The Christmas Pocketknife

Virgin Utah – a couple of days after Christmas, 1953. Many people who lived in Virgin in 1953 were, by any standard, poverty stricken. They had little money, grew gardens for food, and struggled every day to keep their families fed and a roof over their heads. Outhouses were the norm, and running water might have been a well if you were lucky, if not it was the Virgin River. Christmas was not the same to them as it is to us.

The Real World

When we go to our Sunday meetings, when we go to the temple, when we attend stake or regional conferences, we often feel that we are in another place, a place removed from the cares and problems of daily life: A place of temporary respite from the pressures and demands of earning a living, commuting to work, from overbearing and sometimes unreasonable managers and rude co-workers, from impossible deadlines, discourtesy, crudity, immorality, and depravity.

Thirty-Five Cents

Some years ago, our family went to California to see "Phantom of the Opera" in San Francisco. We stayed with my brother, Harold, in Antioch and rode the Bay area Rapid Transit (BART) train to San Francisco. It stopped just a couple of blocks from our destination. The production was sublime, and we were all in a happy mood walking back to the BART stop when an obviously homeless man said to me: “I need thirty-five cents to have enough for a hamburger at Burger King.” I brushed him off, to my eternal regret, because he made the same request of my daughter, Marie, who was right behind me. She gave him what he asked, and he walked straight across the street and into Burger King.

Random Acts of Kindness

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to Target to get something. I stayed in the car because of my recent back surgery. While waiting, I listened to the radio. When Kathy came back, she tried to start the car, but all she got was the irritating and frightening clicking noise the starter solenoid makes when the battery is almost dead.

Incremental Progress

We have been instructed in the scriptures and through our prophets that we need to perfect ourselves, just as the Savior and our Father are perfect. In 3 Nephi 12:48, we read:

Therefore I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect.

Tastebuds of the Soul

Often, when we encounter something we really like, we say something like: “suweeet” or “yum-my.” In a gospel sense, we often equate taste with goodness. In Psalms 119: 97 and 103, David proclaims:

O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Field of Dreams

The other day, I drove by a large lawn that was white with dandelions gone to seed. My first reaction was: “Oh Boy! I bet the neighbors HATE that. But then I remembered my daughter, Marie, at 7 years of age, and the pleasure she found blowing the seeds off a dandelion and making a wish. I realized anew that there are many ways of looking any situation, ranging from great joy to total dejection and despair.

The Race: Come, Follow Me

While I was stationed at Beale AFB, the home of the SR-71 strategic reconnaissance aircraft, I was required to spend 6 to 8 weeks a year at the SR-71 detachment on Kadena AFB, Okinawa.

Books and Covers

Outward appearances can be deceiving. We all have had experiences where we evaluated someone based on their outward appearance, by their “cover” and when we knew them better, found a completely different person behind the cover. Wikipedia says:

The English idiom "don't judge a book by its cover" is a metaphorical phrase which means: you shouldn't prejudge the worth or value of something by its outward appearance alone.

The Last Day

I think it might be good to add an extra caveat at the beginning of this missive. Some of the concepts I am about to discuss are my own thoughts. I have identified places where doctrine ends and my thoughts begin.

As I was reading the scriptures with my wife a few mornings ago, I was struck by the phrase “the last day.” (Not to be confused with “the last days.”) According to my trusty search program, this phrase appears at least 58 times in the scriptures. Usually, it is used in conjunction with a discussion of the final judgment. A question popped into my mind – more on that later.

believing Is Seeing

As an amateur artist, I have learned (over a considerable period of time) that I must be able to look at a subject and see what’s really there before I can represent it artistically. Before I can vary the composition, before I can decide what’s important to the subject, I must see what’s really there, not what I think is there. Only then can I make artistic decisions about the composition.