greaterthansparrows

When I was 14, I made an unlikely friend.  My civics teacher was one of the best teachers I ever had, and I was so taken with her that I volunteered to help out with some things after school.  There was an activity bus, so if I stayed really late, I had a way home.  Her name was Patricia Rudy, and she went off to Columbia University the following year for a master's and married instead of coming back.  I never saw her again after that 9th grade year, though I wrote a couple of times. However, she shared a classroom with another history teacher who had gone to college when her kids were well along in school, and done her student teaching in her 40's.  Miss Rudy taught the last hour at the adjoining high school, and they got out a little later.  Being her assistant after school meant waiting twenty minutes or so for her to arrive back at our junior high. Evelyn Fleming, the older teacher, was willing to let me hang out and wait, help with minor tasks, and c...

Enduring to the end means more than enduring (grit teeth) and my column today in the Nauvoo Times will sound familiar to those who were in our Institute class last spring. We were finishing the Book of Mormon, and the topic of the lesson was "enduring to the end."  Remembering that lesson* on faith related here last week, as levels of concentric circles, I envisioned the growth rings on a tree, from the scrawny sapling which is easily blown or cracked, to the enduring strength of a mature, even huge, oak or redwood.  Our lesson ended up being about "enlarging to the end."  Every choice of faith, of spiritually taking in moisture and nourishment and sending out branches and leaves and pushing upwards towards the sky builds up that strength.  From the core, we enlarge, one ring built upon another, until we (someday) cannot be shaken. I began with that cat poster (Hang in there, baby!), and we traced and discussed the principles and the promises. Sometimes we forg...

We came back very tired, but we had a good time, which we rather needed. Sometimes I think Heavenly Father gives us help even if the matters involved aren't earthshaking, because we were able to do the things we had really planned, and just not add new ones.  We had wanted to go to the zoo, popping over the border to British Columbia was one of the reasons we had run off to this spot, that and the fact that there were no vacancies at our membership-system's place at the coast.  Other spots were just too far away, and we were looking for a last-minute quick trip, cheap, not easy to find. We hadn't seriously contemplated making the trip all the way into Vancouver this time, almost an hour of increasingly horrible traffic west once you crossed the border at Lynden.  We didn't have energy, funds, or gasoline; we had done some wonderful stuff two years ago when we took Jonathan and Carole with us to the Vancouver Temple open house, and then spent a day farther east in th...

Waiting for Hubby to get home.  Cooler is packed--hope he can carry it 'cause I can't.  Clothes are packed.  My meds and sundries are packed, he has to gather his.  Eat something for lunch, load car, turn on dishwasher, and go.  Should take only a few minutes once he arrives. Don't look to this space for any Profound Thoughts or frivolous ones either for a couple of days.  I won't be here, so you go have some fun somewhere too. TTFN!  (Ta ta for now!)

Hubby is now walking, haltingly, short distances without the crutches, and driving bothers him not at all, so the trip is on for tomorrow.  Our activities may be curtailed in the particulars, but the escape is not foiled.  It fell to me, though, to run the necessary errands today, and short as they were, relatively speaking, they weren't short enough to keep me from being wobbly by the time I was home. I had to carry groceries in, ferrying bags inside the front door so that the car was empty, then reconnoitering on what I could handle at once into the kitchen.  I took up the lightest ones together, weight was fine, and started through the passage, only to feel one slip away just as I got almost there.  I lost it to the floor. It wasn't the bag with two pineapples ($1 each, did you ever see such a price?).  It wasn't the bag with bananas, blueberries, and two yogurts.  Oh no, it had to be the bag with a dozen and a half eggs. Of which, two were completel...

We had one of the best Gospel Doctrine teachers I've ever known, a few years ago, the kind who knows his scriptures backwards and forwards, and is prepared for any question.  He doesn't live here anymore, and his departure was a loss to the ward. He traveled for work, so they called a second teacher to alternate. (I found later that this trade-off is now standard, with two teachers routinely called, but this was the first circumstance where I had known that to be the case.) Less often, that teacher was out of town, and if they were both gone the same weekend, I was the designated substitute. Our George Albert Smith lesson Sunday quoted  Alma 32 and I thought about Don.  Verses 26-29 (and continuing) liken the word to a seed: 26  Now, as I said concerning faith—that it was not a perfect knowledge—even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge.   27  But behold, if...

I became the able-bodied member (laugh with me) of this household this evening, when Hubby wrenched his knee getting on the commuter train to come home from the office where he is currently working part-time.  I had to go pick him up curbside and drive him into the garage to get his car; since it's his left knee he was able to drive home.  Stairs are not in the picture, so he will sleep on the couch, and going to Lynden on Thursday will definitely not include tramping around the Vancouver Zoo, if we are still able to go.  We really want to go. It's not as desperate as when we had a hospital bed in the living room, when he broke his right leg in five places, in Utah, while I was here recovering from the first back surgery and having a plate of dinner brought in each evening by the kind sisters of the Relief Society.  A car, five kids to get home with family help, and two surgeries and a wheelchair for him on an airplane--which I couldn't drive to meet--beats this li...