Religion

Our first son is now officially a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

This is the abbreviated version of what happened at Isaac’s baptism:

Songs, prayers, talks, Isaac gets “dunked by Dad” as Micah put it, confirmed a member, given the gift of the holy ghost… All the normal elements of a baptism. It just didn’t feel normal to us. It was all just too great to do justice in describing it. You just had to be there. Isaac probably will not remember as much as we will. I just hope he remembers the intense feeling of the Holy Spirit as it bore witness to many there that choosing to be baptized is the correct choice and that the Lord truly smiles down on his children who follow that commandment.

Posted by Ily on September 8, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 2 comments

The New BYU Rival

This article on the the rivalry between BYU and Wheaton College over the title of “Number One Stone Cold Sober” school is hilarious. The reporter in the video thinks there may have been a party or two at Wheaton last year that allowed BYU to claim the title, but any BYU alum watching the video will see the real reason BYU wins. If the reporter had done his job and visited both schools maybe he would have seen it too—the facial hair and tank tops being worn by the Wheaton kids are obviously what knocked them out of the top spot. Your going to have to go all the way to be the champ, Wheaton. Bare shoulders and stubble just don’t cut it! :-)

Posted by Bryan on September 7, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 1 comment

We will miss you!

Our beloved prophet President Gordon B. Hinckley passed away this evening. When we told the boys the news they got teary eyed. Isaac was so sweet in his concern over President Hinckley’s passing. It just makes you want to hug and snuggle those kids all the more when they show their sensitive sides. We all love President Hinckley and will miss him. We loved him very much and are grateful to have lived during his presidency.

http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/beloved-church-president-gordon-b-hinckley-dies-at-97

Posted by Ily on January 27, 2008 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 0 comments

Conference Weekend

We actually made it through all 8 hours of the LDS General Conference without falling asleep, for long at least. Bryan dozed during Priesthood, and I only missed a few minutes of one talk due to sleepiness during the Sunday morning session. Overall, it was a great experience and the kids even survived!

We had a return of the Conference Fairy (CF) this time. We started a tradition a few years back to have the CF bring quiet toys and activities to the kids when they were being well-behaved and reverent. It has worked really well in the past. Lately though, I have been getting cheaper with my CF gifts because it was getting too expensive to give a new gift after each session. So last conference I moved to a simpler fare and had Rootbeer as a CF treat for one session and some other little things too. This time the CF brought a new puzzle (argh, it was hard!) and some candy and Popsicles. Isaac has definitely figured out the conference fairy is getting on tighter budget and he had some concerns about it. He was expecting new toys this time. After the first session when no cool toys just for him showed up, just a puzzle for us all, he got a little ornery and he had a hard time being reverent after that. I guess that shows that bribery works… Sigh, I might have created a monster. He was still pretty good, but practicing piano when you are bored during conference does not constitute a behavior that is acceptable in our house! Especially since the piano is in the same room that our TV is in. At least he was practicing “Scripture Power.”

Things we did to stay awake during conference:

• Baked Bread

• Put a really hard triazzle (puzzle with triangular pieces) together

See my Tabblo>

• played little people with Reece

• Put together easier puzzles

• Color Wonder coloring books for the kids

• I admit it, I ironed and pinned fabric for Baby Tai straps

• Kept Reece from attacking the puzzles by taking turns playing with him.

I feel lucky that we were able to participate in the Saturday sessions this conference. I really felt the warm glow of the spirit especially during those two sessions. I feel like Saturdays have been the better sessions for me lately (maybe it is because the boys have had it by Sunday and so they are more wiggly…).

The spiritual highlight of the whole conference for me was when Elder Wirthlin spoke. The tv station who covers conference for us really does a poor job and we got to watch a public meeting at a fire station and yet hear conference for a while and I thought they were messing up the broadcast again somehow when Elder Wirthlin’s voice started shaking. Then I saw his whole frame started shaking and yet he refused to sit down until he completed his remarks. I had tears in my eyes as Elder Nelson came up next to him to help support him so he could finish. And he didn’t finish early, he kept going. His words were so powerful to me. His testimony of the gospel burned into my heart as I saw this frail old man who is 90 struggle to stand and refuse to finish until he had said all that his heart contained. The gospel means so much to him and it made me ponder to what lengths I would go to in order to bear my testimony? i can’t even describe how I felt after his talk, it was just amazing.

Posted by ily on October 7, 2007 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 2 comments

Closing Choir Number

Was it just me, or did anyone else think that the closing choir number of the Priesthood session was phenomenal? During those unison, a capella parts I saw many mouths moving up on the screen, but only heard one voice. I was moved to tears. The talks earlier today about the power of good music were confirmed this evening. Were there any talks given before that closing song of the priesthood session? I don’t remember :-)

Posted by Bryan on March 31, 2007 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 2 comments

President Monson's Talk

During this Saturday afternoon session of General Conference, President Monson told a miraculous story about a talk he gave in the tabernacle in 1975. The story intrigued me, and using the Church website, I was able to find the talk.

The story about this talk was one of a little child’s prayer being answered. I was amazed and touched to read the 1975 talk and see that it too was about a little child’s prayer being answered. President Monson is a man of great faith who performs miracles in Jesus’ name. I love hearing him speak and tell these amazing stories.

Posted by Bryan on March 31, 2007 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 0 comments

Why A Professor Believes

There are a few books that managers at work love to cite. One of them is titled, The Innovator’s Dilemma. I haven’t read it, but apparently it describes situations that arise in our big business quite well. I learned today that that book was written by a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a professor at the Harvard Business School, Clayton M. Christensen.

