greaterthansparrows

There is more to life than packing, and I had the chance to teach today, with a little more attention to my study than I felt I was offering last week.  I am very grateful that last week and today [Wed.], the Lord stepped in and led me through.  It has been hard to concentrate the time and the mind for the preparation I am used to doing. We are studying the Old Testament now, and this is a new challenge for me as a teacher.  I taught a portion of the Old Testament many, many years ago, for gospel doctrine class in Sunday School; that was just before and after Jonathan was born.  I loved teaching the Doctrine and Covenants, which we have now finished, and diving into the sources for church history and the revelations specific for our own times.  Now we are studying a period for which the record is often incomplete and framed within a different culture from our own. We have the advantage of additional scriptures in the Pearl of Great Price (which I taught two ...

Well, I have made it through all the current listings on craigslist for rentals, as of yesterday, with nothing to pursue so far.  The only possibility was on a second floor--park here, walk the length of the small complex, go up the stairs, walk back to the parking side.  With my back, his knee?  Okay for a motel for a day or two, not for a place to live.  That has eaten up my time and attention.  I get to look again tomorrow. Actually, since there is no local craigslist for Tacoma, what I did was go to housing for rent, click on it, and then at the search bar write "2 bedroom Tacoma" and tell it to find.  This took it down to 850+ listings, not all of which were in fact 2-bedroom or in Tacoma proper, but it did cull out Seattle and points north.  The deal is, you scan down the list, click on something you want to see, and then keep scrolling.  Lots of 1-BR, a few 3-BR, ignore those.  Some will say "Tacoma/Spanaway" or "/something else" so ...

Looking online for rental possibilities--so far with no luck in the area we want--I opened a second browser with the lds.org meetinghouse locator, so that I could bounce back and forth and check on addresses, as to which ward they would be in.  This worked beautifully last week, in terms of information, though not in terms of finding anything in our ward. Today [Sat.--I didn't get back to finish this], however, though I was sure I was in exactly the same function, I got nowhere at all.  I don't know if I was missing something, or they have continued refining the site so that it's more complicated and I wasn't getting it, or what.  I just know that something that I have used many times before suddenly wasn't working. Isn't that the way it is?  You get used to something and they change it.  They want to make you able to do more, and you find yourself unable to do anything.  You buy something you need and you can't figure it out. Now, we did always figur...

...I love you I love you   I love you I love you   I love you I love you I love you     I love you   I love you  I love you  I love you... ( continuing until the inside is covered -- )  Then, " I ran out of space, o r else t here'd be a lot more. ( P retty good message!  I love you too.)    Be sure and tell someone today what  you might often forget to mention.  Even if they still know it's so!

Almost a Valentine's gift, our youngest daughter is a cheerful person.  Here she is, one year old, and responding to the photographer.  She was intensely connected to people, even from the beginning.  She was always smiling and laughing; the world was her delight. She was the funniest little kid, because you could jolly her out of almost anything.  If she started to cry over something, you could often offer an exaggerated tone and a funny face, and get her to start laughing instead...actually, she would start to laugh while she was still crying at the same time, and then give up on the crying part.  (Like "sun showers" that we get in this part of the world, where you find yourself driving in a light rain along with shafts of sunlight.) There are lots of laughing pictures, very few that are not.  Looking through them lifted my day. The best grown-up picture I have, I think, is this one with her older sister Christina, ta...

"He watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps...," from the Elijah oratorio.  (Listen  here .)  This is what came to me as assurance today, sitting in Sunday School while someone was talking about how we experience the Spirit.  It sings a loop in the back of my awareness, still speaking to the promise of his watchcare.  With no idea yet of where we should be going, we will find the right place. Besieged on every side, the apostle Paul said, "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; " (2 Cor. 4:8)  He knew a few things about opposition and trouble, and he knew how to say, all is yet well...and mean it. Boxes mounting on every side, no idea of where we will go or whether we can fully solve our difficulties, but all is yet well.  For he watches over us, and slumbers not.

Up in the attic is a dollhouse.  Understand that "the attic" is the topmost living space, not a dusty lightless three-foot high space reached by a pull-down stair through a ceiling trapdoor (the definition in the house I grew up in), but a finished, though non-standard, area. It's been long years since there was a daughter young enough to play with this dollhouse.  It remains because I made it myself, and I still think that's pretty cool. Once long ago, there was a Relief Society special Saturday activity, where a brother brought materials and gave us instruction, and we built dollhouses out of the heaviest corrugated cardboard I'd ever seen.  Don went every year down to the port and gathered big sheets of shipping cardboard, and boxes, big huge things, and flattened them out.  He and a few of his buddies would cut and glue and paint and create dollhouses to give to one of the local children's charities--very cool.  On this occasion, he branched out for us...

My fellow teacher sent me an excerpt from his favorite resource book, preparing a lesson last fall.  This bit of it, in the commentary, struck me enough to save it and come back to it: Doctrine & Covenants 100:5 Speak the thoughts that I shall put into your hearts. The admonition given here to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon applies alike to all who have been called to labor in the Lord's name. It is a perfect expression of how the spirit of revelation operates. In Doctrine and Covenants 8 the spirit of revelation was defined as that which the Lord tells us in our minds and in our hearts (vv. 2-3). Precious few of the revelations given in the history of humankind have involved the audible voice of the Lord or personal instruction from angels. For the most part, the Lord places thoughts and feelings in our hearts, leaving the manner in which they are clothed in words to our discretion. Many of these revelations, like the scriptures we have already been given, go un...

You know how parents spell when they have to say something they don't want the kids to hear but the kids are present?  "Are you going O-U-T?"  Emily and Eric use it for the dog, "Are you going to take her for a w-a-l-k?" because if she heard the word 'walk' she was instantly and insistently at the door. It doesn't work very long; kids figure out how to spell the simple stuff.  Even the dog picked up on w-a-l-k, so now they ask if she has been taken for a 'w' yet today, and can get an answer without having a frantic pet. My parents had an advantage which lasted longer.  When spelling wouldn't work anymore, they had French.  My mother said that the reason she didn't lose the French was that she married my father, good returned French missionary that he was, and then he had business dealings in France and she had to host the occasional visitor.  What it boiled down to was that she had continuing practice. Every single one of us too...

My father said something once, when I was in high school, that stuck in my mind.  In reference to some argument roiling through the body politic on the news, he said, "Equal doesn't mean identical.  It doesn't mean outcomes are guaranteed.  People are never going to be identical to each other, and if we insist on uniformity, all we'll end up with is uniform mediocrity." Being 'the same' would actually diminish us all.  There will always be differences in our talents and aptitudes.  There will be differences in our interests and desires.  The principle of being equal is in our value.  When we understand that we are children of God, we realize that our value is enormous and eternal. The Declaration of Independence speaks to the pursuit of happiness, in other words the right to self-determination.  I might want to pursue music or teaching, and you might want to pursue business, or nursing, or construction, or any number of things.  The point...