Of Life and Times

I know, I've been delinquent in my postings. Sorry about that. So much has been going on at work. I was writing a student an email today to explain why the money they thought was going to be gifted to them by a donor wasn't going to happen. I ended by encouraging them to not focus on what has been but the possibilities of the future. This thought popped into my head and I liked it well enough to record it here.


Look to the future, not the past. There are no possibilities in the past, because they are all in the future.

Yes, it is not universally applicable, but then very few thoughts are. 

The ride home from work today was full of talk of campus changes, department and university politicking, etc. After a few minutes of the kind of social commentating that spectators usually engage in, Elaine told me about her drinking glass. She has a heavy cut crystal class that she uses at work for drinking her water. The facets of all those cuts are quite impressive, and look very nice when you have a colored liquid in the glass. She has a cold, so she was drinking some cranberry juice today.

As she sat there, thinking about the latest issues of the math department she realized she had taken into her mouth a leaf from her drink. Still not fully aware of what kind of leaf it was she mulled it around in her mouth, trying to determine with her tongue what it was. She swallow the juice, leaving only the leaf in her mouth. As she looked into the now almost empty glass to take her next swallow, she noticed the other roach floating in the bottom of her glass.

When you are married you tend to think that you have heard all the stories and experiences of your spouse. After all, you have been talking about each other's lives for years and years. But every now and again a new story surfaces that surprises you. This morning Elaine told me one I had not heard before.

Many years ago, before the current auditorium on campus was remodeled and enlarged, there was an open corridor that passed along the entire back side of the building. it was walled in on both sides, but was open at both ends. It just so happened that in order for Elaine to get to a copy machine from her office she had to leave the building, walk the length of that corridor and down another hall to get to the secretary's office.

You also need to know that Elaine is a very jumpy person. You know how when you are watching fireworks you hear the thmp (that's my own word for it) of the firework being shot off, followed by silence then you see the opening of the blossom above you just before you hear the bang? Well, she jumps at the bang. She knows it is coming, she knows it happens right after the flash in the sky, but it scares her every time. I just stand there and smile with my arm around her. I love watching fireworks with her.

That night on campus a play was in progress. I believe it was a production of Fried Green Tomatoes. At one point in the play they were talking about killing magpies. At this point in the play, about 8:30 p.m., when the whole campus was deserted, except for the play goers, Elaine was walking back from the copy room to her office. As she entered the corridor, which was unlit, so she was walking in the dark, a gunshot suddenly rang through the darkness in the corridor. She let out an involuntary scream of shock and surprise. This was followed by a muffled laughter coming from the theater. I don't think the audience that night anticipated that the intended magpie would have a dying scream to donate to the evening's performance.

We have a chicken who has been more persistent than a child who keeps saying, "Are we there yet?" She nested in the rafters of our carport and kept accidentally dropping her eggs off the ledge. We shooed her away from there and she nested among the plants, we drove her away again then found her nesting in our front container box. This happened time and time again. She was always very protective of her eggs. Only when we were able to physically dislodge her from the nest were we able to get rid of her latest clutch, which almost always consisted of at least eight eggs.

This morning Elaine told me to come outside and see the latest changes to the fern alley. When I rounded the corner I was not at all surprised to find the same hen. But this time she was obviously dead. When Elaine picked her up we got a surprise. Whatever killed her had also completely gutted her. There were no entrails left, just the carcass. The real surprise was that even as all that was happening to her she was still tenaciously clutching one of her eggs in one foot.

Never underestimate the faithfulness of a mother's love for her offspring.

Elaine reminded me of a rare moment last night, so I thought I would share it today.

Sometime during the first decade of this century Elaine and I went on a special date. The university was putting on a play about Anne Bolin. The performance was in the round in a small gallery or dance studio above the university auditorium. The acting was great, the costuming well done, and the story was captivating. In the final scene Anne is condemned and lead away to be beheaded.

We were sitting right behind the king and his court. All the room was hushed, and the lights went dim as we all waited for the fall of the ax that would signal the end of her life. From out of the darkness of the room a cannon went off in the distance. I burst out with a screech and yelled, "They shot her!" I was hysterical with laughter at the thought of them taking her head off with a cannon. Everyone in the room was appalled at my behavior at such a solemn moment. Elaine quietly explained that after a beheading they would signal the city of London with the cannon that the person on trial had just died. I honestly thought I was going to hear the thud of the ax on wood, not a cannon blast.

