I’ve been up in Idaho fishing with a client so I have no cool instagram photos to send you. I need to get caught up!
But I’ve been thinking about you a lot this week. I don’t like to think about you being disappointed in yourself. You are one of the most amazing people I know and I am more proud of you than ever. I really hope you can put behind you m what seem to me as silly and minor mistakes and get back to being confident about who you are (daughter of god and one of his chosen missionaries) and back to serving 100% the people who need you.
Ok here’s a short fish video for inspiration.
Love you tons. More later.
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Mom or I may have already mentioned this to you, but it was really special. Grandpa and Grandma were down here for Sawyer’s second surgery, and we did the blessing in their hotel room so that it would be quiet (our house had all of Tiff’s kids in it). Ethan was given many neat blessings and has a lot to look forward to in life.
We have youth conference this week, and Mom and I have a lot to get ready for still! We are doing one of the activities, and it will be an adventure. Will fill you in next week.
Love you tons and think of you often.
Dad
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Two cool things I saw today:
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Hey Sister Keller!
I hope you had a great week! Hope you had some great teaching opportunities and that things are going well all around. Mom and I were at youth conference for a few days this last week, and it was great. We ran one of the activities and spent some time with the youth in our still very new ward. Good kids, and Ana and Ethan each seemed to have a good time. Yesterday, we enjoyed a leisurely day, something I really needed. Went on a bike ride and had our neighbors over to swim. Ethan and Ana did some chores in the morning and worked in the afternoon. Ethan played frisbee golf with friends. Poor Aunt Tiffany basically spends her whole days taking care of sawyer. When you are in a wheelchair, you have a lot of needs, and Tiffany is right there for him all day every day. It’s impressive.
We have a departing missionary speaking in our ward today, a sister Eversole. I’ve forgotten where she is headed. We haven’t had many leave or come home recently but should have a couple more this summer. Not like some of our wards we’ve lived in where the summers seemed filled with departing and returning missionaries. Here is the current list of missionaries from our ward:
President & Sister Christensen 7/17 Guatemala City East Mission
Sister Anna Christensen 5/18 Peru Cusco Mission
Elder Nicholas Hans Bell 10/18 Mexico Hermosillo Mission
Sister Amelia G Stephens 1/19 Canada Winnipeg Mission
President & Sister Littlefield 1/18 Salt Lake City Temple Square Mission
Sister Morgan Keller New Zealand Hamilton Mission
Elder Taiden Gregson California Los Angeles Mission
Elder Niall Thorley Peru Lima Central Mission
Elder Paul & Sister Kay Lynn White Nebraska Omaha Mission
The other elder you know in your mission is not on here because when they split our ward, he stayed in the 1st Ward.
I’ve attached an essay I’ve always enjoyed and thought you might like. Eugene England was an English professor at BYU when I was there, but has since passed away.
We sure love you and are proud of your sacrifice. Keep up the awesome work.
Dad
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Make Cookies and Smile
Talk attached:
Blessing the Chevrolet
By Eugene England
For a moment Abijah felt stunned; in this, his first real emergency, he had
almost forgotten God!
He turned to Brother Tuckett.
Clory, sitting on a boulder near-by, wondered at the sudden purpose in Brother
Tuckett’s movements. What were they going to do? And then she saw Brother Tuckett
appear with the bottle of consecrated sweet oil. She heard Lon say, ‘You be
“Mouth,” Brother Abijah,’ and the full significance of the scene burst upon her.
Why, they were preparing for ‘the laying on of hands’! For Abijah would have to be
‘Mouth’since he held the higher priesthood! She sat up in horror. Administering to
an ox!
She saw Melanchton Tuckett rub the oil between the animal’s red ears and then
both he and Abijah rest their hands, one over the other, on its head.
‘We unitedly lay our hands upon thy head, O ox . . . this oil which has been
dedicated and consecrated and set apart for the healing of the sick in the household
of faith. . .’
Bewilderedly Clory grasped the fact that this prayer had all the earnest
supplication of the ceremony performed for any ailing human being.
.... Clory watched him calmly speak to the ox. Opening its eyes, it stared at the
men with its gentle, liquid gaze. She was not greatly surprised when it scrambled to
its feet.
