts it around my shoulders. He encourages me. He draws me into his presence in intense love. All of this is enabled by the atonement -- by the way he sacrificed his own life to save me.

Amazing grace.

And he is just like God, the Father. God, the Father -- stunning, terrifying -- is just like him.

It is comfort.

If I could believe it.

God is infinity. Infinity of power. Infinity of energy. Infinity of complexity. Infinity of perception. Infinity of knowledge.

All in a man-sized being. Composed of tightly encapsulated infinitesimals of energy -- an infinite number of infinitesimals -- each comprising the mass and energy of an entire universe.

Infinite universes in a finite man-sized being.

A mathematical concept.

It is only mathematically that we are able to characterize this. Intellectually, it is beyond us. As is the case in so many areas of nature. Einstein looked at his math and his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped. Incomprehensible. Among the first incomprehensibles of the 20th and 21st century.

And there it hit me. A solution to my discomfort, my terror, my inability to believe that such a God is approachable -- that He is truly like Christ, His son.

Mathematically.

God has be be absolutely humble and meek. He has to be. Mathematically. Because if He has the slightest, tiniest, non-zero portion of vindictiveness -- or whatever else the opposite of humble and meek may be -- multiplying this by infinity creates a catastrophe. A demon. A devil.

The only thing you can multiply infinity by -- without creating a catastrophe -- is zero. A singularity.

Ergo God is absolutely humble and absolutely meek. His declaration that "I am a jealous God," the description of us being subject to the "judgements of God," His raining down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction on this continent that accompanied the Crucifixion of His son -- all those things are for our instruction and tutoring, and a reflection of His mercy. He will bring to end the doings of the wicked so that they will require no further reconciliation. He will bless us as greatly as it is possible for us to be blessed and He will punish us a little as it is possible for us to be punished.

And we are to become like Him -- and through the atonement, we shall become like Him -- equally humble and meek.

Lost Language of Symbolism

2009-06-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Gaskill's book. The unimaginable is represented and made conceivable by expressing it in symbols. Symbols touch upon the abstract. Concrete objects expressing abstract concepts.

"How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings." Feet upon land represent ownership. Feet upon mountains represent ownership of the world. Mountains represent temples. Temples represent the universe. Ownership of the universe. Symbolism within symbolism. Concept within concept. Take the terrifying and make it comforting. Allow us to grasp it. Become familiar with it. Become comfortable with it. Become grateful for it. Become idolizing servants to it. To Him. A circle returning us to the beginning, only now with a bit of understanding.

And the Lord made coats of skins and clothed them. Lambs' skins. The lamb is the symbol of Christ. They were enclosed in the protection of Christ. With what reverence, what confidence, what love we enclose ourselves. Infinite power. Protecting us. Depending on our faithfulness.

What is Reality? Truly?

2009-06-03T06:49:00.001-07:00

God is truly terrifying. The image of God described in my last post has shaken my confidence in His presence. It's increased my faith. His ability to manipulate matter and energy, space and time is infinite. His ability to perceive and understand is infinite. He knows everything. He can do anything. But the image is terrifying. When I am brought to stand before Him and be judged, will I be totally freaked out? Will I seek to flee from Him, wish the mountains would fall upon me to hide me from His presence?

Quite possibly. Not inconceivably.

Christ is identical.

Width can be rotated into depth and height into width depending on the location and orientation of the POV (point of view). Einstein's relativity shows that time can be rotated into any of these dimensions and any of them into time depending on location and orientation (and relative velocity) of the POV. Physics shows evidence of as many as eleven dimensions, each infinite, each can be planes packed infinitely close or encapsulated infinitesimally tiny in the next higher dimension and can exist in infinite number. Infinities of infinitesimals, inimaginable.

God is terrifying.

Christ is identical.

Christ is an image of love. Of gentle consideration. Of washing the feet of His disciples -- a token of servitude.

God is love.

Is this world an egg? Are we wormy embryos? Is this entire universe, 14 billion light-years wide, packed with immense quantities of matter and energy, simply an extravagant nest for this one little egg? Why not? Our heavenly parents have access to any quantity of mass and energy, space and time. As we develop from embryos to adolescents to adults, how much mass, energy, space, and time will we need to become educated adults?

"Worlds without end have we created." Each an egg? Each in it's own finite 14-billion-light-year-wide nest? Why not? If we dare imagine infinity and know that our imagination is woefully naive and tiny, what is reality? Truly?

"My ways are higher than your ways...

2009-05-15T21:47:00.001-07:00

...and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9)

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Arthur Stanley Eddington)

"Is that what you think about during the endowment?!" (Carolyn Head)

OK, so lets get a few things out of the way -- amazing though they are, they're science. No fiction here. No fantasy.

E=MC²

Everyone knows that equation. Right? The basis for nuclear bombs. It means that if all the energy in my little fingernail were to be released at once, it would be an explosion comparable to a nuclear blast. If all the energy in my body were to be released at once, it would be comparable to hundreds of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs the US is thought to possess or dozens of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs Russia is thought to possess.

That's what E=MC² says. It's not science fiction.

Ok, the significant word here is "if." We haven't figured out how to do that yet. Nuclear bombs release only a tiny portion of the energy in a very small part of a very tiny percentage of the atoms. That's enough. If we could improve the efficiency just a tiny bit more, the effect would be devastating. God forbid that we ever learn how.

The Big Bang Theory

OK, it's a "theory," but it's pretty well acknowledged. The evidence supporting it continues to grow. We think we know what the universe was like right back to 10^-43 seconds after the big bang started when all the energy and mass in the entire known universe was in a particle only 10^-35 meters in diameter. That's smaller than even the most powerful microscopes could see. There is serious controversy, but it involves conditions in the first few seconds of the life of the universe, not so much in the big-bang, itself, or that it started tiny!

OK, so now we've gotten the you-gotta-be-kidding out of the way. People might say that what I'm going to record next is deep, mysterious, far out, and, by definition, should not be preached. "Let's stick to faith, repentance, etc., and not get carried away with the mysteries."

Ha! My take is that we already have the deep, mysterious, and far out, and they seem to be valid. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take these apparent difficult-to-understand-but-apparently-valid "mysteries" and relate them to the gospel?

I think so.

So here goes.

These are all things we've heard all our lives and we accept them because we've heard them all our lives:

God has a body. His glory would consume us if we were in His presence and unprotected. Christ has a light that permeates the universe. It is the light of the stars, etc. When we die and are separated from our bodies for a time, we will consider this separation to be a prison.

Why the latter? Let's start with it. Why would we consider separation from these corruptible bodies to be anything but a liberation? Joseph Smith says that spirit matter is a fine matter (as in wispy, insubstantial matter), but it's still matter. There's no such thing as immaterial material. How big an explosion would you get if you released all the energy in a spirit body. Not much, I expect. We interact very nicely with the things of this universe because out bodies are tightly encapsulated packets of incredible amounts of energy. If spirit bodies are so much more insubstantial with so much less matter, they are much less able to interact with very much in this universe. No wonder spirits consider their disembodied state to be a prison after having had the experience of being able to interact with so much.

But God and Christ have bodies. How much energy is encapsulated in their bodies? As much as a star? As an entire galaxy? As the entire universe? As many universes? Remember that 10^-35 meter particle that contained all the energy in the universe? We have no idea what things were like when the universe was younger and smaller than this. Infinitesimal? That's how it's described. What if God's body was composed of such infinitesimals? Perhaps his body encapsulates an infinite amount of energy.

Perhaps it is the source of all energy of the universe and however many other such universes.

And people think the idea of God having a body restricts Him some way.

They don't understand physics.

But then neither do any of us -- including the physicists.

And, to the extent that the laws of physics helps us to imagine any of this -- the actual universe, the actual reality, the actual nature of God, ourselves, and this wonderful universe home of ours -- reality, that we can't imagine, that it's not possible to imagine, is likely to be much more glorious and wonderful than that. Perhaps infinitely more.

Humility

2009-04-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

In the most recent "Spoken Word," what's-his-name quoted a rabbi (I've forgotten his name, too): "Humility is knowing that everything's not about you." That created an epiphany for me. If everything is about someone, it must be about God. He's the ultimate reality. That makes our joys and miseries, our successes and failures, our glories and shames pretty much insignificant. The only thing we can do is fill the hole into which God has stuck us and do it as competently as possible. In that way we can share a tiny portion of His joy, success, and glory.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Is that true? Someone famous (don't remember who) wrote a short story suggesting that this well-known and oft-quoted saying is not necessarily true.

In the story, a man was shipwrecked on an island and discovered that the people who lived there were blind. I will be king here, he thought. It didn't quite turn out that way. He learned that people do not like someone who appears to be cocky and arrogant. They don't like to be given advice they don't ask for. They don't accept information that disagrees with their prejudices. They especially don't like it when someone catches them in illegal acts. The community, who in the beginning received him warmly and kindly, came to consider him to be an anti-social trouble maker and decided to surgically remove his eyes.

This has a moral for both sides. I'll leave that to the reader to determine what they are. This ties in with our "humility" theme.

Eyring and the Three Nephites

More than once Elder Eyring has talked about humility in the sense of purification-of-motives. It's clearly a topic which worries him.

He's a great speaker. I love to hear him talk. I suspect he gets a lot of praise for his talks, and he is tempted to speak in order to get that praise rather than to serve the Lord. That worries him. That's why he expresses his concerns publicly. Such expression is cathartic. It helps him to clarify both the concerns and the possible strategies for addressing them.

I recently read through the BofM where Mormon and Moroni talk about the three Nephites. "They will be among the gentiles and the gentiles will know them not. They will be among the Jews and the Jews will know them not" (3 Nephi 28:27-28). And, of course, both Mormon and Moroni were looking to our day. For them, the entire population of the world would be divided into these two groups and everyone would be a member of one or the other. So that means that the three Nephites will be anywhere in the world and no one will know them.

These three gentlemen are powerful. They can't be killed. They move freely between the mortal plane, the Spirit-world plane, and the Celestial plane among others. They know (see) a great deal that we don't. Such men must be wonderful tools in the hands of the Lord for accomplishing his work.

But they do it anonymously. No one knows them or knows what great power they have or what wonderful secrets they could share. They are free of arrogance. They help wherever help is possible and they don't care who gets the credit. They go about quietly doing whatever the Lord wants. There is no honor, no glory -- just the knowledge that the Lord is pleased with them. The Lord is their ultimate reality -- even their total reality.

That's where we should be, how we should act, what attitude we should have.

And it is possible -- for each of us.

And, to hear Elder Eyring talk, that's where he wants to go -- difficult for him, being so in the lime-light as he is.

It would be easier for us.

Sunday Sessions

2009-04-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

Sunday A.M., I spent a few hours doing my extraction-director work and when 10 A.M. arrived I realized it was time for my nap. The only thing that would have prevented me from immediately going to sleep would have been to sit on a tack or to take Vivarin intravenously. A pill simply doesn't work fast enough. Both of those involve sharp points, and I determined to take a nap, instead, so I missed a lot of the 4th session of GC.

However, I did pick up on at least two speakers saying that righteous acts are not a spectator sport. We don't get credit for them by observing and commenting on them.

For the 5th session, I noted a very interesting thread:

Elder Bednar talked about the temple -- one of my very favorite topics.

Elder Stevenson (?) told a story, the punch line of which was that the little boy said, "We aren't lost. Even though we are way out in the boonies, on muddy roads, across rickety bridges, as long as we can see the temple there, we're not lost!" The image on the screen was that of the Logan Temple seen above the trees in the foreground.

At that time, I thought that the being-able-to-see-the-temple was much like navigating with a GPS that does not have a map. It's as though your destination is like some high landmark that you can see so you know where it is, which way it is from your current location, and how far away it is. You may not know the absolutely optimum way to get there, but since you can see it, it's just a matter of time and patience to find it.