The King and his court wheeled around and glared at me. I think I laughed for the next three months over that unexpected sound. I also couldn't show my face in public for a couple of years.

Happy Anniversary Dear!
This year I decided to struggle with my language and try to describe to you what just a small part of you means to me. I'm talking about your hands. I know it sounds corny, but at least it is sincere.

When you place your hand on the side of my face, reality fades away. I feel a need to quietly gasp. My eyes close involuntarily, and a smile spreads across my face. I feel almost giddy. The warmth of your touch pulls up feelings of security, love, peace, and a longing that you never remove your hand. It is like going to sleep on the side of a sunny hill snuggled up with you, feeling the ocean breeze tousle our hair. Pure contentment.

When we go to sleep each night and you clasp my hand with yours, as I close my eyes, the day seems to fade away, and like a security blanket treasured by a small child, I can quietly slip away to dream my dreams.

You are so important to me for so many reasons, but on our thirteenth wedding anniversary I wanted you to know that I don't want to take any part of who you are for granted. I love you completely.

Your loving husband,
Kelly

In two days' time Elaine and I will be enjoying our 13th wedding anniversary. If there is any observation we have noticed and commented on consistently, it is that time is running faster at our age than it used to when we were much younger. Our current weeks are seeming to pass as quickly as our days used to when we were in our 20s.

This is my second marriage and Elaine's first. Up until about a week ago I just assumed that we were still newly weds. Imagine my surprise when Elaine made a comment about which anniversary this is and I realized that we are nearing almost one and a half decades of marriage. What happened to the time? Where have I been all that time? I swear we just just moved to Hawaii and enrolled our children in Laie Elementary and Kahuku High and Intermediate. Our eldest, Eleanor, just graduated from high school and met and married Vlad from Ukraine in college, Anna just started having children, Paul just met Tammie from Indonesia, Marie just moved to the mainland, and Elizabeth just entered the fourth grade.

Wait, let me get myself caught up. Elaine was just released from being department chair after 10 years. Eleanor now has three children, each several years apart. Anna has four children, the oldest of which just turned 11 years old. Paul has two children and is about to graduate from college. Marie is still living on the mainland. Elizabeth, our baby graduated from high school, moved to Wyoming, and married David, and got an 8 year old son in the bargain. She and David are just celebrating their first anniversary next month. And our hanai (unofficially adopted) son, Trevor has graduated from high school, served a two-year mission for our church, and just got married to Alyx. She seems like a very nice young lady.

Some people may say that 13 is an unlucky number, but from where I stand, in the last thirteen years Elaine and I have had too many blessings sent our way to feel unlucky.

A couple of years ago Elaine and I made new friends with the Kahele family. They started to attend our Gospel Principles class and Alan just caught on fire. His wife, Jolanda, is a returned missionary and has been active in the Church all her life. Alan drove a garbage truck and was known for being a really hard worker. You couldn't hope to find a more personable and faithful friend. He would gladly put himself in any form of inconvenience to help someone else out of their troubles, and smile and be affable, and be grateful he had the chance to be of service to someone else. Alan is a real jewel.

After a number of months Alan got baptized, and when the time was right, I ordained him to the Melchizedek  Priesthood. In a year's time they went through the Laie, Hawaii Temple, and he never skipped a beat, continuing to serve and be humble, and was always hungry to learn more. He had found the joy the Gospel of Christ and had embraced it with all his heart.

In April we got word that Alan had been admitted to the hospital with two forms of cancer. Everyone played down the seriousness of his illness, so I assumed he would be back at Church once he was finished with Chemo. Every week we got favorable reports in Priesthood Meeting. Then a couple of weeks ago I went to Church and was told that Alan had died the night before Father's Day. I was stunned. Evidently the bone cancer was pumping dead blood cells throughout his body and it poisoned him.

Yesterday was the funeral. I helped to dress the body, I played the music for the funeral, and I gave the first talk, using the Laborers in the Vineyard parable as the text. Alan truly was one of the laborers whom the Master hired in the 11th hour.