—Maurine Whipple, The Giant Joshua
At vArious tiMEs i have heard and read, with mild curiosity, of the anointing of animals by the power of the priesthood in pioneer times, but it wasn’t
until i found myself with my own hands placed in blessing on the hood of my
Chevrolet that i really felt what that experience meant to those early saints, who
depended on their animals, as we do our cars, for quite crucial things.
one evening last fall, Charlotte and i drove about sixty miles to visit a young
couple in our branch, converts of a few years who had slipped into inactivity and
growing doubt but were now trying to rebuild their faith. We had supper and a good
visit and gave a blessing to their new daughter who had been ill for some time with
a vague disorder that kept her crying severely for long stretches. When we tried to
return home the car would not start. We managed to push it to the only garage in
that small town just before it closed and were told that the trouble was apparently a
broken timing gear which would take about two days to order and install. our young
friends lent us their car to drive to our home and bring back when we came for ours.
When i phoned to check two days later i was told that the timing gear was installed
but for some reason the car would not start; i drove over anyway and tried to help,
but as the afternoon wore on and we tried all kinds of variations of the timing
apparatus, plugs, etc., we could only get an occasional rough chug and some
backfiring. the mechanic finally said he was afraid he would have to tear out the
new timing gear and check it, which would take well into the next day. But i had to
be back home to conduct an important Branch meeting that night, and when my
anxiety reached a certain point, i found that it was quite natural, while the mechanic
was helping at the gas pumps out front, to literally place my hands on the car and
give it a blessing, explaining to the Lord that i was about His work, that my branch
needed me, and i needed some extraordinary help to get there. the mechanic came
back, made another adjustment, and half-heartedly tried the starter again for the
hundredth time. so help me, i was not even surprised when, after a few mild growls,
the engine started. the mechanic was incredulous and insisted on a test drive before
he would let me go; after a few miles the engine was still running quite rough but
he agreed that i could probably get home and then have it tuned up some more
later—and i was off. it was only on the long ride back that i became properly aware
of what had happened, was amazed, and gave .thanks.
i have had many occasions to bless my wife and my children and have not been
surprised to see them healed, against all the odds, or relax from pain into peace or
sleep under my very hands. And on a couple of occasions when we had car trouble
during our many trips back to utah from California or Minnesota they have suggested
that we pray for help and it has seemed to come. i now remember, while on a little
used Nevada back road in early spring, driving onto the shoulder to look at some
flowers, finding myself stuck in hub deep mud, and after a family prayer, inexplicably
making it back up on the pavement. And a number of times, following such a prayer,
we have limped across hundreds of miles of desert or a nighttime of closed stations
with leaking radiators or worn bearings or something else that should have stopped
us. But those things have occurred in fairly naturalistic ways that i sort of took for
granted—as nice experiences for my children but nothing miraculous—and haven’t
thought much about until recently, when i started blessing my Chevrolet.
At Christmas this year we visited our folks in utah and on our way home noticed
there was a certain nagging mushiness when we tried to accelerate and also that a
noisy muffler was getting louder. Crossing south Dakota on a saturday afternoon
we found few mechanics available, but finally one took time to look at the car and
found a dirty fuel filter, which he replaced, and a loose tailpipe connection, which
he tightened and wired together so it couldn’t work loose again. When the car still
had no pickup—in fact, seemed worse—he took a look at the mileage (84,000) and
cheerfully declared that the transmission was probably going ($400), but i could
probably make it home. We started out again but found that now we couldn’t get up
over 40 miles an hour on the level, could barely make it over those infinitesimal
variations in the landscape they call hills in south Dakota, and were getting about
three miles per gallon. i calculated that even if things didn’t get worse it would take
us well into sunday to get home and we would probably run out of money for gas
before then or stall on one of the (comparative) mountains of Minnesota. And if
things did get worse, we could be marooned on the south Dakota prairie (fairly
dangerous in January) or at best stuck in some motel until Monday when someone
might be able to put in a new transmission—except that we couldn’t pay for it.