And then Elder Teixeira startled me by giving the talk that I have thought of giving if I ever got a chance. The GPS is such a great metaphor for so many things. It tells you where you are, where you're going, and how to get there. It works fine as long as it can hear the satellites. The metaphor is obvious, in my opinion.

Then Elder Watson told of having been taught that, when you are in a fog so dense that you can't see your hand in front of your face, you can give the horse completely free rein and it will find the way back home. The metaphor for him was that there are times when we simply have to give our trust over to the Lord who knows and perceives things that are hidden to us. He will guide us through his servants, the prophets as well as through inspiration directly to us.

Even though I'm not particularly comfortable with the use of a horse as a metaphor for the Lord, his point is well taken and ties in nicely with the rest of the thread.

Conference Synthesis

2009-04-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just as Michelle's 40-day approach to reading the Book of Mormon brings unique benefits, a single-sitting viewing of General Conference also brings unique benefits. For the Book of Mormon, it helps you conceptually knit together principles and ideas from different books and pages. For conference, it helps you conceptually knit together principles and ideas from different speakers. Such a knitting-together requires a bit of personal synthesis, so my apologies for blending my own perspectives with the ideas of the apostles.

Note that this is not the way I usually think of watching GC. I sit through all the sessions, but I know that I will later view them and/or read them again, as individual talks, and I give them less thought and consideration the first time -- being satisfied with simply "absorbing the Spirit" so watching with an eye (ear) toward synthesizing things that can't easily be put together talk-by-talk was different -- and as it happened, quite valuable.

This morning, Elder Hales taught that obsessions can only be overcome by a love of Christ. I was touched and received a powerful testimony that it was true. It impressed me because I have worried about obsessions for some time. What makes a person bash in car windows and steal sound systems in an HP parking lot in broad daylight, and what makes a pedophile stalk victims on the web? Both of these people know that they will soon be caught.

The movie "Silence of the Lambs," which I did not like and have no desire to ever watch again even though it made a great impression on me, illustrates how obsessions can totally overcome a person's rationality. It was scary, and I have worried about how such things -- such impossible-to-resist obsessions -- will play out in the eternal judgement, and how they are to be reconciled with never being tempted beyond our ability to resist.

And yet, Elder Hales points out that this same obsessive irrationality is present in many things we do, especially, he pointed out, in the bad habits that lead to financial problems. He concluded by stating that obsessions can be -- and perhaps can only be -- overcome by submersing them in the love of Christ.

Do you remember our cousin, Scott (last names withheld for web security reasons)? His father abandoned his mother, Brenda, to go shack up with a cute little Korean masseuse. At that time, Scott told his father that he (his father) had done that because he had abandoned the love of Christ. I thought that was a quaint, if not a bit naive way of stating it, but it looks like Scott understood a phase of the Gospel which, up to now, has eluded me.

That also suggests how impossible-to-resist temptations come into being. We are promised that we will never be tempted beyond our ability to resist, but we aren't promised that we will not be allowed to place ourselves in conditions where temptations cannot be resisted. That's our choice. And submission to an obsession is, in the beginning, just such a choice. Correcting this means returning to Christ and renewing our inherent love of Him.

And Elder Christoffersen expanded Elder Hales thoughts by telling us how to get the strength to do this. He quoted extensively from the Sixth Lecture on Faith. This reminded me that this lecture was the most powerful and wonderful thing I had ever read when I first encountered it early in my mission. We get strength and faith needed to acquire a love for Christ (as needed to overcome obsessions) through sacrifice. In fact that is what we do to acquire powerful, i.e., all, faith. Sacrifice is the way to come to know that our path of life is entirely acceptable to God, and this knowledge allows us to exercise all faith. In fact, it is a requirement for being able to exercise all faith.

And Elder Eyring expanded Elder Christoffersen's points by telling us how important adversity is to give us -- even to force us to have -- experience, motivation, and strength to pursue such a marvelous effort of faith to its ultimate, successful conclusion.

All these things came together in this morning's session. In a few minutes, the afternoon session will begin. I'm looking forward the wonderful ideas that I will get from this session -- assuming I can stay awake to listen. (Not that obvious at the moment.)

---------------

And the afternoon session was a bit of a challenge to keep my eyes open, but I did notice that one of the Latino seventies continued Elder Eyring's comments about the benefits of adversity. He lost a child to drowning. And Elder Scott also continued this theme having lost two children and his wife. Elder Scott also said that the temple strengthens us in our adversity and helps us learn whatever we are supposed to learn and that he attends the temple weekly and participates in all ordinances.

That was special to me because a couple of months ago, I helped administer the initatory to him.

---------------

I assumed that this "40-day" effect would likely not be present in the Priesthood Session. A third of the speakers would address the 12-year-olds giving them inspiration and entertainment. The other two thirds would talk about honoring our priesthood.

And, ho-hum, Elder Packer started just that way. He told us how we, as priesthood holders, should do righteous things.

But then another Latino seventy (De Costa?) brought that into our family relations and told us which righteous things in particular strengthened our family and how great our obligation was to our family.

Then Elder Uchdorf told the story of the airplane crash in the Everglades that occurred because the crew was distracted by a burned-out indicator light and he drew our attention to the need to never let unimportant things distract us from important righteous acts.

Then Elder Eyring talked about the need for valor and bravery in approaching needed righteous acts. He used the story of Blackhawk Down to powerfully illustrate this.

So, from Packer to Eyring it was a continuous, thrilling crescendo.

It thought that President Monson was going to have trouble continuing that crescendo. Eyring had pretty much raised it as high as it would go.

Then President Monson talked about keys of the priesthood and referenced D&C 107:18-19 without actually stating exactly that. This is just about the most exalted statement I know:

"The power and authority of the higher, or Melchizedek Priesthood, is to hold the keys of all the spiritual blessings of the church. To have the privilege of receiving the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, to have the heavens opened unto them, to commune with the general assembly and church of the Firstborn, and to enjoy the communion and presence of God the Father, and Jesus the mediator of the new covenant."

Elder Monson just referred to the "spiritual blessings" part. The rest of it is pretty high up there and is so exalted that it is seldom mentioned. That's about as high as the crescendo can get -- so high that you only understand it if you know the scripture he's referring to.

And all this from Michelle's 40-day reading approach applied to General Conference.

I'm becoming my mother?

2009-03-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

“Why do you read those trashy novels?” Mom asked me on more than one occasion.

“They're not trashy,” was my habitual defense.

“They're just made up stories,” she'd counter. “Worthless.”

“What should I read?” As if I didn't know. She'd always point to the scriptures.

I considered this to be inexcusably provincial on her part, and I attempted to broaden her appreciation and tolerance by drawing her attention to our great body of uplifting literature. She remained unconvinced and, with time, read only the scriptures and finally only the Book of Mormon before she lost her sight to macular degeneration and descended into “sweet confusion” as described by her assisted-living caretakers.

In general, I'm happy. I have a joyful lightness of step much of the time if not most of the time. I've often wondered if I'd have achieved this decades earlier if decades earlier I'd have adopted the habit of weekly endowment sessions. I know twenty-somethings who do this and they show obvious spiritual benefit. I wish I'd have been one of those twenty-somethings. I feel like I lost decades.

In any case, the joyful lilt is enhanced by said endowment sessions, BYU devotionals, CES firesides, general conference, In Performance, Orchestra at Temple Square, Music and the Spoken Word, FARMS, J. S. Papers, the Ensign, and, of course, the scriptures. I'm proud to say that I'm addicted to all of these.

And this lilt is diminished by ER, CSI, Heroes, Numb3rs, Fringe, Cold Case, Without a Trace, Law and Order, most novels, and much of the public news media. And, I'm embarrassed to say, I'm even more addicted to these.

I fully understand the experience Cindy described. Cindy's a quiet, spiritually sensitive mother of four including twins, whom we knew in our California ward. She was a great fan of Harry Potter, and once she described how, after she finished reading Rowling's latest publication at the time, she had to go into the bathroom and pray to dissipate the dark feeling that enveloped her.

Since that's the way I often feel, how long will it be before I determine that it just isn't worth it to subject my spirit to such depressing influences when there's so much better material to choose from? I suspect it may happen. If I live as long as Mom (not likely) I can imagine that this determination may come well before then.

Mom Insight

2009-03-13T05:37:00.000-07:00

So there I am, subbing Wednesday night at the SL temple, and an ordinance worker whom I didn't know walks up to me and starts talking with no introduction:

"In our mission there was an old-woman missionary named Ireta Head who enjoyed playing basketball with the young elders. She was quite a person. She always complained about how difficult it was to get people ready for baptism, but she and her companion baptized more than anyone else. They were the ones to keep up with. I don't remember the name of her companion or many others anymore, but I'll never forget her or her name."

Of course that is only a synopsis of what he said. I admitted yes, that was my mother and it sounds typical, but those were details I had never heard before.

...going on fourteen

2009-02-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

"Grandma says we're going to make valentines," I informed Claire when I picked her up today after their school valentine party was already history.

"For who?" she asked bluntly.

Hm. Direct challenge to adult rationality. From a six year old. She's going to be some teenager.

"Lucas gave me a transformer," she said.

The non sequitur threw me for a moment.

"A girl's transformer?" I asked. In the past, she's shown distinct antipathy toward boys' toys.

"No."

"I guess that means he likes you."

"He does."

"How do you know?"

"He only talks to me when he's around me -- or when I'm around him."

"Do you like him?"

Pause. "Yes. We met in the hall today and had a little chat."

I didn't dare pursue that any further. Hope the hall is well chaperoned.

Claire's Swimming Update

2009-02-07T21:49:00.000-08:00

Today's open-plunge session was 2 hours (because Mommy stipulated that it shouldn't be longer than that). We spent about a third of that time in the 9-foot Olympic racing pool.

Claire enjoyed finding new toys to play with including a bin full of yellow water-polo balls. As floats go, they're a little hard to keep under control and they get away from you very easily, but Claire stated that water-polo was going to be her sport of choice (though she insists on calling it water-soccer).

She was also pleased to find the stash of huluhoops (used in her swimming class). She even tried them out on land for the purpose for which they are designed. It's not quite the same as the WII Fit, but she progressed from 3 loops before it found itself around her toes to almost 10 loops. But she gave that up after a few minutes and took it into the water with her.

She instructed me on how to hold it (vertical, mostly under water) and proceeded to push off from the bank, swim through it, and come to a halt some distance from the bank and not an insignificant distance from me -- in 9-foot water with no float.

Be aware that she has never been taught to tread water. Her classes are conducted at the 3' 3" level where she can comfortably touch the bottom with only a bit of a tippy-toe stretch. I mentioned last time that she showed she could tread water -- once, for about one second -- but Michelle blew it off with a bit of amusement disbelieving that this short time frame could really be considered treading water.

So here she was, treading water, several feet from me. This made me acutely nervous -- a number of things she does make me acutely nervous -- but I held myself in check to see what she would do.

Still treading water, she turned to me, grinned, and commented on her swimming prowess (not her water treading prowess which was freaking me out). Then she giggled.

I decided that there was not too severe a crisis in the offing.

Dad (Nephi L. Head)

2009-02-02T14:43:00.000-08:00

I have used blogging to record some of my most precious past experiences and epiphanies, but I realized this week that I have never recorded the single most defining event of my life: the death of my father.

