credit: michelletheeverydaycritic.blogspot.com

 This has been a crazy week of preparations.  Speedy is busy illustrating what his preparations have done for him by taking finals in all of his classes, but Scuff has just a few days to finish preparing for his missionary service, and tomorrow he will be receiving his endowment.  Because of all of the things going on, life at our house has been just crazy and emotions for everyone are running high.

It is very interesting how each and every person manages the stress they are feeling.  I bury my head and emotions, work like crazy and eat (already established….), especially things that cause me problems with weight, like milk, chocolate, and carbs.  One of my boys needs to play and exhibits significant annoyance and irritation that the rest of us do not feel like we can play because of the things we are trying to accomplish and his play time is not the way he thinks it should be, or that he doesn’t really have any time to play.  Another son procrastinates everything and does nothing.  He sits around reading a book or playing games on the computer just completely avoiding the responsibilities that are quickly crowding in upon him.  Another son wants to be entertained and participate with his brothers, feels pulled between his desire to play and need for work and then is just pretty much an emotional basket case because he doesn’t want to be responsible for doing what he wants to do and not finishing what he needs to do.  And then there is the baby…he must have had a bad dream about me leaving.  He woke up this morning hitting me and being so very angry with me, screaming and yelling and kept telling me that I was home!  It took a full 15 minutes of that before he was in an emotional place to be reasonable.  It is amazing to me how even at such an early age, we have feelings because of the things we think about and are important to us.  My little people are very intense emotional beings…..always.

 I think this will have to be a very short post so that I can keep on working with my emotional people and helping them learn to manage their stress in positive ways.  What positive ways have you found to manage stress and still accomplish those things that are stressful to you??

I loved this short video about President Uchtdorf.  And here is the text it comes from:
The Infinite Power of Hope. 

So often we have difficult things in our lives that makes it hard for us to believe and continue to move forward.  Like President Uchtdorf, I have learned that I can put my faith and hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Those principles give me hope too.  And in that hope, I can keep moving forward through the darkness, until my path is again illuminated with light.

President Uchtdorf:

Along with Middle-aged Mormon Man’s  Hug a Convert Day….. (Go over there and check it out and send him your conversion stories!)

I would like to announce that here on Building Eternity, I am offering those of you who are interested a free Book of Mormon.  I’ll even write my testimony in it for you! 

If you are interested, head over to my ‘About Me and Contact’ page (look up, link at the top, its new so let me know what you think), and send me an email.  If you prefer a language other than English, please make a note of that in the email.  Hopefully in the next couple of days, I’ll figure out a way to put that link into my side-bar…..

Also, you need not fret.  Article of Faith #8, (recite it with me…..) We believe the Bible to be the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly.  We also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. 

We believe that the Bible is the first witness of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we believe the Book of Mormon to be a second witness of Jesus Christ.  He is the Savior and Redeemer of the world.  These are His books and this is His gospel.

In another week, our third son will be heading out to spread the good news about our Savior:  that we can repent and return to live with Him, that families can be together forever, that we have living prophets upon the earth to guide us and help us know what we must do to return to live with Him, and that we can each receive that knowledge for ourselves, personal revelation, to guide our lives today.  So if you need answers to life’s questions, Elder Nelson would say:  Ask the Missionaries! They can help you!

Over at Chocolate on My Cranium and We Talk of Christ We Rejoice in Christ they are reporting on Angela Fallentine’s experiences attending the World Congress of the Family, held in Sydney, Australia this year.  I am so excited from reading her report about the messages the presenters are speaking to.  It is inspiring and hopeful to me to know that there are so many of us around the world who feel the need to speak boldly about the future of the family.

One of the comments made by one of the presenters spoke to me.  He said that we should be willing to share our stories of how divorce and marriage have affected you.  Well, I have both.  I am a child from a divorced family and I have built a strong marriage and family as an adult.  I have experienced both.  I feel that I speak a lot about my family…that is what this blog is about.  But I do not feel like I have spent an adequate amount of time speaking about the consequences of divorce for me or my family of origin.  Also, I am a social scientist.  Growing up in the family I did taught me some very stark examples of things I did not want to have in the family I created, and my education and my religious beliefs helped me to know things I did want to have.  This is a deep and intense topic and certainly cannot be covered in only one post.  But I will start the dialogue and hopefully keep it going.  Feel free to join in with your own experiences.  The more of us who can ‘stand as a witness’ to the negative affects of disintegration the family and the blessings of strong and stable families, the more we can help to influence the rising generation and give them tools to stand for the family.