I used to take issue with the notion that those who were hired at 5:00 p.m. were paid the same wage as those who were hired at 6:00 a.m. After knowing the joy that the Gospel had brought into Alan Kahele's life, I can now honestly see why the Master of the house paid them all the same. I would never begrudge any blessing to someone as completely changed and devoted as Alan had become. He has been such a good example of how I need to become, and I have had the Gospel my whole life. I am one of those 6:00 a.m. laborers, and so grateful that I have had the time I need to become a better person. Alan was just able to do it infinitely faster because once he caught the vision he did whatever was necessary to better himself and reconcile himself with the Lord. I can't use the word envy, but I can honestly say I eternally grateful for the Lord's goodness to my friend Alan Kahele; he deserved it.

I have a niece what was raised with high standards. She made covenants with God and was obedient to what she had been taught. She was happy. But at some point her vision blurred and she became spiritually lost. This is a dreadfully sad and eventually painful thing that happens when we are not careful about keeping our promises to God.

The reward for obedience to God's commandments is knowledge. Little by little as we keep our promises to Him, he opens our minds to grander and grander views of eternity. We begin to understand why we need to do some of the things He has asked of us. Our ability to place our trust in him and his counsel grows and we become more and more sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, who's responsibility it is to teach us the ways of God. Only through the gentle voice of the Spirit can we find our path through the distractions and falsities of this life. He is our guide and protector, the bringer and revealer of truth. We must cherish that relationship above all others in this life if we are to make it to the other side in triumph.

So what happens to us when we lose our focus and start doing things on our own, ignoring the urgings of the Holy Ghost and our own conscience? Disobedience acts like an opiate. You head into its use with your eyes wide open, but soon you begin to become numb to your surroundings. You begin to do things you would have never dreamed of doing before, and you honestly no longer see anything wrong with it, except that you feel more and more uncomfortable with those who still do the "good" things you used to do. At least you still recognize that much. So you start to avoid the places those people go and hang out with others who don't do those things. You begin to forget, as from a waking dream, the details that once governed your life. You adopt new standards, which are never higher than the ones you are abandoning. Before long even things you were raised doing seem foreign and uncomfortable. You don't realize that the uncomfortable feeling is the Spirit trying to urge you back into the light of reality.

There are those who descend so far into the abyss that they no longer comprehend anything that they themselves used to espouse publicly. They forget everything that they once held so dear. Life now is the pursuit of one pleasure after another. The catch is that all these pleasures come at a high price. Families are torn apart, friends lost, friends betrayed, loved ones made distant nuisances to be avoided, a grim and uncomfortable reminder of the standards that have been forsaken. We become stubborn in our insistence that our way is okay, and that we are better off this way. Yet we never do feel the joy we once felt when we kept the commandments.

The only solution to this spiritual euthanasia, or the killing of the soul in a quiet numbing way, so that the guilt of wrong is not felt, is to face our problem squarely and admit that we have made a poor choice. Sometimes it takes decades for someone to get to the point that their misery becomes more than they can stand any longer, and they start to grope their way through the darkness of their lives back into the light of understanding. Some never make it, but some do eventually come back, wiser and more humble, and glad to have escaped the mind numbing drug of disobedience.

In this life we are blind. We can see no further into the past than our own birth and can see no further into the future than our own death. Anything past those two end points is a stab in the dark, a guess. Is it any wonder that so many espouse the belief that there is no purpose to this life except what we assign to it? After all, what is there to tell me that I am anything more than just one of the many animals that have evolved on this planet. We are just the lucky ones, because we can think and direct ourselves, whereas no other animals can.

So many questions. Surely there is some purpose to life other than living and dying. Surely there is some grander design other than pure chance that has allowed me to come into existence as something other than a gnat. But if there is no other purpose than to live and die, then I may as well have been a gnat. At least the gnat doesn't have to worry about its reason for being. The gnat can't see into the future and wonder about the past. The gnat just is until it isn't any longer.

If all this were true, then we of all beings must be the most miserable and lost, knowing that we are without purpose and design, no destiny or past, and no way to change it. What a terrible existence it would be, living from one temporary pleasure to another with only the darkness of the grave at the end of our journey.

___________________________________

I am so grateful to know better. We as Latter-day Saints have been blessed with the truth. We are all the children of a race of resurrected beings with glorified and eternal bodies. We have lived forever and will continue to live forever. Just as we were raised by our Father in the premortal world, so we understand that our time here is brief. We have certain responsibilities to fulfill and challenges to overcome before leaving this testing ground to continue our development on the other side of death.