Here is some background. During my teen years I developed a paranoia that became nearly a neurosis: I became terrified that one of my parents would be killed. In my early teens, I became aware that there was a cruel world out there ready to do us harm. The Korean war was a daily source of bad news, and 1952, the year in which I was 13, was remembered as a year of record-breaking automobile accidents. It was the first year that US auto fatalities exceeded 50,000. (Since then it has seldom exceeded this number by a great deal, due presumably to safer vehicles and roads.) People were dying everywhere and everyone knew victims. That scared me and I became almost pathologically frightened of my patents being caught up in this carnage.

When I was nineteen, my worst fears were realized. Dad died as a result of an accident. It wasn't an auto accident, but it was just as deadly. He was painting the eves of our house and the ladder collapsed under him. For three weeks, he was in a coma, and then he passed away with mother holding his hand.

Those three weeks were a hell born of desperation. Subsequent weeks and months were a hell born of hopelessness. There was no joy in the universe. Joy was impossible. The only thing that could possibly bring joy would be for Dad to return to normal life and routine. That wasn't going to happen. The universe had been irremediably broken. Nothing was ever going to be right again, ever.

Helen arrived from Canada for the funeral and stated that she couldn't believe it. To her, Dad was still someplace else -- a long distance away just as he had always been while she lived in Canada and we lived in the US. And she knew that this perception was true. It helped her.

I had no such help. Dad lived with us. He was always an immediate presence. Dad and I had, virtually up to the day of his accident, been daily carpoolers. He worked at the VA hospital across the street from where I attended the U. We'd had daily opportunity to converse and visit about any and every subject imaginable -- not as a parent and child, but as two adults discussing deep and significant temporal and spiritual matters. Dad's intellectual command was immense and he stretched my intellectual muscles. In those couple of years, I had grown closer to him than I'd ever been. His absence was an intolerable void that could not be filled. I envied Helen. I also envied Lawrence and Kitchener who still had full families and homes to which they could return -- homes that continued, unabated, without ghastly voids. Mother and I were in hell, a hell from which there was no redemption. We fled to Canada for respite. And while we were gone, Lawrence and Kitchener finished the house which had been Dad's death.

In Canada, I read my first church book: "How to Pray and Stay Awake." I read it as avidly as any novel. Religion had suddenly acquired relevance. I was no longer satisfied with Sunday School answers to vital questions. I wanted to know that the Spirit World existed and what it was like. I wanted to know that Dad still lived and I wanted to know what he was doing now.

The next year was a year of huge change for me. I became an avid student of religion. Even before Dad's death, I had become quite enamored with the recently discovered evidences for the Book of Mormon. That was the basis for my testimony. The Book of Mormon was hard to explain away by rational, unbiased, thorough scholars. To me that meant that it leaned solidly toward being true. And that was putting it mildly. If it was true, Joseph Smith was a true prophet. If he was a true prophet, the church he founded was true. If the church was true, then the Church's teachings were true. If they were true, then the Spirit World existed and Dad was alive and active and a part of some great movement somewhere.

This line of reasoning became an urgent verity for me. It had to be true! It had to be. It not being true was simply not imaginable.

I studied vigorously with a concentration on anything and everything pertaining to the afterlife. This provided a framework for the mastery of an ever broader range of Gospel topics. I loved the way it all fit together and I acquired more than a bit of unrighteous pride in my mastery and understanding of the kingdom's mysteries.

And, with time, the broken universe restructured itself into something more exiting and more beautiful than ever. I had experienced the very worst that I could imagine and I had survived. All my childhood demons were swept away. I was afraid of nothing. Death was either no more than a necessary step in our eternal progression, or it was the end of consciousness. Either of these was OK with me, and I found that powerfully reassuring. "It" no longer had to be true, but I enjoyed the reason-derived probability that it was, and I liked that better.

I was amazed at the alteration in myself, and I stated, definitively, more than once and to multiple people, that Dad's death had been the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Why can't we go through the same transformation without the need for such traumatic and final events as the death of a loved one? The universe doesn't work that way, I assumed. "There is a law irrevocably decreed..." and all that. Too bad.

But my testimony was purely rational. Reason trumped faith, and I knew that it shouldn't. My testimony was as dry and lifeless as a parched desert. It hadn't changed me. It didn't have the power. What had changed me was the experience of Dad's death and the reordering of the universe. The Gospel was powerful, itself liberating, capable of creating in an individual all the amazing transformations I had experienced and more -- without the traumatic tragedy. I needed to tap into that power to complete my metamorphosis.

I was aware of something called a "spiritual testimony" and I even understood what it was to a degree and that I lacked it. It was the luxuriant rain forest as opposed to the parched desert. Perhaps flashes of Holy Ghost enlightenment had touched my soul and imprinted upon it a numinous awareness of something just out of reach. I understood a "spiritual testimony" to be a direct communication by the Holy Ghost to one's spirit -- spirit-to-spirit -- more believable and convincing than anything acquired through the senses -- that had power to change attitude and nature. I wanted such a testimony and I prayed for it.

I entered the mission field a year almost to the day from the day Dad died.

My lack of a spiritual testimony proved to be a serious problem. All those wonderful things I had experienced and the amazing absence of demons and the fearlessness did not protect me against depression. The first three months of my mission, with me banging my head against the wall of rejection and persecution, attempting to bear a testimony that remained lifeless, and trying to do it in an unknown language, dragged me down into a hell that was different from the one I'd experienced a year before, but it was nevertheless a hell that made life seem not worth the effort.

Then, in the third month of my mission, during the third week of September, 1959, my prayer was answered and I did receive a spiritual testimony that proved to be more than I ever imagined. That's another story. Let's just say that it continued the transformation that had started with Dad and seemingly would not have been possible without Dad.

When Jerilyn died several years later, I thought, "Wow. Lawrence and Dorrine now have a huge, unfillable void. A 17 year old daughter -- a beautiful butterfly that has just emerged from its chrysalis and spread its lovely wings -- and is then crushed before the wings even dry. What could be worse? They are experiencing the same thing I did -- perhaps even more intently."

When Lawrence asked me to speak at her funeral, I was shocked but I recognized that it would be cathartic. I felt that I knew what they were going through and I could express it -- and express my own feelings and perceptions as well. This funeral talk is on the family web site under Jerilyn's page. I have thought that it expresses my impression of life and death so well that I would like to have it played at my own funeral -- I, myself, speaking at my own funeral. Poetic, no? Carolyn has strong reservations about that. I recently listened to it. Maybe she's right...

Claire's Swimming Progress

2009-01-25T06:13:00.000-08:00

Claire's now in the middle of her second 6-week swimming course. She's making good progress but not quite to the point where we'd be comfortable giving her access to deep water without very close supervision.

It would seem to make little sense that the only swimming she gets is in a swimming class. Where's the concept of home work and practice? So we decided that I should go with her to "Open Plunge" Saturday afternoon. We've done that for two weeks. It now looks like a firmly established tradition.

Open Plunge is a different environment from the classes held in the same pool. The slides, fountains, jets, and lazy river are all in full function -- and the patronage is dense to the point of infestation -- squirming, crawling, splashing, half-naked creatures of all shapes and sizes. You can't do anything without bumping into something living. No one even bothers to say excuse me, otherwise it would be a constant "Excuse me" chatter. And, as always, my job is to stay close to Claire and do everything she asks.

She expressed curiosity about what she could see through double sets of glass doors. Over there was the Olympic-size racing pool. We wandered over. It was empty except for a half-dozen people in one corner and one old man (my age) doing laps in one of the lanes. Quite different from the playground pool. I asked the only official there if "Open Plunge" included this pool. He looked up from his work of repairing and adjusting the lane floats to answer, "Sure."

Claire studied the numbers painted on the edge. "Nine feet!" she exclaimed. "That's deep!"

That was unique. I've never heard my barely 6-year-old granddaughter express shocked discovery and realization before.

"Remember when you were jumping off the diving board," I reminded her. "That was nine feet."

"Oh?" she said. "I didn't know that...." The last sentence trailed off to thoughtful contemplation.

That was even more startlingly unique. When had she ever expressed humble surprise before?

I could almost hear the gears grinding in her little brain. What were we to do with this huge, intimidating place?

She decided that this end was a little too intimidating. The opposite end was clearly the place to start and she took off in that direction. As per rule and tradition, I followed her without being directed to do so.

The other end turned out to be nine feet also. Well, we'd just have to make do with what we had. "You go in first, Grandpa." Obediently I jumped in and she jumped in after me.

After a period of getting used to it and trying all sorts of floats, boards, and even some flippers she dug out of a bin -- the smallest set still too large -- she settled on a float comprised of pipe insulation -- four-foot lengths of 4 inch diameter, flexible cylinders that fit across the chest and under the armpits. They were a variety of bright colors. (I wasn't aware they came in any color but black or dark gray.)

With this, she proceeded to flutter-kick/doggy paddle the entire length of the pool! She seldom lets me in on her intentions and plans, so this was an amazing surprise to me. In the very middle of the pool where the banks all appeared to be impossibly far away, I was sure that she was going to come to her senses and give up. When she made it to the end, I assumed that her appetite for the Olympic racing pool would have also come to an end, and she would now be content to go back to the playground pool. How surprised I was when she turned around and immediately set out to retrace her path back to the original end!

She repeated this several times, stopping once to trade her 4-foot section for a 2-foot section. That concerned me because it didn't seem substantial and secure enough, but she was overjoyed with the greater maneuverability and seemed more than satisfied with the result. The only other time she paused was to tell me, "Let's rest. I'll show you how we rest here." I followed her lead as we got out of the pool, sat on the bank with our feet in the water, and kicked vigorously for 5 seconds. Then back in the pool.

Once she actually did lose her float. At that point, she demonstrated that she can tread water! That demonstration lasted one full second before I could grab her.

Meanwhile, I was pacing her with a half water-tread and side stroke. It was not the most efficient or relaxing way of getting through water. Whenever I settled into a full, relaxed, gliding side stroke, she would say, "Grandpa! Don't try to pass me!" She insisted that she be the one to win every lap. She even had me move to the next lane so that we could be fellow competitors. The result was that I was getting tired. The single 5-second bank flutter hadn't done it for me.

"Are you sure we want to go again," I asked as we made it to the end of a lap. "I'm tired!" She looked at me with disdain and took off.

This only ended when she said, "I have to go potty!" She jumped out of the water and added, "I have to go potty bad!" I have studiously avoided letting her in on the dirty little secret.

One serious problem I have with all this is that Claire pops in and out of the water at will and with rapidity. As a boy scout I learned how to quickly and easily get in and out of deep water, (Claire has never needed such instruction) but my lack of shoulder rotator cuffs makes this technique impossible, so my efforts to get out of a deep pool -- or even a shallow pool -- is similar to a walrus ooze-flopping onto the beach. And I have to do it quickly, because Claire moves quickly. She has learned to walk/run just fast enough to avoid a shrill whistle and rebuke from an official. To keep up with her is also a bit of a stretch for me to avoid the same whistle/rebuke.

We completed our open plunge in the playground pool after which I finally succeeded in my many attempts to convince her that she'd had enough and wanted to go home.

The whole was a three-hour stint.

America's Choice

2009-01-09T14:04:00.000-08:00

I walked into the Bountiful Temple and noted that only one of the two recommend stations was manned. A bit of a line was forming. In front of me was a lovely, tall young woman.

An ordinance worker walked up to the unmanned station and began fiddling with the computer. The young woman moved over beside him presumably to split the growing line into two, but from the computer machinations, it appeared that it would be some time before the station was ready to scan recommends. I motioned to her to resume her place in front of me where she would be next in line.

She held her ground and said, "I'm being taken care of." She smiled. She seemed to smile easily.

My recommend was scanned and handed back to me. Before continuing into the temple, I turned and stared directly at her from the front. She returned the favor with obvious amusement.

"You're Miss Utah!" I said. I hope I didn't point at her, but I'm afraid I probably did. Bad form.