I will just start with some statistics from my family.  I am the oldest of six children.  My parents had been married just shy of 20 years when they decided to get divorced.  I was 18, my brother 16, another brother 14, my youngest brother 13, my sister 10 and my baby sister was 9.  It has now been about 25 years since my parents made that decision.  Of the children, two of us are still married to our first spouse and have an intact family.  Four of us are divorced, one of us divorced twice and annulled once.  Of the divorces, there are eight children now growing up in divorced families, compared to the six of us originally.  Eleven children are growing up in intact families, nine of those are mine.  My father has remarried once and is still married, my mother is currently remarried to her third husband.

In all of this craziness, it is difficult for the children to know who to attach to because in their life time, those individuals keep changing.  There isn’t a lot of consistency of care or if there is, it is because the other parent is uninvolved and so they have abandonment issues.

I have plenty more to say, but other things I need to accomplish today…so just ponder on those statistics and take inventory of those within your own families and spheres of influence.  This is not a judgmental exercise, simply inventory the statistics and see for yourself.  I am sure my experience is not unique, in fact, I know it isn’t.

And do what you can to build your own eternal family, drop by drop.

photo credit: animals-zone.com

 Do you ever feel sometimes like life is swallowing you?  Like there is so much going on in each and every direction in your life it is difficult to be yourself?

Things have been so busy at our house lately that I have been letting the more important things slide and I can feel it.

We have remodeling drama….the bathroom is being remodeled so I have extra people in and out of the house every day with extra decisions to be made about placements, colors, textures…all sorts of stuff.  (Even in the process of removing the old insulation, they found a dead creature in the attic….lovely.  At least it was dead!)  The electricity is off in the bathroom, but that switch apparently also controls the furnace, outlets in the children’s room, and the outlet the cordless phone and the microwave are plugged into, and the kitchen light.  So we can either have the microwave or the phone, but not both.  It has been an interesting adjustment.  But the electrician comes tomorrow, so our time with this condition is almost over.  Plus I still have a few finishing touches to take care of in my painting of the man-cave.

We have end of school drama….Speedy is supposed to be finished with his classes and schoolwork by the 22nd of May (that is next week, folks).  We have been cranking out the schoolwork and writing essays.  We have two finals ordered, one we should be able to order later today, and one that will have to wait to be ordered hopefully on Friday before the close of business.  Then we have one class we are so behind on and hopefully will be able to finish before the finals actually arrive.  Needless to say, Speedy has not been in a very good mood and is pretty frustrated.

We have older kid drama….Slim is home from college and working but needs rides to and from work, two jobs.  Scuff is home from college and preparing for his mission and endowment.  He is leaving in two weeks, so we are trying to polish off his last minute items, clothing purchases, immunizations, driver’s license, packing, etc…  Then we are trying to get things in order for the temple, clothing, recommends, mental and spiritual preparations.

We have food drama….trying to feed three extra adults on the same food budget….OY…no left-overs ever!  I am not grocery shopping until Friday and we are already out of eggs, milk, butter, potatoes, noodles, fruit, meat, etc…  I should not complain.  We have plenty of food in the house and we will not be hungry, I just have to come up with new and exciting ways to eat it.  Oatmeal, for breakfast, some kind of vegies for lunch, and probably a meatless or vegetable chili for dinner.  I can make any breads with powdered eggs….(OK sorry, just thinking to myself…)

We also have extra emotional (unnamed to protect the innocent and guilty) drama which is causing a lot of stress.  Each day is new and heightened drama to work through, ponder through, pray through and try to be Christ-like through.

As I have thought about all of this extra emotional managing, I have realized that I am not consistently reading my scriptures.  Prayers are good.  Scriptures need work.  On the days I do it, life and drama are better, or at least my capacity to manage them is improved.  On the days when I don’t….not so good.  I know part of the drama is due to the fact that we have two temple endowments coming up and one missionary to send out now, and one in two months.  Always, for us, the principle is whenever big spiritual milestones are ahead….we get extra drama to dissuade us from keeping things in spiritual order.  So sorry to the blogging world, but we are trying to keep our spiritual and emotional boats afloat and that requires balance and time.  Over the last few weeks, pretty much all of May, we have been working on keeping that balance and bringing things back into balance when we can see that the drama is out of harmony and we are all out of sorts.