This beautiful planet was created for all of God's children so they could be happy while they are here, and delight in the splendors of His creations. This is a place of trials, to see if we will be able and willing to be obedient to the commandments we are given by Him. His promise to each of us is that by being obedient we will be blessed with vision beyond this mortal life. Our faith in God will be able to transcend this small time in mortality and grow into a grand view of all eternity. Only with this view can we muster the hope and faith needed to be completely true to the covenants we have made with our Father and endure in that faith until the end of our small time here.

It is the vision of the hereafter that fuels us. We look forward to a time when we are raised from our separation from our bodies and given perfected versions of what we laid down in death. Because of the covenants we have made the Lord will garner us with knowledge of the universe and how it is made and sustained. We will grow in power and abilities until eventually we will have become like our Father, creators of worlds and families to people them with. We will have joy in our posterity and their happiness for all eternity.

Yes, we as Latter-day Saints are different from the world. We do not see things in the same way. We do not behave in the same way. Our behavior and beliefs are fueled by a vision of eternity, not the short duration and end of mortality.

I was raised in a military family. We moved about every 1-2 years, which meant that I never knew anyone more than that amount of time. It seemed that each time I made friends with someone either he or I moved shortly thereafter. The first time I became aware of how unusual my life was was in high school. We had just moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I was just about to start the 10th grade. I was standing in line to register for classes and the boy next to me was chatting aimlessly about the place when he pointed to a boy not far away and laughing said, "yeah, me and him have been friends since before kindergarten."

I had never considered the notion of knowing someone that long before that moment. I suddenly felt very lonely. That loneliness has never left. I am now in my 55th year, and I still can't say that I have known someone since childhood. My family is the closest thing I have to an exception, and even then most of my siblings don't really know me. Even as a child I was the odd man out.

On the 30th of December Elaine and I attended the endowment and sealing of a wonderful couple in our ward. In the Celestial room, in the sealing room, at the fale after the session when we were all eating and talking, there was hugging and smiles, and an obvious air of complete familiarity and acceptance in the air. Even today at church, I was standing with my former Stake President. We were discussing home teaching issues when a couple of ward members came up and warmly gave him a heartfelt hug and wished him a happy new year. They looked at me like they weren't sure what they were supposed to do. I followed suite, whether appropriate or not, and gave each of them a hug and wished them well. I think they were a little surprised at my forwardness. Can't say that I wasn't either.

At home I talked to Elaine about it for a moment. I expressed my sadness that I would go to my grave never ever having had a home, a place where I had lived where everyone knew me, knew my history, and still loved me to boot. It is sad to feel that I will go through this entire mortal experience always feeling alone and like an outsider, always looking in at the family through the window, but never being invited in and made one of the clan.

That is when I thought of the scripture that talks about knowing God and being known of God, us knowing Him as we are known by Him. Charity was the topic of our class today, which the Bishop postponed until next week. I think we were in Church today all of 45 minutes before being sent home. Anyway, back to my narrative. How is the Lord able to be so loving to children who betray him, lie to him (or try really hard to), betray and abuse each other, who are unrepentant and unloving and unforgiving. How is he able to forgive us and love us anyway. He never stops trying to reach us. He never stops giving us a chance to come back to Him, no matter how much we mess up. We have to work really, really hard to cut God out of our lives completely. We have to become extremely evil to get rid of Him. Even then he mourns our loss.

I would like to think that the secret is that he knows us. He is not just familiar with our daily constitutional or our preferences at restaurants, he really knows us. He knows what we have done, what our capabilities are, our gifts, what we can accomplish in the future if we live up to our abilities. He knows how much love we are capable of, how much strength and devotion we can learn. He knows us so intimately that he foreordained us to great callings in this life and the next even before we came to this life. He doesn't see us as the mess we are today. He sees us and loves us for who we have been for eons of time, and for the eons to come. Like a person who is sick in a hospital bed, he sees beyond the incapacities and indigent circumstances, and knows us for who and what we really are and can be. So He continues to reach out to us, to seek after us, forgive us, and offers us redemption despite today's or yesterday's behavior. For who we are today is not who we are supposed to be. He loves us as the God's He is raising us to become.

I may not fit in here. Elaine and I talked about the fact that we didn't need to worry about having last minute gifts for those who might show up at our front door at Christmas time. No one ever comes to our door unless they are selling something. Even our own family won't come to our door. But I am known by someone. I am loved by someone. Someone knows me better than I know myself. He longs for my company, even if I don't act like I long for His at times. And someday, someday, I will know Him as I am known by Him then I will belong.