She appeared startled and I assumed that I was mistaken though the resemblance was uncanny.

"I am!" she exclaimed. "I was," she corrected. Then she flashed a dazzling, completely unmistakable smile. "Thank you," she said.

"Hard to miss," I muttered as I turned and continued into the temple.

It's no surprise that I couldn't remember her name, but I wished that I had muttered something like "People's Choice" (actually, should have been "America's Choice") to cement the identity.

A contemplative temple meditation session was out. I hurried home to get onto blogger and clear my brain of Jill Stevens. Yes I remembered her name -- significantly during the endowment.

Atkins was Right, or Beauty is More than Skin Deep

2008-12-14T09:29:00.000-08:00

For nine years, conventional wisdom has told me that my predilection for cream and cheese is killing me, a view that people have constantly reminded me of. The issue, apparently, is arteriosclerosis, also known as "hardening of the arteries" or "plaque buildup."

This conversation occurred at the completion of a carotid artery ultrasound ordered in the aftermath of my recent "TIA" episode:

"I don't suppose you can comment on the results?" I asked the technician, hopefully.

"Well, the radiologist will come up with the numbers," she said, "but you're beautiful!"

"That's flattering," I said, "but I was asking about the ultrasound."

She giggled. "I look inside people's bodies every day, and that's where I find beauty. You're beautiful! There's no hint of plaque in your arteries, and, for a man your age, that's rare!"

The official radiology report later confirmed her assessment: "No significant fibrocalcific plaque...[and]...no evidence for hemodynamically significant stenosis." See a copy of the report on our family web site.

Significant is the fact that it is now nine years that I have been curbing carbs and welcoming fats -- with the encouragement of Atkins and with the biochemical explanation of "Syndrome X."

During that time, I have been criticized by people for being misled, reckless, and foolish. I most certainly had arteriosclerosis and was in danger of keeling over from a heart attack at any time. Particularly in light of Lawrence and Kitchener both having had heart trouble, I was placing myself at great risk.

Although Syndrome X's findings and explanation seemed compelling and my own blood tests showed improvement, still when conventional wisdom keeps getting hammered at you for a decade, you begin to wonder and doubt.

This doubt is now cleared up. Atkins was right. Syndrome X is right. Conventional wisdom is flat-out wrong. I'm not going to die of heart problems.

Instead, I'll die of cancer. I've had three different forms of it already. All of them originated before nine years ago, so I don't think low-carb/high-fat has had anything to do with them, but....

Six Year Old Ambiguity

2008-12-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

Tom, with a bachelors degree in sports medicine, travels with the Ute girl's volleyball team to provide first-line treatment for injuries and other medical issues. As the girls have swept into and through the national play-offs, Tom has been out of state more often than at home, including the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

Six year old Claire follows the exploits of the girls team with interest and appreciation, but she does miss Daddy and has become aware that his extended absences will terminate only when the girls lose.

The girls swept the preliminaries and made it to the "Sweet 16" in Seattle -- where their long winning streak ended.

"Guess who's coming home," offered Michelle.

"Daddy!?"

"Yes."

"Did the girls lose last night?" Claire asked, disgruntled.

"Yes."

"Awesome!" she stated without the slightest disgruntle.

TIA: A new synonym for "Senior Moment"

2008-11-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

I had a TIA! At least that's what they said in the emergency room when they couldn't find anything else to explain it. (TIA: Transient Ischemic Attack, also known as a short-term stroke, a precursor to a full, all-out stroke.)

I had a roaring sinus infection accompanying a painful ear ache and went to the doctor (OK, a nurse practioner, the doctor being unavailable), and I couldn't remember "Coumadin" when I was asked what medications I was taking. I finally came up with "Warfarin" which satisfied her and caused her to say "Coumadin" which didn't even sound familiar. I also tried to tell her the antibiotic that I had just been on for my ear infection, but had to mentally thrash around to come up with "Keflex" from a mental image of the prescription. That didn't sound familiar or in-context, either, but it satisfied her and I let it go.

On the way out to the car, I called Carolyn as I normally do, and couldn't remember how to place the call. I mentally thrashed around again and tried something which connected me to voice-mail. I then tried something else which succeeded.

An hour later, I went shopping with Carolyn. She sent me to put some packages in the trunk. I couldn't remember how to open the trunk! More thrashing. I focused on the mysterious button under the dash board. I didn't know what it was for and there was absolutely no mental association of it with the trunk, but I remembered that I had pushed it often and seemingly never when the car was in motion. I tried it and the trunk opened. My satisfaction at this result was short lived as I realized that it seemed like a brand new discovery -- learning about a relationship that I had never before known. This disturbed me because logic said that this should be a well-known and long-understood relationship.

At that point, I talked Carolyn into dropping me off at the ER to find out what was happening to me.

An hour later as I lay in the ER, I realized that all had become clear again and that I remembered, knew, and understood all those things that had been a mystery a short time before. They took a CT scan of my skull and failed to find any evidence of a blood clot but they did note that all my sinuses and my left ear were infected. They took an x-ray of my chest looking for something mysterious and didn't find it but did note my broken ribs. The nurse also placed in my record her observation that I was wobbly when she led me to the room. I don't remember that but do remember that she appologized for not placing me in a wheelchair for the trip. Not having anything else to go on, they said it was a TIA and instructed me to see my primary care physician for follow up. I did, and she decided that it didn't look like a TIA and concluded that it was simply a lack of blood sugar. She was the first of several over the next couple of weeks to express dismay at the fact that we don't really have regular meals in our house. I didn't realize it was that big a deal.

But now we refer to any "senior moments" as TIA's. We've both been having them regularly ever since then.

Remedial Course on Mt. Aire

2008-10-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

A month ago (September 29th), I tripped over my own feet and fell on my face on Mt. Aire. I broke three ribs, collapsed a lung, and spent the next eleven days in the hospital.

During that same time, Michelle gave birth to our 8th grandchild in the same hospital (St. Marks). That was convenient for Carolyn who could walk back and forth between 4-West and The Women's Pavilion and visit us both. Sometimes I accompanied her to visit Michelle. Sometimes I even went by myself.

That's where I ran into a few problems.

Homely old men in off-colored hospital gowns dragging oxygen canisters behind them are not common sights in the Women's Pavilion and I was frequently challenged. "Sir, may I help you? Are you lost?" "Isn't this 4-West?" "No, sir. It is not!" I learned not to make such flippant responses. It didn't help. For the most part I could convince them that I had a reasonable excuse to be there -- to visit my daughter and hold my hours-old grandson. Only once was my nurse called on me and even her I was able to convince that I did know where I was and how to get back to my 4-West home.

These experiences reminded me of when that same daughter had her learner's permit some 2 decades earlier. I was sitting in the obligatory passenger seat admiring the competence of my pretty little chauffeur. I knew that she would pass the drivers test with flying colors -- which proved to be prescient. She got 100%, something I have never achieved either before or since.

Anyway, on that particular occasion, the task was simple. She was to navigate the car from one corner of the large California mall parking lot to the opposite corner where we could get out on the road and go home. The trouble was that it was mid-December, the Christmas shopping season was in full sway, and the parking lot was oozing with vehicles, all trolling for parking places. It was a new situation for little Michelle.

I was a little startled when I had to yell, "Stop!" at the first intersection to keep her from colliding with a car. I was even more surprised when I had to yell "Stop!" for one reason or another at every other intersection across the parking lot. That shook my confidence a little. Hers, too.

I realized that she was navigating the entire parking lot simultaneously. She was attempting to gain and keep intellectual control of every turn and every route and every alternate turn and route, and every alternate-alternate turn and route between her and her destination -- the complete parking lot, all at the same time. In the process of filling her brain with all that data, she was missing vital info, such as the fact that within 30 feet of her were multiple moving vehicles, all on a collision course with her. "No, Sweetheart," I could say. "The human brain doesn't work that way -- not even super flexible, active, 16 year old, female brains. You know exactly where you're going and generally how you want to get there. That's enough. You then have to focus on the here and now -- exactly where you are at this very second -- and make those decisions which will facilitate your eventual arrival at your known destination." I was proud of myself for my great understanding of this life-metaphor and of my ability to explain it to my daughter.

Little did I realize, as I lay face down in the dust of the Mt. Aire trail, trying to relearn how to breathe, that I was beginning a remedial course on this same lesson.

After I mastered some of the more basic techniques of breathing, I got to my feet. There were only a few things I clearly understood about my situation. First was that I hurt something awful. The second was that, at that location just below the sharp bend in the Mt. Aire trail at the saddle, I was almost exactly 1 mile from the trail-head where the car was parked and about 1200 feet above it. That meant that the average slope was 25%. And that was the average. Often it was far worse than that.

It's strange what one thinks of under those conditions. What I thought of was the allegorical story of the man who looked back over his life and noticed that every where he went there were two sets of foot prints, one beside the other, and he knew, for reasons that I don't remember, that this was because the Savior had walked with him, hand-in-hand, his entire life. But sometimes he noted that there was only one set of prints. And he also observed that this always occurred when his life had been the most difficult -- when adversity had been most intense.

"My Lord," he asked, "why did you abandon me at such times to walk the path alone? How could you have done it?"

"My son," he replied, "those were the times when I carried you."

And I thought, "Ok, my Lord, feel free to carry me now. You won't find me complaining of only one set of foot prints here. I'm ready and willing for you to carry me."

"Yes, my son," he said. "I will carry you by placing your feet exactly where they need to be all the way down the mountain," and I was filled with peace, love, joy, and security.

Then I looked down the trail and all those good feelings went away. They were replaced by uncertainty, doubt, and a fear that bordered on panic.

"You're doing it wrong," He said.

"OK, my Lord. How am I supposed to do it?"

"Don't look so far down the trail. Focus on the few feet right in front of you and I will show you and help you place your left foot. Then I will show you and help you place your right foot. Then move your focus a few feet further on and I will show you and help you place your left foot. Then I will show you and help you place your right foot, and you will be carried, inexorably, to safety."

"Yes, my Lord. I can do that." And I was filled with peace, love, joy, and security.

Trouble is, I kept screwing it up. I knew the trail and so I often looked around to see where I was, how far I'd come, and how far I still had to go, and, when I looked down the trail I was filled with fear.

"You're doing it wrong, again."

"Yes, my Lord. Focus. Left foot. Right foot...."

And, even though I kept screwing it up, eventually, with surprising abruptness, I found myself standing by the car door. I was filled with tremendous relief and gratitude for having been carried to safety.

I was then shocked at the agony induced as I folded my body into a configuration that fit inside the car and I drew all my body parts in after me. Then I gingerly drove down the canyon and was happy when there was cell service so I could reach out and touch Carolyn, and whine.

But I later could paraphrase Elizabeth Smart's statement to Oprah a few weeks earlier: "I'm not sure I'd ever choose to go through that again, nor would I ever want to wish it on anyone else, but good things resulted." In fact, I think she was saying some of the same things that the Willey and Martin handcart company survivors said. And although my tiny hour in no way compares to their multi-month ordeals, yet I can say that (1) I've never felt closer to the Lord in my entire life, nor (2) understood more fully the importance of continuously, day by day, minute by minute, making those decisions with the help of the Lord which will most optimally facilitate our journey toward the goal we all clearly have in mind. And (3) it doesn't matter how often we screw up. He has infinite patience and continues to give us help and guidance as soon as we are amenable to such. And (4) the peace of the Spirit is powerful and can coexist with physical misery, which is good because, having already had three different forms of cancer, I can expect my last days to be physically unpleasant, and (5) the Spirit is also quite different from the chemical effects of medication such as the well-expired Vicodins Carolyn gave me which induced a feeling of comfortable floating within an hour of my getting home. I've never had a clearer opportunity to compare these two effects, full-strength, in real time.

