Paying Attention and Loving

So many changes that have happened in over the year since I last posted. First we are in Utah and we doing better. Our little family has grown and we are blooming family of four. We are a fun and silly bunch which I'm glad to say that I learned from my family that I grew up in. Evelyn is a cute toddler who understands two languages, French and English, and speak one and a half. Julie Leanne joined our family four months ago and is a happy little girl who has thus far decided to Daddy's little girl and Evelyn has taken claim of Mommy.

I love to expound on the ways that our lives have gotten better but some of them are too personal to address on here. I will say that I have been doing some "Wii exercises" as one of my friends used to joke with me. I have also cut back on my reading which has helped me focus on families and friends. Wendy and I have made friends in our ward or congregation and we intend to only get more because we are greedy like that. I do want to say that I am married to my best friend who is wonderful and who is bent on helping me be a better man. I love flirting with her. Also if you haven't have listened to the song "Beauty and the Beast" it's awesome. My favorite line from it now is "learning you were wrong". I like it mainly because my first impression of the beautiful woman who would become my wife was not a positive one at first. I've had the good experience of learning just how wrong my first impression was of her.

I do want to mention that I am excited for the Pokémon Go App. I will only mention this topic in passing to warn anyone who might have an inclination of talking to me about it, as I might talk your ear off about that subject. I do want to mention that Brandon Sandersen has become my favorite author is another subject about which I could talk at length.

The title of my post is based on something I realized from an experience with my second daughter Julie. Wendy had just given birth to our daughter, I had clamped the cord and Julie was off to a great start. As always the nurses needed to check all of Julie's vitals and make sure that she was healthy and ensure that she could indeed survive on her own. I remember that there were three nurses checking all of the monitors and looking at Julie to make sure would be fine. In the midst of all of these screenings, I remember hearing Julie cry for probably the second time in her short little existence. I glanced at Wendy to ensure she was alright and then went over to little Julie. She was crying, red and flailing. I put my hand out to her and she grabbed my finger in her tiny little hand and suddenly stopped crying. As I reflected on this experience I realized that three very caring people were all paying attention to Julie but I had to reach out in love and that's what she felt. I think that we often tend to pay attention to what someone is saying or doing or we are thinking about our response. I think that we often forget the vital part that we need to love them. I'm not saying that things two things are mutually exclusive but I am saying that we tend to do one rather than the other. As both the Apostle Paul and the Book of Mormon prophet Moroni taught that if we don't have charity we are nothing. While we do need to pray for charity, I think that it is also important that we exercise the muscle that is love towards our brothers and sisters. I pray that as you go through out your week that you will exercise that muscle of love towards your neighbor. I know that as you do so you will touch the lives of others in positive ways and you will start to reflect the love our Heavenly Father and Christ to others.

Enabled by Grace

I'd like to offer my sincere apologies for having not written sooner. After my last post I got an internship down in Utah and moved down there. It's been very exciting to work with local city government to get necessary things accomplished. I'm looking forward to seeing how my work influences the city decisions. Also my wife, Wendy and I are expecting our first child later this year. We're very excited about welcoming our little girl into our new family. Wendy and I also visited Idaho about a month ago to visit friends and family. I'm close to finishing up my internship. I'm currently reading the Foundation series and Dad is rereading it.

My sister Catherine has a skill for making shirts and Onesies. At my request a few months ago she taught me how to make them. I came up with a design and then most of the execution with her careful oversight. This is the result.

The concept comes from one of my favorite TV shows the Avatar: the Last Airbender.
Here are two other shirts Catherine's made for me.

The above one is also from Avatar.

This shirt comes from a book called "The Little Prince". The quote on the back reads "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". The quote is in French because I wanted a shirt with French on it that wasn't something mundane like "J'aime Paris" or "I love Paris".

So I came across a concept that I really like. It came from a talk in the last April session of LDS General Conference. The talk was by Elder Cardon entitled "The Savior Wants to Forgive". I liked the concept so much that I made it into a diagram which makes me feel like I understand it pretty well. Elder Cardon explains that if we seek the Lord's grace that it will be granted to us and make weak things strong. Endowed with this grace we are then capable of accomplishing tasks that we normally would not be able to do alone. It's a really simple message but it was something that really stuck out to me. It's something that I really believe to me true because I've searched for grace and been enabled to do things that I never thought I would be able to do.

I hope y'all have a good week!

Answering Our Prayers

Oh wow. So it's been over a month since I last wrote. Well to get y'all caught up. A few days after my last post, my family and I left for California to see my sister Megan get married to her best friend, Garett. It was fun experience and I'm glad to see my sister be so happy. It also made me excited because... It means Wendy and I are next! Yay!!!

After the wedding, we came back home to Utah. Since being back, I've done my best to keep busy and get needed stuff done. Well and I've done my best not to think about how much I miss Wendy. While being home I've been to a fair in Bountiful that had a some fun dance groups and one of them was French! It was fun to see a French dance group and made me miss the country even more. My darling Wendy got to visit it which made me a bit jealous. Well, I hope to one day visit it with my darling Wendy. I should also say that during this break we've been able to grow closer to one another.

I've got to hang out with my family and get caught up with them. It's been really nice to be able to hang out with them. I love being around my family; it always makes me feel like I'm spoiled. I've also been able to play with my little nephew Nikolai. He's adorable and he's crawling like crazy. For the most part he's really happy and really fun. Last week, my sister Catherine helped me make (more like helped her) a really cool t-shirt. It's a copy of a shirt from the Heroes of Olympus series that I read earlier; that series is a continuation of the Percy Jackson series. Anyways, I'm happy and excited to wear the shirt around campus.