suddenly i found myself gripping the wheel with a special intensity and giving
the car a blessing again. i told the Lord that my family was in danger and that our
Branch needed us the next day and it was time once more for some special help. i
felt impressed to take the next exit, which led us to a town some distance from the
freeway, and without any surprise felt directed to a certain station. the owner looked
things over, disconnected a vacuum tube, and had me drive off for a test. there was
no change and i went back disappointed and for the first time surprised. But the
station owner greeted me with a grin and said, “i’ll bet i know what the problem is;
i heard it as you drove off.” He put the car on the hoist and soon found out he was
right. Disconnecting the tailpipe at the place the previous mechanic had wired it, he
pushed a hose down it and found that the inner wall had collapsed almost shut. He
explained that my Chevrolet was from one of those few years when they had experimented with double-walled tailpipes. sometimes, in the extremes of heat and cold
of the upper Midwest that inner wall collapses, shutting off the exhaust and producing
symptoms much like a bad transmission or an engine that needs overhauling. in fact,
the reason he recognized the problem for what it was is that a friend of his had, just
the month before, wasted $500 on his engine before he discovered that he had this
very problem. the only reason i had been getting any power was because the pressure
had forced the tailpipe connection loose so that the exhaust could escape there; and
when the previous mechanic had wired that so it couldn’t force open, the engine’s
power was shut down. i found myself quite calm, without surprise, as he told me
these things, without anxiety when he was unable to locate a new tailpipe at that late
hour on saturday but then barely caught one supply house in time to get a length of
some flexible pipe and some clamps and managed to cut out the curved section where
the collapse was and clamp in the flex-pipe securely enough for us to get home.
i do not understand fully why or how the Lord does these things—though i know
He does. in fact, if i think about it much, there are difficulties: How about our free
agency and our need to learn to solve our own problems and be maturely independent—not like infants always asking for help? How fit all this with the Lord’s assurances that He makes His sun and rain to come down equally on all His children—the
just and the unjust? How about all that suffering, apparently uninterrupted by God,
in the sub-sahara famine, southeast Asia’s constant bloodshed, the animal-like
packs of deserted children in south American cities, the emotional destruction during
slow death in American nursing homes? Couldn’t God have veered the typhoon that
killed thousands in Bangladesh or the earthquake that killed thousands in iran as
well as guide the mechanic to straighten out the timing on my Chev or me to
someone who could cure my car? i don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with
God guiding people rather than interfering with nature; perhaps it has something to
do with His being asked in faith and for reasons that have to do with His most
important purposes, which aren’t just keeping people alive but saving their souls.
Yet He seems mysteriously selective about helping there as well. And of course,
even when He does clearly respond it isn’t always the way we want or expect. in
that almost too painfully moving autobiographical account, “the Death of a son”
by Carole Hansen, that appeared in Dialogue (Autumn 1967), we were powerfully
reminded that God, in response to a priesthood blessing, can give assurance and
peace, even to the point of being misunderstood—and then eventually can give
conviction of His care and the child’s ultimate welfare—without giving what parents
emotionally want most, the child’s life. Again, i don’t know why or how.
All i really know is that i continue to ask blessings and to see them given. Last
week our Branch held a special fast and had a prayer session for the four-year-old
daughter of some friends of one of our members: she had to come from Colorado for
extremely dangerous heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic to correct a congenital defect.
the parents had lived with the specter of losing this child for four years as she grew
into a poignantly frail elfin joy while they waited for her to be old enough to risk the
operation, and they had fasted each week over the past months as the time grew close.
they had been told the chances were about 50-50, but somehow none of us was
surprised when the last exploratory catheterization at the Clinic revealed the condition
less serious than had been supposed and when (after an anointing by her father and
a local rochester Branch brother) the operation went extremely well and she was up
and skittering around after only a few days in intensive care. Last fall i felt moved to
give a special blessing to a dear and extremely capable friend who was suffering
anxiety and self-reproach under the pressure of his professional responsibilities and
the possibility of failing his family and himself by not meeting them, and i had no
doubt that the Lord would bless him with the measure of self-confidence he needed
to succeed, as He did. And yesterday a faithful, long-suffering father and i were
suddenly called out of our sunday school preparation meeting to find his child in
the chapel having a severe seizure. (she has had a condition from birth that causes a
reaction, at entirely unpredictable moments.) As the father took her in his arms and
held her jaw so she wouldn’t bite her tongue, i placed my hands on her head and
through the power of the priesthood rebuked the uncontrolled shaking of her entire
body. As i continued to stroke her head, the shaking quickly quieted, and then we
carried her to the car to be taken home to rest and i returned to explain to those who
had been present what had happened and to ask their prayers for her.
the opportunities, the needs, come often, and the Lord’s response forms a bright
thread in the texture of gospel living. But i don’t fully understand why or how. i
only know that i continue to ask—and to acknowledge the Lord’s hand in all things.