I can't think of anything I would be willing to trade for those experiences.

Grandkids are growing

2008-09-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

Melinda's post re Dillon's talk reminded me that our grandkids are growing up so fast that it startles us. That's the case even for Claire whom we see multiple times each week. How much more is it the case for the ones we see only a couple of times a year.

In August, it was a novelty to carry on a conversation with Dillon. That's never been possible before. In this case it was about Melinda's instructions concerning his breakfast. I had questions: "Did she say..?" and he told me exactly what she must have said because that's the way she does it. And when I got it wrong anyway, he would correct me. "Grandpa, Mommy doesn't cut up my waffle." He ate it anyway.

And Claire comes up with surprises, too.

Grandma informed me in their presence, "When Claire allows you to put on her eye patch, give her and Dillon a see-oh-oh-kay-eye-ee." "No!" exclaimed Claire. "Only I should get the see-oh-kay-eye-ee."

Logical. But we're going to have to learn Spanish.

And at Wheeler Farm, Claire, Dillon, and I came out of the restroom and saw Melinda rapidly pushing Jeremy in his stroller up the sidewalk away from us. She probably didn't know where we were and she was hurrying to search for us. We cut across this huge lawn to intercept her.

Claire, at a dead run with Dillon in tow, headed for a foot bridge across a ditch made to look like a little brook that separated us from the sidewalk. I noticed that there was a tiny rope strung across the foot bridge with a triangular flag hanging from it to prevent someone from accidentally tripping over the rope. I looked around and noted that the entire huge lawn was roped off, apparently for a private reservation for a group I noted occupying a distant corner. We had entered it at the only place where it was not roped off -- near the restroom, of course.

Claire saw the rope just in time to avoid running into it and she stopped so fast that Dillon almost ran into her. Then she turned away. That surprised me because I expected the rope to be about as much hindrance to their progress as a sunbeam across their path.

Claire headed upstream to another little bridge which, by that time, was even closer to Melinda and found the rope strung across that one, too. At this point, she also looked around and saw that the entire lawn was roped off.

"Grandpa," she exclaimed in dismay, "we can't get out!"

I was startled and impressed with her respect for law, order, and barrier, and I considered turning around and exiting the area by the restroom where we had entered. I considered it for a good 2 milliseconds, then I lifted up the rope and invited her and Dillon to walk under it, which they did. Claire was wearing a little grin as she did so.

And I felt terrible. I hope I didn't permanently damage their respect for law and order.

Time for your swimming lesson, Claire.

2008-09-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

I think I made a mistake when I pointed out to Claire that the only place she was allowed to run was on the diving board. I was shocked to suddenly see my 5-year old granddaughter sprinting the length of the diving board and gleefully leaping wide out over the rippling chasm. And here I am, sprinting through the water to grab her within 2 seconds after she hit the 9 foot bottom -- more for my peace of mind than hers, apparently.

She had found an exciting new activity we could do together and she repeated it over and over leaving grandpa exhausted and the lifeguard, observing all from atop her pedestal, giggling.

Claire is now registered for swimming lessons beginning November 1st.

If you're 50 and not a conservative....

2008-09-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

I have a favorite quote which I often pull on my kids. They respond with eye rolls and other signs of irritation. The quote is attributed to Churchill:

"If you're 20 years old and not a liberal, you have no heart. If you're 50 years old and not a conservative, you have no brain."

This speaks truth to me, but the best expression of this truth was recently given by national columnist, Thomas Sowell, in his 9/11 column. From his picture, Sowell appears to be a good looking black man. This is his column:

Liberals' lofty vision often runs counter to real world threats, experience

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience — but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.

"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain — whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary — can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.

Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded people.

Even people born into normal lives, but who have been able through talent or luck to escape into a world of celebrity and wealth, can likewise find themselves in the enviable position of being able to choose whether to grow up or not.

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution. The working class are in fact today among those most skeptical about the visions of the left.

Ordinary working class people did not lead the stampede to Barack Obama, even before his disdain for them slipped out in unguarded moments.

The agenda of the left is fine for the world that they envision as existing today and the world they want to create tomorrow.

That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by inherent constraints and the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a world where there are attractive, win-win "solutions" in place of those ugly trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in.

Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing nations and work things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military equipment to keep them at bay. The left calls this "change" but in fact it is a set of notions that were tried out by the Western democracies in the 1930s — and which led to the most catastrophic war in history.

For those who bother to study history, it was precisely the opposite policies in the 1980s — pouring tons of money into military equipment — which brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation to an end.

The left fought bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted the burden of the Soviet threat, instead of leading to war as the elites claimed.

Personally, I wish Ronald Reagan could have talked the Soviets into being nicer, instead of having to spend all that money. Only experience makes me skeptical about that "kinder and gentler" approach and the vision behind it.

The Church Will Prosper

2008-07-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

In Tuesday's live BYU devotional, Scott M. Ritter quoted a scripture that I've been thinking a lot about recently:

"As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints." (D&C 121:33)

I've been thinking about that with respect to Anne Osborn. See my blog of Sunday, June 29, 2008. Recording our thoughts in black and white helps to solidify them and to reveal previously unrecognized correlations. This is the epiphany that resulted:

The Church will continue to prosper.

Why? Because the Lord is providing a steady stream of souls of Anne's caliber who have amazing spiritual experiences and who then become powerful tools in His hands.

In Tuesday's devotional, Ritter also offered a number of interesting quotes about the effects of the Spirit. (He also commended and praised Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which was startling but with which I totally agree, but that's for another journal entry.)

It's as I generalized from one full-time mission and three stake missions: If a person sheds tears during the first discussion, that person will be baptized and will remain active. It's not necessary. We saw many who were not immediately so affected but who were still baptized and remained active, but from the handful of examples of those who were so affected, it appears to be sufficient.

Why? Because we are more convinced by our feelings than by our intellect. Bruce Springsteen was right when he said, "I continue to do this [make music and go on concert tours, etc., even though he has plenty of money for the rest of his life] into 'old age' [he's 58] because of the way it makes me feel and because of the way I can make others feel." (A quote from tonight's 60 Minutes.)

And that's what the Holy Ghost did to Anne Osborn. It provides the most intensely euphoric "high" possible. People know, intuitively, that they should have and should be having this "high" and they try to find it or find out how to get as close to it as possible.

So much of what people believe will lead them to it turns out to be a chimera. I'm not saying that Springsteen's music falls into this category. Music, if wholesome, leads to this high, though often only the way I-80 leads to Cheyenne. We can get on it and reach Cheyenne, or we may get on it and then get off at Park City or maybe even at Parley's Way. To reach the destination our numinous sense perceives and longs for, we have to go way beyond Springsteen. Anne found this way and fully pursued it.

And, as D&C 121:33 says, the Lord doesn't give us this high just to make us feel good. It's accompanied by tremendous insight and knowledge. The mysteries of the heavens are opened to us. The Holy Ghost places pure knowledge into our minds and this is always accompanied by this highest of all highs and greatest of all joys. Nothing else even approaches this for compelling conviction. It is knowledge in its purest sense.

Because of Anne, and so many, many others like her, the Church will prosper and continue to prosper.

We can be part of that if we choose. We can allow ourselves to become amenable to the greatest blessings, insight, and joy the Lord has for us and be a great benefit to the Lord, or we can take the first convenient exit off that freeway or even plunge into the tragic dead-end of a chimera pursuit and become irrelevant.

It's our choice.

Thinking of Nothing is a Productive Thing to Do

2008-07-06T15:29:00.001-07:00

There's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity.

The lead article in this week's MormonTimes has the headline “Noise reduction” with subhead: “Making time to reflect allows spirit to connect.” It derives strictly from LDS sources and quotes multiple prophets including President Hinkley. The bottom line is that we need to allocate time for pondering and meditation, and this time should be free of noise and other sensory stimulation, and that is difficult in today's world.

Of course I enjoy some of the non-LDS confirmation sources as well.

The Larry Fleinhardt character of NUMB3RS is an introspective genius who tends to perceive the human condition in terms of cosmic metaphors. He seems to believe in meditation and he practices it but characterizes it as “trying to think of nothing.” The writers skillfully leave it to the viewer to decide whether this is valid and, if so, whether it's productive.

I believe that it is both valid and productive. There are a number of documented evidences for this. I will reference two:

1. A recent NOVA episode and a recent 60 Minutes report both featured the same study that shows that deep sleep facilitates learning and memory. Subjects are instructed to type an unfamiliar and awkward sequence of numbers with the non-dominant hand. It requires many minutes of practice to do it easily and accurately. Twelve hours later they are found to have lost quite a bit of facility and accuracy, as expected, unless they have had a significant amount of sleep during that time. In the latter case, it is found that both the speed and accuracy have significantly improved! In other words, while the person sleeps, the brain is constructing new connections to facilitate the activity and this is found to occur during the deepest part of the sleep – the delta-wave sleep, the time when the person is most nearly comatose.

“Let me sleep on it and get back to you,” is a reflection of the historic recognition given to this phenomenon. Many people have observed that they go to bed with confusing, insolvable problems in their heads and wake up the next morning with confusion dissipated and the solutions clear.

This is found to benefit both learning and memory. A person of my age spends much less time in this deep sleep phase and this is seen to be a possible factor in an older persons degradation of memory and of ability to learn new things.

2 In skilled meditators – e.g. the Dahli Lahma and his associates – where they are able to closely approach Dr. Fleinhardt's “thinking of nothing” state, brain scans show that the brain actually increases in its energy consumption, and a larger than normal quantity of the brain is involved in this energy-consuming activity. What is the brain doing when one would think that it is not doing much of anything? That brings up the advantages of meditation which are touted as ability to reprogram the subconscious, alter one's basic personality and intuitive/reflexive responses, and solve problems as mentioned in number 1 above, among other things.

In other words, there's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity. If we rely on thinking, reasoning, observing, and activity alone without the quiet interludes to allow the subconscious sorting, cataloguing, referencing, and correlating activities that turn data into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom, we are impeding, even laming our effectiveness.

If we can't find time to sit down and meditate without grabbing a book, a TV remote, a game control, or counter-cross-stitch, we are denying ourselves a great deal.

And, of course, the temple is an ideal place for the kind of meditative reflection mentioned. We should not have to immediately grab the scriptures when we sit down in the assembly chapel or even in the Celestial Room. The Lord wants to reveal amazing mysteries of the kingdom to us. We should give him the chance. Prayer is supposed to be a two-way conversation.

Claire Casitgates Legs

2008-07-04T21:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a big week for Claire and her two-wheeler. She crammed to prepare to be in the Evergreen parade. She was close to being able to ride without the training wheels, but not quite close enough.

Her cramming did some good and now she's much more at ease with the bike. Today, even after the parade, she wanted to go, go, go on her bike -- long trips with Mommy and Daddy who accompanied her on foot (Grandpa concentrated on the shorter practices up and down the hill in front of the house).

Such activities produced a new effect for her: leg aches! She became noticeably irritated with her legs and chewed them out for slowing her down! She then insisted that they stop at a bicycle gas station which she identified and had to point out to Mommy and Daddy. After pausing there for 30 seconds, she declared the bicycle gas tank to be full and off they went again. That particular round trip was close to two miles. She did a much longer one earlier with Daddy. Good exercise for all of them.

Two weeks later, she was riding comfortably without training wheels. If there were a local parade for the 24th....

(And now I've learned to upload pictures! Getting them positioned where I want them is another issue. Anyone got any hints?)

Claire's Cute, Too

2008-07-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

Our kids generate blogs primarily to comment on the cuteness of our grandchildren -- and that's a very valuable function.