I've also got caught up on watching some movies that I've wanted to see. I got to see the new Batman movie which was really good. I also got to talk to my dad about the French Revolution parallels in it. For me, it was really fun to be able to do that with him. I also got to watch a movie recommended by one of my French teachers called "Joyeux Noël" or Merry Christmas. If you watch it, you probably want to put English subtitles on. The movie has English, French and German all spoken in it. It's based on a true story from WWI. Around the Christmas season, a German tenor came and sung for some German soldiers in the trenches. He sung a hymn for them and a Scottish priest recognized the hymn and started accompanying the tenor on his bagpipes. From there three battalions, one German, one Scottish and one French rapidly become friends and stopped fighting. It was really cool and for me showed how the spirit of Christmas can unite people. It was really good.

So a few weeks before Megan and Garett's wedding, Catherine (my other sister) and Jesse's car broke down. It was horrible timing on many levels. I watched as they struggled with this trial. I know that they prayed a lot about it. I know that my parents and I prayed a lot about it. I will admit that I was impressed by both Catherine and Jesse's strength during this trial. A couple weeks ago, they were able to purchase a very good used car. It reminded me that the Lord does indeed hear and answer our prayers, even if our answers to our prayers are not immediately forthcoming. It also reminded of another prayer that was answered. I got home from my LDS mission in March of 2009. My plan was to date around for about a year and then find my special someone and get married. The Lord though, had a different plan for me. For three years, I went on flirted, went on dates, and did the whole dating game at BYU-Idaho. It was long and tiring . At times it was heartbreaking but I continued my search and continued praying. I'm glad that the Lord didn't get annoyed at my incessant prayers about finding my wife. Well three years to the day (or pretty close) that I got home from my mission, I got engaged to my best friend, Miss Wendy. I'll try not to brag about her too much... I just want to say that she really is my best friend in the whole world, like no else has been. To be honest, when I think about Wendy, I can just see so many of my prayers answered about how I wanted my wife to be, plus so many more awesome quirks and traits! I can honestly see that the Lord really did answer my prayers by giving me her.

I want to testify that the Lord really does hear and answer our prayers, even when we don't yet see it. Oftentimes we have to work hard, pray hard, and be patient to see our prayers answered but the Lord will answer them in His time. I have a quote that I shared with a friend of mine earlier that relates to working towards the Lord's answers to our prayers. Elder Holland said “Take advantage of every opportunity to learn and grow. Dream dreams and see visions. Work toward their realization. Wait patiently when you have no other choice. Lean on your sword and rest a while, but get up and fight again.” I testify that the Lord hears and answers our prayers. Oftentimes we have to work diligently towards their realization. I testify that the heartache, tears, and sacrifice that we have to go through will always be worth it. May the Lord bless you with the patience to see the answers to your prayers! Have a good week!

Stand Ye in Holy Places

The last couple of weeks have been interesting. I finished listening the first book of the Hunger Games. It is a very interesting series and I'm hoping to get the second book soon, so that I can finish it. For the past several weeks, I would listen to part of the story on my I-pod while I was doing my laundry. I liked this so much that when I finally finished the Hunger Games, I went looking for another audio book to listen too. I found a nice website LibriVox that has free audio books that are in the public domain. Almost all of their books are classics, but very good. Lately I have been listening to Peter Pan. One day recently I realized that Pan is the Greek god of the wild; I learned this from the Percy Jackson series. So I thought that Peter Pan's name was rather clever hint at his slightly "wild" nature. it's a well written book with beautiful prose that are almost musical in nature. The next book that I am looking at listening to is Jane Eyre. If anyone knows other places that I can find free audio books please let me know. I will also say that I am over half way through "To The Rescue" which has been good but heavily detailed.

These last couple of weeks have been rough on Barbara and I. She's a ton of homework, sickness and long days of work. I've done my best to help cheer her up and keep her motivated to do her homework. I've been struggling with somethings of my own. I have two callings now that I love but both are a lot harder than I had thought they'd be. Both have been fun but hard. I'm hoping and praying that I can get a hang of them here soon. Luckily for the last two weekends, Barbara and I have been able to go to the Idaho Falls temple because the Rexburg temple is closed for cleaning. Before going with Barbara, I hadn't been to the temple for two weeks and I was sorely missing it. As many of my readers may know, I love going to the temple. It is a special place where we can feel the Spirit of the Lord more strongly than in other locations. During the last few weeks, it struck me that I don't know when or if I'll ever be able to see my home in North Carolina every again; having grown up in that house, it was a very sad thought. Something that I have come to realize is that for me, going to the temple is like going home. It is a place where I can feel comfortable and secure from the storms and tempests of life. At the temple, I can also receive guidance, comfort, and counsel from my Father in Heaven. I love going to the temple on a regular basis. It wasn't until I was on my mission that I realized the blessing of being able to go the temple regularly. I met many people in France who had to plan for months to be able to the temple just once during the year! After seeing such devotion by the latter-day saints of France, I decided that if I lived close to a temple, that I would go to it as often as I could just like those French saints would. Having been home for a while, I have learned that I need to go the temple to help keep me on the path that the Lord would have me on. I hope for my readers that you do your best to go to the nearest temple. I promise you that you will be guided by the Lord there to understand the things that you need to.

So I included this picture because I see this ring on my hand everyday. It is a CLB ring which means "Choisir le bien" or "Choose the right". I really like this silly ring because I have had it for over two years now. It reminds me of my love for the French and France, and to do my best to choose the right.

I hope that y'all have a good week. Que Dieu vous benissiez!