Please excuse me, I have to get back to ……..HEY!  Stop pouring syrup all over the floor……oh ya…and toddler drama…..BYE!

photo credit: wallpaperpin.com

Wow!  What a weekend!  I am not really sure where to start.  On Monday, we received word that Drew’s aunt had passed away.  On Thursday, we drove 15 hours to be with family (just Drew and I).  On Friday, we went to the funeral, visited with family, and hung out.  Then drove home 15 hours on Saturday.  Sunday morning we got ready and went to church, got home, relaxed and pondered about the weekend.  Today we are back to real life.

I had a few reflections from the funeral.  First, you will need a little background.  Drew’s aunt was in a rehabilitation center recovering from a back surgery.  Everything seemed to go fine, she just wasn’t recovering as fast as they had hoped so they had moved her from the hospital to the rehab center.  Her daughter, who had had a different surgery happened to be her roommate.  Around 3 a.m Tuesday morning, her daughter noticed that her breathing sounded funny and called for the nurse.  Her mother had vomited and aspirated.  From that point on, her mother was in a coma.

Family flew in to be with their mother.  One son is a doctor.  For the next week, the family went through many tests trying to decide what had happened and why she wasn’t waking up.  They tried many different things and avenues.  After a week without much medical explanations, they felt, unanimously that it was time for their wife/mother to cross the veil and they let her go.

Listening to their experiences during the funeral, I noticed several things.  One son in particular expressed significant lessons about the atonement that he had come to know personally through this trial.  He discussed his feelings at the beginning as ‘insisting/demanding’ that his mother get better and return to health.  Over several days, that turned to pleading, then to recognition, and finally realizing that his will was not the Lord’s will and submitting his heart to what the Lord wanted.  His testimony was sweet and personal.  His lessons were deep, significant and soul-stretching. 

I marveled at the Lord’s ability to teach each one of us different life lessons through this trial of our extended family.  He knows what is best for each and everyone of us.  Though we all experience the trial, our experiences of the trial are different, unique and individually tailored through our understanding, knowledge, and willingness to submit or not submit to the Lord’s will.  Each of those individuals who were personally connected with Drew’s aunt were touched differently by participating in her passing through the veil.  The lessons were personally tailored.

I think that often the point the Lord is trying to get across to us is the submission of our will. 

“The submission of one’s will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God’s altar. The many other things we ‘give,’ … are actually the things He has already given or loaned to us. However, when you and I finally submit ourselves, by letting our individual wills be swallowed up in God’s will, then we are really giving something to Him! It is the only possession which is truly ours to give!”
                                                             Elder Neal A. Maxwell
                                                             Ensign, Nov. 1995, 24

When we allow our hearts to bend and yield to what we know He wants, that is when we truly grow and are ready to see with eternal eyes.  As long as we are fighting to do what we want and the way we want to do it, we are not in a place where humility and understanding can really grow.

For myself, I had my own learning lessons.  I felt prompted to write about my feelings.  So in my journal I penned how free I felt to get away…..away from my calling, away from the demands of motherhood, away from my responsibilities.  I realized in my writing that I felt like I was always living to serve others, that I felt pressed upon by the demands and responsibilities I had.  I wondered if I always felt like that…..yep, pretty much.  I wondered where the balance is because the scriptures teach us that when we lose ourselves in the service of God, we find ourselves.  There is a balance there and how come I did not feel really happy with all of my service??!  And then it hit me……

I have been waiting to be finished with what the Lord wants of me so I can do what I want to do.  I have been trying to ride the line of obedience just enough to have a time-table for my service, a time to do what the Lord wants, so I can get it over with and then do what I want to do.  Wow!!  Really??  That is in there in my heart?  I am not waiting on the Lord.  I have an agenda and I want to finish the Lord’s agenda so I can get on with my own.  Ugly!  That is not the program.  So this is the lesson I am suppose to be learning right now?? 