It also turns out Brother Christensen (I can call him that now, right?) has written an article for the February ’07 Ensign, and he has recently posted a longish essay on his personal website entitled, Why I Belong, and Why I Believe. I took a few moments to read this today and I highly recommend it to anyone. He does a beautiful job explaining the effectiveness of our volunteer organization in The Church, as well as how he gained a witness of the truthfulness of of the gospel from the Holy Ghost. Go take a look.

Posted by Bryan on February 6, 2007 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 0 comments

"9 A.M. church better than 1 P.M. church," Considered an Understament

There was a time in my life when I really liked being able to sleep in on Sunday mornings before lazily getting ready for afternoon church. Last year was not that time. We did have the one o’clock schedule, but there was no sleeping in or lazily getting ready involved. Oh sure, Isaac, always our best sleeper, could sleep in, and if he did happen to wake up early he didn’t wake us up. Reece and Micah knew no such behavior. Worse than a forced early start on the day by far though, was the interrupted nap time. Micah never did get the hang of nursery instead of napping. Reece was no better. I think holding one, or sometimes both, of them for the last two hours of church every Sunday for the past year is what really caused me to have to lay down with a sore neck for 5 of the 11 days of holiday vacation I had this December. One o’clock church with little kids has been a sore trial.

But today, today was so good. Today we started the 9 o’clock schedule. When the alarm went off early this morning I jumped out of bed with excitement. For once it was my turn to bound into the boys’ bedroom early on a Sunday and see them all bleary eyed. Micah had a bit of a crying fit, but otherwise we made it to church on time and had a nice Sacrament Meeting. By the time nursery started Micah was fully awake and he walked right in, under his own free will, without looking back. Ily isn’t teaching primary for the first time in three years so she even held Reece and I enjoyed the next two hours of Sunday School and Priesthood unburdened. It has been a long time since I’ve had that pleasure. But it didn’t stop there. When I got home from processing donations after church, the quiet of peaceful napping pervaded the house; it nearly brought a tear to my eye. Aside from a small snooze, I was also able to spend some time reading, pondering, preparing a Family Home Evening lesson for tomorrow, and writing this therapeutic journal entry. As I just remarked to Ily, this is the most peaceful and productive Sunday I’ve had in probably a year. Life is good.

Posted by Bryan on January 8, 2007 | Filed under: Family News Religion | 2 comments

Potential

Being in the Elders Quorum presidency for my ward, I had the opportunity to attend our Stake Priesthood leadership meeting a couple weeks ago. What was really special about this was that Elder Russell M. Nelson was there. We were getting a new stake presidency and he and Elder Gibbons came to make that change.

It was an amazing meeting. Elder Gibbons taught us first, and he was very good. Then Elder Nelson stood up and told us he didn’t know why he was assigned to come to our stake, we were doing jus fine. Then he said that the chance of having a member of the Quorum of the Twelve coming to your stake conference is getting so rare that he just wanted to give us a chance to aks him questions. Wow.

The first question he answered was how to find balance in life. He said he was still trying to figure that out himself, but then gave a good lesson on giving your career its due, putting family first, and all that good stuff. The next question actually ended up being the last. A young mens leader stood and asked, “How do you get a young man to see his potential?” Elder Nelson quickly quipped, “It’s for you the old man to see your potential!” But really, he assured us, this was a wonderful and insightful question. It must have been, because he spent the next 45 minutes answering it. He took us through all kinds of scriptures, shared stories from his service as an apostle, and spared nothing to make sure we understood our potential. It was amazing and I furiously took notes as I tried to drink it all in. Eventually he looked up at the clock and said, “Well, there was a long answer to a short question for you. You have more questions you would like to ask, and there is a lot more I could say, but we better end now …” As we sang the closing song the message that I had been totally unaware of my potential, and had allowed myself to be caught up in all kinds of little, inconsequential things, flooded me. It was powerfull and I still can’t get over it. And that’s a good thing.

Today was fast sunday and my turn to teach the Elders Quorum lesson. I didn’t think I could do any justice to it, but I couldn’t think of teaching anything other than Elder Nelson’s lesson on potential. I was able to find a couple past talks of Elder Nelson’s where he said almost exactly the same things he told us, which greatly helped to fill in where my notes were lacking. I studied lots and tried to boil it all down, and I think it went pretty well today. You can see my rough lesson notes if you like (html version too). They might not make complete sense to anyone other than me, but who knows.

(Now, don’t think I spent a whole lot of time making those lesson notes all pretty and cross referenced, and doing the conversions to html and pdf. I used a great tool called LaTeX to type them up and generate the different forms of output. It’s an ancient computer program that’s awesome for that kind of thing, and I think everyone should use it.)

Posted by Bryan on May 7, 2006 | Filed under: Religion | 0 comments

General Conference, April 2006

For some reason Comcast isn’t showing General Conference on our basic cable this time around. Thankfully BYU TV has an amazing video stream set up with Move Media. Aside from only having an Internet Exploder client, I’m very impressed with the quality of the sound and video. I searched around to find out more about the technology and only found one good reference, from 2003 sadly.

Anyway, conference is always great. It never ceases to amaze that it seems like every speaker talks about problems and questions I’ve been having lately. The Lord takes care of me.

Posted by Bryan on April 1, 2006 | Filed under: Religion | 0 comments