That's not my primary function, but we can do it, too, since we have Claire two days a week, and tonight is a special sleepover in preparation for the 4th of July parade tomorrow morning.

Though not yet having started kindergarten, Claire's getting to be quite a little mathematician. For instance, she can add 2+2, 4+4, 4+3, and even 7+7. The latter is quite a stretch considering her finger-counting technique. She can count almost indefinitely. Almost. Grandma said, "Look, Claire. The temperature is 99 degrees! What comes after ninety-nine?" "Ninety-ten," she responded without hesitation. (Well, if it had been the generally accepted answer, it wouldn't have been worth commenting on. Right?)

When Grandpa got back to the table, Grandma and Claire had a monkey-quiz for him extracted from the sack of the Carl's Jr. kiddie lunch. (Carl's Jr -- her choice tonight.) Grandpa even got some of them right. "I want to do it again!" stated Claire.

"OK," said Grandma. "What time is it when 20 monkeys chase one banana?"

"Twenty after one," said Claire.

"Where does a 2000 pound gorilla sit when he's tired?"

"Anywhere he wants!"

"What did the banana say to the monkey?"

"Nothing. Bananas can't talk."

"What kind of key doesn't open doors?"

"A gorilla!"

OK. Some things can be over rehearsed.

Maybe someday, I'll even learn how to post pictures.

Glory in Weakness

2008-07-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

I watched Br. Barnes devotional a second time. It's nice to have it DVR'd. These are significant points that speak to me:

1. Weakness is not sin. Sin is a conscious violation of God's commandments. Weakness is a gift from God (as clearly defined in Ether 12:27).

2. The atonement of Christ does not change us to eliminate our weaknesses. It changes us to accommodate and deal effectively with our weaknesses and to be strengthened by them.

3. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, begged the Lord thrice to take his "thorn" away, but was blessed, instead, to glory in his thorn for the good it brought him in Jesus Christ.

A new thought to me, therefore, since I have the same weakness as Br. Barnes -- fear of looking bad -- is that I will always have this fear of looking bad, but that I will be strengthened as I become more effective in dealing with it. Same for all my other weaknesses.

Fear of Looking Bad

2008-07-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

Michael Barne's in today's BYU devotional, touched a powerful chord. In a discussion of Ether 12:27 and of 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10, he used his own weakness of "the fear of looking bad" as a case in point. I recognize this, with this exact wording, as a serious problem for me. In a recent discussion with Melinda, who is very good at expressing her personal concerns, and in on-going discussions with Carolyn, who, after four decades feels equally free, I understand this fear to be common to all three of us -- and therefore possibly to many more.

I am impressed with Brother Barne's thorough examination of Ether 12:27 (a scripture which was also a favorite of Mom's, Ireta C. Head's, and which she considered to be useful to me because she often drew my attention to it), and I refer everyone to this examination. It is available on http://www.byub.org/devotionals/ and should soon be downloadable and viewable online.

If I can come up with a bottom line to this half-hour devotional, it is the concluding clause in Ether 12:27: "...then will I make weak things [i.e., the fear-of-looking-bad mentioned above] become strong unto them," and 2 Corinthians 12:10: "Therefore I take pleasure in [my weaknesses] for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, then am I strong."

But I advise everyone to watch/listen to the entire devotional.

Anne Osborn -- "I knew it was true."

2008-06-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

I walked into priesthood meeting early one Sunday morning in (or around) 1970 and was startled to see a stunningly beautiful girl sitting on the stand as though she belonged there. There was also another woman and there were two men, none of whom were familiar. Bishop Donaldson of the Stanford 2nd Ward informed us that he had invited these four people to tell us about their recent conversion.

I don't remember anything any of them said except the girl. She informed us that her name was Anne Osborn, that she was a medical student at Stanford, and that she had been baptized just two days before. It was not lost on us that her first church meeting as a fully baptized Mormon was priesthood meeting.

Having been asked to tell us about her conversion, Anne complied in amazing detail with primary emphasis on the most recent three weeks. I'd never heard such an explicit description of the way the Holy Ghost works in a conversion, nor the way the adversary tries to nullify the process. She never actually mentioned "Holy Ghost" or "adversary" or any similar terms, but it was clear what had happened. I sat transfixed. It seemed as though every spiritual experience I'd ever had in my entire life was being described with words for the first time. So that's how it's expressed! How it sounds! And the whole thing accompanied a spiritual atmosphere so dense that one scarcely dared to breathe. It was an experience that I'll never forget.

Anne went on to become a popular fireside speaker. No wonder, I thought, with the story she has to tell. She wrote a number of Church books and she wrote articles in official and semi-official Church publications. She eventually married Ron Poelman, a widowed general authority. Vocationally, she became an internationally recognized neuroradiologist writing texts and publishing innumerable papers. One can Google her as "Anne G. Osborn" to get a flavor of her vocational acclaim or as "Anne Osborn Poelman" for the church flavor.

A few years after the priesthood meeing, I had an opportunity to attend one of her firesides. I looked forward to a reprise of her amazing account. She spent the better part of an entire hour telling about her conversion. She even mentioned the priesthood meeting, but she covered the main three week climax of her conversion in a single sentence: "I studied with the missionaries for three weeks and was baptized."

Yeah? That was it?! What a disappointment.

At the conclusion of the fireside, I told her that I was at that priesthood meeting and heard her amazing account and wanted to hear it again. She said, "Oh, I never talk about those things. They're too sacred."

OK, that I understood. As Dale Mouritsen points out, the word "mystery" as in "mysteries of the kingdom" come from a root that means "keep you're mouth shut." You're not supposed to talk about them. They're for you, only. If you try to talk about them, you'll likely lose them. But that doesn't apply to me, I thought. I can talk about Anne's experiences. I can record what she said -- and I remember a lot of it! I won't lose them because they're not mine to lose. And I fully intended to do this in a written journal form -- this form.

But as I sat down to compose the words I would use, I couldn't do it. Her expressions remain inexpressible! They're not only her experiences, they're my experiences too, and I cannot put them into words! And now I understand 3 Nephi 19:34.

One example I will record, however, because it illustrates the principle of testimony and of spiritual knowledge and because I fully intend to use it some day in a testimony meeting or in a talk. It is a rather mundane account of the climax of her story:

She described how she was interviewed by the zone leaders just before she was baptized. During such interviews, they determine the extent of a person's gospel understanding and the solidity of the person's testimony. It includes the understanding of the nature of the Godhead. She had had all the lessons, but she had considered these discussions symbolic. How can one understand the nature of God? During the interview, she became aware for the first time that she was supposed to view God as literally having a body and as existing in space and time. This was not possible! She was a medical student. How was she supposed to perceive God as having a body of flesh?! She argued with the zone leaders -- and failed the interview.

They told her to go into an adjacent room by herself and pray about it.

She collapsed in tears. The whole thing was a fraud. How could she have been so duped? Where had those amazing experiences and feelings come from? Her depression was the deepest it had been since the process had started and in the agony of her soul, she uttered a prayer to whomever and whatever she had been associated with for weeks. She immediately found herself lifted to the highest joy and euphoria that she had experienced since the process had started and she informed us, "I knew it was true!"

And we knew that she knew.

Submissive, Gentle

2008-06-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

The most pointed part of my "mantra" (which see in a recent blog) is the phrase, "be submissive and gentle." The entire mantra is significant, but this phrase provides the most intense and reliable spiritual jolt. "Submissive" by itself doesn't do it. Neither does "gentle" by itself. It takes both of them.

Clearly this is an area in which the Lord is especially desirous of having me make progress. My basic personality is neither submissive nor gentle. The two together form a total disconnect, but my nature is to be changed to fit. Only God can change our basic nature. Can I doubt that He will succeed? If so, is it not my faith that must be strengthened?

Alma 7:23 is the only place in scriptures where this combination occurs. Elder Scott's talk was vital for me to hear and to experience.

James E. Faust, Pauline, and Juliet

2008-06-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

In James E. Faust's final general conference talk (April, 2007), he described in some detail the recent situation among the Amish where a non-Amish milkman went crazy and murdered five of their girls and wounded five others before taking his own life. The Amish community responded with instant forgiveness even sharing the money they received as contributions with the family of the milkman declaring that they were as much victims as the Amish were.

President Faust also mentioned the bishop who lost his wife and two of his children to the actions of a drunk driver on Christmas Eve, 2006. This bishop frankly and immediately forgave the young man who was responsible.

President Faust also mentioned a few other similar incidents, concluding that forgiveness is empowering and leads to health, whereas hate is debilitating and leads to illness.

When I was 15, an event occurred which, over the next few decades, taught me some unsettling things about myself. At that time, two 15 year old girls by the name of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in Christchurch, New Zealand, murdered one Nora Parker who happened to be the mother of Pauline thereby creating an international scandal.

I hated those two girls. I hated them for three reasons:

1. I couldn't imagine a more horrible crime than murdering your own mother or helping someone else do that.

2. They were my age. In fact they were respectively three months and two months older than I, which was even worse.

3. They were girls! Girls are better than boys. That was my perception as a 15 year old and it's pretty much my perception as a 69 year old. Girls have higher standards than boys. They are held to higher standards by society. They hold themselves to higher standards.

For two girls, my age, to have committed such a horrible crime...! Well, it was obvious that they were the most evil people in the history of the world and would reign with Satan in eternity, Pauline on Satan's right hand and Juliet on his left. I was appalled that New Zealand didn't provide for capital punishment for teenagers. I didn't realize at the time that no civilized country allowed for capital punishment for teenagers, but I felt that I would be perfectly willing to be their executioner myself and I made sure everyone knew that, and I even fantasized how I would do it. It was a good thing that New Zealand was far away from Utah.

I thought about this some five decades later as I stood across the desk from Juliet Hulme to solicit her autograph on a book that she had written. I had missed the book signing the previous day at Deseret Book and so I was attending the one at a Barns and Noble in Salt Lake City. I was acutely aware that here was one of the girls I had once fantasized killing.

Of course, by that time I knew a little about her history. She was sentenced to five years in an adult prison, the maximum sentence that could be imposed on a teenager in New Zealand. When she was released, she assumed a new identity and disappeared from public awareness. Pauline served her five years, was then on probation for another five years, then she, too, disappeared from public awareness. In 1992, a movie about this event was released entitled Heavenly Creatures. The part of Juliet Hulme was played by Kate Winslet. This role jump-started Winslet's career. I don't remember off-hand the actress who played the Pauline part. As a result of this movie, some investigative reporters set out to find out what happened to these two girls. Juliet was located and was immediately outed as the well-established novelist Anne Perry – and as a Mormon. Pauline was also located, but her situation was more tragic and even these conscience-challenged reporters decided not to out her. That was left for later, even more conscience-challenged reporters.

The outing of Juliet Hulme immediately induced the Church to publish an article in The Church News which stated, in effect, that the church knew all about Anne Perry, AKA Juliet Hulme. When she was converted in her late 20's, the First Presidency carefully reviewed her case and approved her for baptism and for being washed clean of all her sins! Since then she has served the church well in a number of ways including use of her writing skills. She has written material for various official and semi-official church publications both under her own name (Anne Perry, to which she legally had her name changed) as well, especially earlier, as a ghost writer for various GA's. She was also the primary contributor to the well-received History of the Mormon Church in the British Isles.

And this was one of the girls whom I had hated so much that I had fantasized killing.

We never know all the circumstances surrounding any action. That's one of the lessons from this event. When Juliet Hulme was outed, news media of the entire world wanted to interview her -- so many that she was totally overwhelmed and quickly lost count. The interview I heard was on NPR's Fresh Aire of which Juliet/Anne told me she had no recollection. In this interview, Terry Gross asked her the question that all of them asked: “Why did you do it?” Her response was that she was faced with a horrible choice. It was either the life of her friend or the life of her friend's mother. If Nora continued to live, Pauline would die. She chose the life of her friend.