The Lord has his own time-table.  The lessons are uniquely tailored to me, just as yours are to you.  In case you are wondering, they will extend over my entire mortality, even until the end and I cross through the veil myself.  There will be no getting done with the Lord’s agenda so I can move onto my own.  I have my own ‘heart’ work to do.  It is time for me to submit my will to His.  Now that I consciously know that, I have to apply it.  Application is so much more difficult than theory.  Wish me luck and just plain pray for me…..I am not really good at letting go of my agenda.

In the meantime, I am sure the Lord will find a way to help me learn to submit if I do not chose to do so on my own.  I am grateful for the time we had with my sweet husband’s family even if our gathering was to mourn our loved one.  I know we will see her again, and I look forward to that reunion.

Our family member in the hospital passed away so I am off to the funeral to mourn with my sweet family the loss of their wife, mother, sister, aunt, and friend.  I will be back when the weekend is over and after I have reconnected with my kiddos will be back to blogging.

In the mean time, do me a favor.  Go to this website and consider donating.

I have been reading about the World Congress of the Family for about a decade now.  It is really scary some of the organizations who present themselves to the Congress and express that their views represent those of our entire society.  (Mandatory preschools, expecting all women to work and institutionalized childcare….scary stuff.)  It is scary enough, that I have continued to follow whatever I can find about subsequent Congresses.

This year, the Congress is being held in Sydney Australia and Angela Fallentine has the opportunity to go but not the funding.  Angela is one of us, a mom and someone who feels deeply about the family and the doctrinal importance the traditional family provides to the stability of our society and the health of individuals, especially children.  Please help her attend!!  Time is growing short, only two weeks left!! 

Send out the information far and wide, post it on your facebook, tweet, blog, whatever you do!!  Send out the call.  I didn’t want to hone in on anyone’s parade so I haven’t posted  about this yet.  But I am feeling the necessity to ask for your help.  Donate whatever you feel you can.  If we each give a little, we can know that our voices are heard and our position represented in the Congress!

Angela and her husband already testified to the New Zealand Parliament (Read about it here).

Please do what you can to help!!!   See you when I get home.

photo credit:  bbc.co.uk

Sorry I have been a little absent in the blog-sphere.  This week has been super crazy.  I have been painting the man cave and hoping to have it finished before my college boys arrived home.  It wasn’t but I am over that now.  We have a family member in the hospital, extended family, and our concern and prayers are with her family.  Several of my friends have been having difficulties and I have been helping out and I have two college boys home.  So we have been kinda busy over here.

I have lots of emotional managing going on for myself and plenty of stories/applications to share, but they are going to have to wait until I have more time to think and ponder and can put them together in a blog post that is worthy of being read.  (Plus my baby has been sick….lots and lots of real life happening right now.)

I am imagining that I will be able to get a post or two together soon.  Until then, please check in and see if I have been able to get it together 🙂  Keep blogging 🙂

Stephanie Sorenson, of Diapers and Divinity is the author of this amazing book.  It explores many characteristics of the Savior and how mothers, by sharing in those same responsibilities emulates Christ.  I especially loved this paragraph:

“As we go through the daily details of our mothering, the small things are more meaningful than we recognize.  Like signs and tokens of our covenant relationship with Christ, the simple emulation of His attributes binds us to Him and makes us like Him.  Piece by piece, we build a life and a home and a family based on the doctrines of Jesus Christ; we create in slow motion.”

Even though I have been a mother of earthly children for a little over 23 years now, the principles expressed in Stephanie’s book have given me a greater insight into my role.  I love motherhood.  I have a testimony of its importance and significance.  I love my roll and teaching my children and helping to mold and shape their soul.  It is personal and spiritual and sacred to me.  But I have to tell you, this new and unexpected event in our lives over the last almost three years now, has tried my soul.  After six years of not having little, little people in the house, to return to diapers, teething, sleepless nights and now the joys of toddler-hood, especially his favorite past-time of emptying the entire contents of my new face powder onto the bathroom floor, Oy!  I am tired.  And sometimes I feel weary……definitely weary in well-doing.

Covenant Motherhood has reminded me that my service is not forgotten to the Lord, that there truly is ‘divinity in each new life’ and my job as mother is just as significant and important to the molding of this little soul, as it has been to the eight before him.  I especially needed the reminder that God’s work is just like motherhood: developing souls, teaching, training, loving, supporting, extending the arm of mercy, and occasionally dispensing justice.  (I just thought I was past the early part of it…..)  But God does not get tired of his work.  He loves it, because He loves us.