(Pauline was anorexic. Juliet was keeping her alive. Nora was not understanding of that situation and was intent on taking Pauline away from New Zealand. That would result in Pauline's death. It was as simple as that. That was the perception of both girls.)

Of course, that turned out to be very bad judgement on the part of adolescent girls. Fifteen year olds – even fifteen year old girls – are not known for clear, mature thinking. Perhaps that's not an excuse or a justification. It's just a reason. But I see the possibility that God would understand this reason. Certainly the First Presidency seemed to see it that way.

This whole multi-decade incident has given me insight into my propensities and basic nature. I wonder how much of it has "taken." When I hear of some of the horrific acts perpetrated by some people in this world, I find that the hate, anger, and fantasies that well up inside of me are not qualitatively different from those of my 15-year old self. And yet how many of the "reasons" might the Lord be inclined to forgive? Many of the people who are doing really horrible things have the best of motives. They believe that they are doing the will of God. They are even willing to sacrifice their own lives if necessary. These aren't just words, they're actions. We believe, perhaps we even know by the Spirit, that they are most horribly mistaken.

Saul of Tarsus would have been termed a "terrorist" if that word had been in vogue among the early saints. He was horribly mistaken. The scriptures so testify. He went through hell to attain his eventual status of Paul, the great apostle of the Lord.

So do we know for sure how the Lord will judge the current terrorists? They are under the influence of him who has promised to reign upon this earth with carnage and terror and who seems to be quite successful. But whose fault is that? Theirs? Unconditionally? Are we sure? Was it Paul's? Certainly they will have to go through significant "hell" just as Paul did, but thereafter, who will be standing closer to salvation after the judgement, Bin Laden or myself? The fact that the answer is not completely obvious is troubling.

And that brings us back to Pres. Faust's talk. Even the most obvious open-and-shut cases can have exonerating circumstances. That being so in Pauline and Juliet's case, how much more might it be so in most family or neighborhood squabbles where the consequences are far less dramatic. President Faust points out that God will forgive whom He will forgive, but as for us, we are required to forgive all men. (D&C 64:10)

The Mantra

2008-06-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

I sit down for a spiritual interlude with a recently DVR'd BYU devotional and, with a stab of disappointment, realize it's by Elder Scott. Elder Scott's not my favorite GA. Too cloyingly sweet for my taste, and I voice same to the Lord and receive a sharp rebuke by the spirit.

Wo! That surprises me. Whenever I'm doing anything worthy of a rebuke, which is often, I don't have the spirit at all. This is a rare event. In fact, I don't remember it ever happening before.

I sit up straight with eyes wide. Ok, ok! I get it. I'll give him the respect and attention he deserves. The spirit confirms that this is the right decision.

His talk centers primarily on Alma 7:23:

“And now I would that ye should be humble, and be submissive and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long-suffering; being temperate in all things; being diligent in keeping the commandments of God at all times; asking for whatsoever things ye stand in need, both spiritual and temporal; always returning thanks unto God for whatsoever things ye do receive.”

That's one of those verses containing the entire ten commandments in a single sentence, one which you read quickly through without trying to comprehend every clause because you're trying to get through 4 pages in ten minutes. “Yes, that's Book of Mormon language, alright. Beautiful... I think.”

It takes an entire BYU devotional to explain it all, phrase by phrase.

Did I understand Elder Scott? Be humble, be submissive and gentle, easy to be entreated.... What's that mean? Easily entreated? “Please, sir, can you spare a dollar?” “Hello, little sister. No I can't. I saw you on Channel 2 News where it was suggested that your claim to being homeless is a bald-faced lie....” Does that qualify? If I say it with loving kindness? Hm.... full of patience and long suffering.... All those qualities which are completely incompatible with my personality, but totally compatible with Elder Scott's.

Ok, I've got some work to do here, Lord. A little help would be helpful. Only God can change one's basic nature. That's what C. S. Lewis says. It's also what our evangelical, born-again Christian friends say. Not to mention the atonement. The parable of the bicycle and all. Ok, Lord. I'm ready for my basic nature to be changed. I'll try to cooperate with the process. Please let me know what, when, and how. It's in your court. Isn't it?

New mantra: humble, submissive and gentle, easily entreated, full of patience and long-suffering. Humble, submissive, gentle, entreat, patience, long-suffering. Humblesubmissivegentle....

And I'm parked at Smith's, a huge SUV next to me. The only way to get out of here is to check to make sure no one is behind me then slowly back out to where I can see around this SUV and make sure it's safe to back out further. Someone lays on their horn with a resounding bellow that reverberates for a totally unnecessary eternity. I show great restraint by laying on my own horn for a mere half as long as he did.

Be humble, submissive and gentle, easy to entreat, full of patience and long suffering. Be humble, submissive, gentle, entreat, patience, long suffering.

I follow him out of the parking lot.

Humble, submissive, gentle....

He turns down 33rd.

...patience, long suffering. I could use some help here, Lord. Humble, submissive....

He turns into the outside lane. I immediately pull over into the inside lane, planning to pass him.

...gentle, entreat...

I get some passing help. He comes to a sudden stop behind a line of a half dozen cars. Someone's having trouble making a right turn. I zoom past him, fully prepared to glare it him... in a humble, submissive way, of course.

And I catch a side-view glimpse of a little man with sparse white hair, a few strands of which are sticking straight up as though wave-set into that position. A web of skin drapes from the tip of his chin to his Adam's apple. His hands are gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I can almost see his white knuckles from here. His mouth is open wide and so are his eyes staring at the car in front of him, and his look says, “What's happening?! The whole world is conspiring to get me! I just want to get home! I'm not sure I'm going to survive! Oh, me! I'm not going to make it! I'm not going to make it!” And my heart melts. I want to take him in my arms and tell him, “It's OK. It's OK. There, there. You're going to be fine. God loves you, little man... and so do I.”

Mantra, aside, God does help. We are works in progress.

Anniversary

2008-06-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

We've been married 41 years. Not only does Carolyn aver that. My own extensive math skills confirm it. At least after a misstep or two.

When did we actually become one? In thought and purpose? In feeling and perception? Or, at least, if not exactly one, where there may be differences, when did the other's become OK, too? When did I first look at her and feel overwhelmingly grateful for the shear love I felt for her? For God's having put us together?

It wasn't 41 years ago, that's for sure. We were both much too self-centered then and saw our joining as a means of satisfying our own personal needs – needs for companionship, for completion in a world that demanded marriage unification, for fitting together like pieces of a puzzle – spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically.

But it wasn't that recent, either. It wasn't this year. Perhaps not even this decade. Or even this double decade.

Never the less, this year it probably reached its zenith – so far, at least.

The Sunday afternoon before my big cancer surgery, we sat together on the love-seat in the living room as close as we could get, acutely aware that our remaining time of unity on this earth may be measured in a small number of months. We started talking and found that we were finishing each other's sentences, “yes, and...” “yes, and...” and discovering that we had the same thoughts, the same perceptions, the same emotions, the same large set of questions, the same small set of answers. A stream of consciousness flowed in, through, and around us enveloping us in common awareness, and to paraphrase a sentence out of “Return with Honor,” it was as though every cell in our bodies was resonating at the frequency of love. We were understanding with a single mind, loving with a single heart.

It was an afternoon I will never forget.

What's left over from that experience is that I can no longer conceive of Exaltation without that relationship with Carolyn on an on-going, permanent basis.

Understanding with a single mind.

Loving with a single heart.

And being grateful....

The Long Story

2008-06-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

This is the “long story” mentioned in “Testimony.” I'll place it here because I like it and no one else will read it anyway.

My January, 2008, hernia repair surgery took more than two hours. That worried Carolyn because her full hip replacement surgery took barely an hour. Dr Kim came out and told Carolyn and Michelle that everything went fine but that he found some “calcified scare tissue” which was unusual. He figured it was nothing to worry about but since he didn't know what it was, he sent it to the pathologist to identify it. Dr. Benjamin Kim is a noted oncology surgeon and the fact that he didn't immediately recognize it is an indication of how rare it is.

A week later, when we went in for our follow-up appointment, he said that he had talked to the pathologist just before our appointment and the news was “serious.” He said it was MFH (malignant fibrous histiocycoma) in the spermatic chord. That was a rare combination and he wrote those words down on paper so that we could google them. I jokingly asked him, “How long do I have to live,” and he non-jokingly responded, “I'm not sure.” MFH of the spermatic chord is very rare – only a couple of dozen cases are noted in recorded history, but it was somewhat safer than MFH in the general abdominal cavity. He said that he had not found a core mass from which the tumor could be emanating. When asked if that was good or bad, he said he wasn't sure. He tip-toed around the question, but one got the impression that it probably wasn't a good sign. It could mean that the core mass was somewhere else in the abdomen and that it had simply metastasized to the spermatic chord. It turned out he had a hunch that the mysterious indications in the August, 2007 CT scan which had alternately been diagnosed as a small diverticulitis that had not shown up in the colonoscopy or as an appendix aploica was in reality this core mass – which turned out to be essentially correct – but he didn't tell us of his hunch until later.

However, the Internet gave us much unvarnished information about MFH reported with clinical detachment. There were some cases of spermatic chord MFH which had been cured, but it was by no means 50%. MFH in an extremity such as an arm or leg could sometimes be cured by removing the arm or leg. MFH in the abdominal cavity was almost never cured. The likelihood of my surviving for five years with such was pretty much nil and more likely death would occur within three years. It was only our state of denial that gave us any hope at all. It had to be in the spermatic chord and we would be one of the minority cases that would be cured. The foreboding image of it emanating from a large mass higher up in the abdomen and the death-sentence that would be, we tried to ignore.

I always thought that I was so spiritually mature and at ease with death being part of life and a necessary step toward exaltation that I would completely bypass the stages of mourning when presented with the prospect of my own death. That proved to be incorrect. I didn't jump straight from information to acceptance. I don't think I was ever in the anger stage. That was one that I missed, but all the others were there. As mentioned above, denial was prominent in all our information research, and we struggled to maintain it even as data gnawed at it. I'm not sure about Carolyn, but I, myself, went through the negotiation stage in my fervent prayers. Well, I'm sure Carolyn did that too. Depression was a biggy for both of us. It was the main issue for the three weeks that we thought I might die soon. And, as suggested on the Internet, we went in and out, back and forth, from one of these stages to another.

The acceptance stage was gradually solidifying around us. I began to make plans for what I needed to accomplish in the next year or so of healthy life I had left. Spiritual issues became preeminently important. We saw into eternity and making plans for it were vital. Our dedication to the Lord and our commitment to Him increased significantly. We even agreed that we would be willing to serve a couple mission if we got the chance.

Tom and Bill administered to me. So did Bishop Reese and Bob Palmer, our high priests group leader. Many in the family held a fast day for me – which I was scarcely aware of. Helen contacted her entire posterity and had my name put on the prayer rolls of various temples. Later she recited to me a partial list of those temples in places around the world. I didn't remember many of them except that I noted at the time that she named temples in places I didn't know there were temples. Also, she said that many of her posterity attended the temple and participated in the prayer circle in my behalf.

Dr Kim tried to give us hope. My unusual case was being carefully monitored by the “cancer board” which met every Friday and consisted of experts and specialists from all over the valley. He had gotten lots of suggestions and council from all sorts of different disciplines. He said that during the surgery, they would send real-time samples to the pathologist to guide the scalpel. They prepped me to allow him to remove part of my colon or intestine if necessary and promised that any disorder at the incision boundary would be taken care of by radiation. If the pre-op CT scan showed any tumor seeds in the lungs (which it didn't), they could also be excised. All in all, it stood a good chance of lengthening my life span. He tried to be encouraging and, if the promise of good outcome disagreed with the Internet, it must only be because of excellent progress that had recently been made and because of Dr. Kim's great reputation (and it is great as indicated from the Internet and from many good words about him given us by friends and by physicians) – and because we went in and out of denial.

In the weeks before the surgery, Carolyn schooled me in numerous exercises to say, “Hi, Honey, I'm fine, I love you” as soon as I became conscious after surgery and saw her for the first time. This I did. Her face was the first thing I remember seeing and I repeated as trained, “Hi, Honey, I'm fine, I love you.” She seemed to barely force a smile, said almost nothing, and disappeared immediately. I was disappointed. Didn't I do it right?

I was told that she went somewhere and broke down. It had been a trying six hours.

We were told that the operating room was scheduled for only two hours. I kissed Carolyn and was wheeled away at about 2 p.m. She and Michelle expected the surgery to be finished by 4 p.m. Instead, I was moved to a holding room for an hour and was taken to the operating room at about 3 p.m. People puttered around, Dr. Kim came in and greeted me, and the next thing I was aware of was Carolyn looking at me over the bed railing. The surgery actually toke more than four hours. Carolyn and Michelle received no information until 7 p.m. and it was another hour before they could see me. Beginning at 4 p.m., Carolyn became increasingly panicky and was beside herself after a three hour wait.

The surgery encountered a rather large tumor called a “well-differentiated lyposarcoma,” or a cancer of the fat tissue. Guided by the real-time pathology analysis, this entire tumor was excised together with all the fat in my lower left abdominal cavity. Also excised was the left spermatic chord and the left testicle. Since the spermatic chord contains the blood vessels that supply the testicle, the latter could not be left in after the chord was removed. Dr. Kim described the excised tumor mass and held up his hands to show an approximate size which Carolyn reported, with some dismay, as being the size and shape of a football. He later clarified that it wasn't the shape of a football. It was more the shape of a squid with the body at the top and the tentacles reaching down the cavity into and around the spermatic chord. Since the tumor was a lyposarcoma and did not involve the anything except the fat tissue, it was not necessary to remove any of the colon or the intestine. He reported having placed “clips” in my body to delineate the excision margins and to help position the gun for later radiation treatment.

Carolyn spent most of her time with me in the hospital room, so she was there four days later when Dr. Kim came in late Saturday afternoon and uttered the words: “Good news!” It seems that almost nothing of the original MFH was found in the pathology report. There was just “one microscopic location” of the original tumor in the center of the excision mass. The MFH had therefor been removed with a “generous margin” as is required to stop this tumor. An examination of the three lymph nodes that had also been removed showed no tumor. This is good evidence that the tumor had not widely metastasized and that, statistically speaking, it had all been removed although the pathology report (which see on the Head Family web site) included the standard CYA clause stating that they were unable to test for distant metastasis. In other words, at the time of the hernia repair, most of the dangerous tumor was removed when it was excised to send to the pathologist. This shows that even the scariest cancers can be dealt with if found early enough, and the hernia had accomplished that.

A well-differentiated lyposarcoma is relatively benign. It seldom metastasizes and can be controlled almost indefinitely through surgery. I told Dr. Kim that this was my understanding of “benign tumor .” He said rather emphatically that it is definitely a malignant tumor, so I had to look up the medical definition of malignant vs benign.

A benign tumor does not metastasize, it does not invade other organs, and it is encapsulated inside a membrane. A well-differentiated lypsarcoma does not usually metastasize or invade other organs, but it is not covered with a membrane and does invade the space between organs. It will eventually crowd the organs and disrupt their function, thereby killing the patient. When excised, it usually comes back where it was before.

Note that “well-differentiated” means that the tumor still behaves like the original material from which it comes. A non-differentiated tumor is tissue which has lost all former functionality and appears to have, as it's one objective, to simply grow beyond all bounds. “Well-differentiated” means that the cancer tissue still performs much of its original function. In this case, it stores fat when told to by the body's endocrine system. It pulls blood lipids out of the blood or converts blood sugars to fat and stores them. When called upon, it will also release these into the blood. It grows when we gain weight and shrinks when we diet, etc. The problem is that it continues to grow even when we are maintaining a stable body weight. It looks almost exactly like fat in the CT scan and can be distinguished from it only by examining it closely. Dr. Kim showed us some of the images obtained during the arthroscopic investigative examination that proceeded the surgery. They show the tumor with a blue tint compared to the pink of the fat.

But it grows slowly and, as stated, can usually be controlled with surgery. The Internet says that the five year survival rate is essentially 100%. Probably it's most severe problem is its propensity to mutate to a much more deadly form. And that's what it seems to have done in this case. It became an MFH. No one knows why this mutation occurred, but it is suspected that the lypsarcoma, which must have been with me for a long time, was induced to mutate by the radiation treatment that I received as part of my prostate tumor treatment in 2001. That's about the right time frame. If the radiation had stimulated a tumor from scratch, the intervening seven years would be a rather short time frame for such to show up. But for a single genetic mutation that would be necessary to convert a lyposarcoma to an MFH, seven years is about right, particularly considering that it was found early, and if it hadn't been found so early, it would have been a number of years later and well advanced when it finally made its presence noticed.

In any case, the pathology report could not identify any incision margins that would be suitable candidates for radiation, so no radiation is planned. Note the neither of these tumors, neither the MFH nor the lyposarcoma, are considered to be good candidates for chemo. Chemo would only be used if it were found to have widely metastasized and that would be considered to be a last-ditch effort with little hope of long-term success.

As it is, the planned management is to take a full torso CT scan every 6 to 9 months and watch the progress of the lyposarcoma or anything else that might be increasing in size. Dr. Kim suggests that in five to eight years, another surgery will likely be needed. And, of course, God has a tool he can use to take me anytime he wants. Another mutation will likely be undetected until it is too late and my death will follow within a year or two.

Of course I already have my chronic productive cough which has been with me since 2003, cannot seem to be effectively treated my medical science, and is getting worse. It could turn into fatal pneumonia anytime the Lord desires.

Maybe next time we will truly be able to skip all those other stages of mourning and jump right to acceptance after all.

June Testimony -- Cancer Health Log

2008-06-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

Testimony born 6/1/08

I bear my testimony once a year near the anniversary of our move to Utah. That's the third week of October. I do that deliberately because I noted in California that I would bear my testimony about once a decade, which didn't seem quite what the Lord would want.

It's amazing how often that comes around. No wonder that was such a seldom event in California.

Anyway, I knew what I would use as the content of my testimony this year, and started preparing it months ago, and I find myself going over it and over it in my mind while going to sleep and while waking up, etc. By the time November rolls around, it will be over rehearsed, as has happened before, and will be rattled off in a memorized, sing-song way, totally devoid of Spirit.

When a long silence occurred in Fast and Testimony Meeting this month, I felt I should just get up and unload it now. So I did. Amazing how much comment I received thereafter. I don't remember such a reaction any other time in my life.

Anyway, the following is nearly word for word what I said since it was well on the way to being memorized and over-rehearsed:

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Brethren and sisters, we experienced a life scrambling event this past year. It was awful. We couldn't believe something so terrible was happening to us. However, it is quite common and happens to lots of people, and will happen to many if not most of us sometime during our lifetime, and often Fast and Testimony Meeting becomes a vehicle to help us work through the issues involved.

In April conference, Elder Oaks told us what a testimony is. He also told us what a testimony is not. Included in the long list of things it is not, he said it is not a “health log.”

So let me get the health log part of my testimony out of the way as quickly as possible to minimize violation of Elder Oak's principles.

In January, I went in for a routine hernia repair, at which time the surgeon encountered a somewhat rare but very scarey form of cancer. The Internet offered the unvarnished information, reported with clinical detachment, that my likelihood of living for five years was pretty much nil, and that more likely I would be dead within three years. Three weeks later I underwent major surgery with the cancer as the focus, after which time the pathology report was more optimistic. It extended the three years to three decades, meaning that something else would likely kill me first.

That completes the health log part of my testimony. There's actually a long story behind all that involving three different forms of cancer, two of which are related, and the amazing timing and location of the hernia. I love this story and tell it at the drop of a hat, but I've noticed that people become uncomfortably bored by the end of it, and if I tried it here, Elder Oaks would definitely be unhappy.

During the three weeks we thought I would die soon, I received a priesthood blessing from my family and a priesthood blessing from our priesthood leaders here in the ward. My extended family held a fast for me and my sister arranged for her large posterity to place my name on prayer rolls around the world in temples in places where I didn't know there were temples.

My concept of Eternal Progression is that it consists of a series of two steps forward followed by one to two steps backward – a series of these interspersed on rare occasions by great strides forward induced primarily by adversity.

That happened to us. During the three weeks that we thought I would die soon, our perspective broadened to eternity, important things became crystal clear, priorities were obvious, our dedication to the Lord increased by an order of magnitude as did our commitment to conform our lives to His will. We even decided that we would be willing to go on a couple mission if that were to be possible. We were well on our way to having our calling and election made sure.

And then the doctor came into our hospital room late one afternoon and uttered the words, “Good News!” We were overjoyed – and went right back to where we were before.

That's a new aspect of Eternal Progression I've never thought of. It's not only possible to make great strides forward in leaps and bounds, it's also possible to make leaps and bounds backward, which thing I had never considered.

I received a reprieve! I don't know why I received a reprieve. I didn't expect a reprieve. From my experience, reprieves don't happen. So why did I receive a reprieve? Perhaps the answer may be found in a quote from Brigham Young who told the saints:

“Don't be discouraged if you haven't had the privilege the older members have had of being robbed, driven and mobbed, and plundered of everything you own. You have the promise that, if you remain true and faithful, you too will be tried in all things.” [Brigham Young, Journal History, 14 February 1853, LDS Church Archives]

That gives me something to work on.

But there are some things that remain with us. For instance, I know there is life after death. Not the way Hugh Nibley received such knowledge. He describes that, as a young man, he became quite concerned about whether or not there was life after death and prayed mightily to get that knowledge. His prayer was answered dramatically. In one of those be-careful-what-you-pray-for experiences which I'm not sure how many of us would choose to duplicate – I'm not sure if he would have chosen to have such if he'd known it was going to happen.... Serves him right. That's OK, I'll be satisfied with a simple spiritual confirmation. That's more convincing, anyway. Spirit to spirit. Overwhelming conviction.

I know that there is life after death. I know that through the atonement of Jesus Christ, we will all be resurrected. I know that through the atonement of Jesus Christ, we can all be saved in the Kingdom of God if we cooperate with the process. I know that Joseph Smith was the prophet through whom Christ revealed the process, and I know that Thomas S Monson is the Lord's prophet today.

I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Eternal Content?

2008-06-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Negroponte claims that anything that isn't digitized will disintegrate but that bits last forever. Bits do not fade. They do not mold. They are not an appetizing meal for insects or mice. Although nearly everyone expresses doubt that bits are so permanent, Negroponte makes a good case given the direction in which technology is going. So, in 200 years, where will our descendants find information about us? In musty attic trunks full of moldy paper? Or on the 23rd century version of the Internet?

Believing that it will be the latter, I am laboring to make sure our data is in bit form and is properly staged to be propelled into an endless future.

Given current technology, blogging seems to be a useful tool for generating this content although I detect that it is time limited. Photos and videos show signs of disappearing as blogger.com takes steps to limit their own storage requirements. It is necessary to transfer these blogs to a site that will likely cost money in the near future.

But first things first. Get the content, then make it permanent. That said, I will also avail myself of this medium for content generation. But not daily.