I would not have chosen to have this many souls come to my house.  It was not in my plan.  But the Lord knows I will be obedient.  He knows I have a testimony of motherhood.  He knows I love people.  And He knows that love is never exhausted, it grows and grows and grows with each individual and each willing act of service.  He knows that as I just go through the process of mothering, again and again, my love will grow and my heart will be knit with each and every person He sends, even if they dump out all of the diapers, use my eye-liner to write on the wall, draw on my new couch with crayola marker, and dump cinnamon-sugar all over the kitchen table, chairs, and floor.  My love will grow, even then, and I will become more like Christ.  Thanks for the reminder, Stephanie.  I needed it.

I promised some spiritual insights after reading about my emotional roller-coaster (here,and,here).  So this is what I have observed (I am sure there is more, there is always more….but this is what I have so far):

• I received information that led me to believe we would be following a certain course of action (we were moving).
• If I did not believe this was the case, I would never have emotionally invested myself in the process.
• Being emotionally invested is what actually allowed me to explore the emotions I was stuffing.  They would have never come to the surface if I didn’t ever believe we were actually moving, mostly because I would just have kept myself busy with the normal things of daily life.
• Although it appears I received conflicting information (we were moving when we actually didn’t), it really is an evidence of the Lord’s love for me.  It was never about moving or not moving.  It was about my emotional growth and development, my growth as a person or my spiritual development.  The Lord knows me well enough that He knew I wasn’t expressing or paying attention to my feelings in a certain area.  He knew that wasn’t healthy for me and He knew why I was doing it.  He allowed me an opportunity to explore my feelings in the only way I would really do it.  Then He put those circumstances in place.
• He knew me well enough to know that if I knew why I was pursuing a certain course and I had an option between my choice and the Lord’s choice, I would chose His direction instead of following my own desire.  (That is generally my nature……..my favorite scripture is 1st Nephi 3:7—I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know the Lord giveth no commandment unto the children of men save He shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.  Link here.  Obedience is a key factor and deserves a post all on its own.)

Think of your own children.  When you know a child is struggling in a particular area, don’t you go out of your way to help them learn to master that area–or at least learn the next concept along that path?  I will give you a personal example.

One of my little ones struggles with honesty.  Last fast Sunday (Once a month, we practice the law of the fast, where we go without food and water for 24 hours and use the money we would have spent on those meals and donate it through fast offerings to the church to be used to help those with less.  In our home, we start fasting for one meal from 8-11, then two meals 12-18 and help them work up to a full fast.), I was getting ready for church, and he called to me while I was doing my hair in the bathroom.

“Mom, can the baby have a chip?”

“Yea…..sure”  [Wait a minute, why does he have chips?  I told him it is fast Sunday]  “Are you eating chips?  It’s fast Sunday”

Now he appears in the doorway, chips in hand.  Picture a guilty look across his face.  “Well, I haven’t actually eaten any chips yet.”

“Then why do you have them?  If you have chosen not to fast for breakfast, then you will need to fast for lunch.”

“Since I haven’t actually eaten any, I can still fast for breakfast.”

“You haven’t eaten ANY???”  [knowing this child, I found that hard to believe, but was willing]

“No.”

“Then why do you have crumbs all over your shirt?  What are those from?  And why do you keep doing that thing with your eyes?”  [My husband was not happy that I was giving away how I knew this son’s honesty was in question.]

“Well, actually, I forgot it was fast Sunday and I did eat crackers and an orange, but I haven’t had any chips.”

Oh, there it is.  “Well, sweetie, you can eat chips if you like, but you will need to fast for lunch.”

Knowing that honesty and fasting is an issue for this little soul, I would do him no favors if I let him get away with his plan.  It helps him grow to have to do something that is difficult for him, but not beyond his ability.  As his parent, and one interested in his growth and development, I put circumstances in place to help him learn that honesty is important and he still has responsibilities and things that I want him to learn.

Our Father in Heaven is a better parent than I am.  He is more concerned about my growth and development and yours.  He puts circumstances in place to help us learn things that may be difficult for us but not beyond our ability.  He loves us.

I loved this talk from Elder Scott about finding joy and happiness.

Can you think of a time in your life where things have not turned out as you hoped, but you learned something significant from the process??