Clearing the path...

Hey all. Are you ready for a really vague, obnoxiously heavy metaphor? Well then, I have the post for you! Please read on...

I've been struggling a lot lately with something occurring in my personal life...or my work life. It's hard to tell because they are so heavily intertwined in the position I have. And I realize its basically the same struggle I often have when anything hard passes in front of me. I've mentioned before that I far prefer the path of least resistance. But somehow or another, I always end up inadvertently choosing the other path--you know, the one with all the thorns and scary trees that look like they are watching you? Yeah...I get myself in that neck of the woods a lot, I think.

Anyway, I won't go much into it because I rather like my job, and the people I work with, and moreover, I NEED my job. Let me just say that there is an issue that I feel I MUST take on. It is a fight that isn't necessarily "my fight," but I understood the Spirit when it spoke and said, "It isn't enough. It isn't enough to sit back and be sorry for those who hurt."

I feel that God advocates for women.
I feel it is important for me to advocate for women.
More than that, I feel that God expects me to advocate for women.
Especially in this instance.

But sometimes doing what is right (even what seems right all the way to the core of your being) is really hard, and it seems like you're walking in a forest all by yourself late at night and there is an owl hooting and rustling footsteps in the leaves behind you and faces in the trees, and all you want is to get back on that path with the street lights and the friendly houses along the way and forget that there is a harder path that you could be making less scary for other people who will come after you...and...and...

And then, when you're asking God to be able to let it go, to just be able to sit back and watch things play out, to let someone else take their machete and clean up that scary road for the other people that might have to travel that way...

Then, He calls you a coward. Clear as a bell, He aims a single word at you that is incomparably accurate,  and you know it's true. So you get up and quit crying in the fetal position because a raccoon is following you, and you start slicing away.

Where am I going with all of this? I'm not even sure...but this is my place where I can dump my feelings and feel a little better, even if it leaves the literally tens of tens of readers painfully confused. All I know is that I've found myself in a prickly situation, with no choice but to keep on fighting back at the thorns. And I may hack and hack and hack at all the vines and claw-like branches on that path only to turn around and see that everything has grown back and that the journey was only for me. But at least when it is time to meet my Maker, "coward" may no longer be the most apt description for me. And, you know, that's always a good thing.

Wishing you peace! (And maybe wishing for a little for me too...)






P.S. Sorry for the bizarre, insanely vague nature of this post. This was simply one of those posts that was "for me." There are some "real" posts coming up soon. I have been working on a couple of tutorials for y'all and fall just gets me going...makes me want to write and craft and cook and spread happiness everywhere I go. So hopefully there will be a little more happening in this little corner of the inter-web. I'll try not to beat you over the head with more metaphorical ambiguities in the near future. :)

On Legacy, Part 1

Family, and specifically, mothers, have been on my mind a lot lately.

And no, it isn't really because Mother's Day is around the corner.

I've been thinking a lot about connections and the legacy we leave---the kind of legacy I hope to leave someday. Two things have spurned this on, and I imagine that it will take two posts to adequately express my feelings.

A bit over a month ago, my grandmother passed away. I've wanted to post something about her since it happened, but I have had difficulty coming up with anything meaningful. Not because she wasn't meaningful herself--quite the opposite. She was truly an amazing women. At the ripe old age of 98 and a half, she was survived by 6 children, 34 grandchildren, 95 great-grandchildren, and 24 great-great grandchildren. She lived a quiet life, but she was full of love, and stubbornness, and concern for every one of us in that list. I am grateful to have had her touch my life and grateful that she is relieved of her earthly cares, on to bigger and better things. People remark what a legacy she left in pure posterity, and it is truly beautiful.

But none of these things really means anything. Because statistics and generalizations about my grandma or her posterity do not actually give any idea of who she was. These things do not fill me with the Christmas Eve anticipation of grandma bringing her handmade Christmas bags to every one of those 34 grandchildren, each complete with handmade ornaments, popcorn balls, and two crisp-as-could-be one dollar bills. Or the absolute dependability of a birthday card from one person on the planet. Or her laugh...the way she would almost close her eyes and tilt back her head, and lift up her hand, covered in skin like crepe paper, just a bit as she let it out.

Numbers don't explain her fierce desire for independence--the apologies she would make when I was the one who got to take her on her weekly shopping trip, too worried about inconveniencing me to know how very much I enjoyed spending the time with her, or the insistence that she put those groceries away and the fuss she would make when I would do it anyway. Generalizations don't bring to mind the holographic bandaid she wore on her forehead at my wedding (because in spite of a fall on the way up the temple steps, she was not going to miss it). They don't tell the tale of how, in spite a broken hip, she chastised the paramedics taking her to the hospital for not allowing her to put on a nicer looking dress.

Numbers don't call up the soft voice, the way she watched my children play...the peaceful, contented look she had as she watched all of us--the 34, and the 95, and the 24--play.

Most importantly, it isn't numbers that she left behind. In fact, it isn't just people. It's mannerisms and habits, turns-of-phrase and expressions; it's a legacy not of things, but of spirit. What she left behind is still in us. It's there in the way an uncle and an aunt laugh, the way one talks, and the way another worries. It's there in the way my father walks and the expressions he uses (and the stubbornness I know I will have to contend with as he himself ages). It's in my prematurely graying hair at my temples, and another cousin's nose or eyes. And from there it goes on and out to all of us counted in those numbers. Whether they are physical traits, words she spoke, or the simple mannerisms of a remarkably good woman, they are there.

And ultimately, her legacy is an endless thread of love and goodness woven into each of us. As long as we are still here, spinning and weaving those threads, she is still here.

{Digging Potatoes}

Well, we must really live in Idaho, because today I went out and dug up potatoes. This was a first for me, and I actually enjoyed being out in the co-op garden, alone in the sun and breeze, just me and my thoughts.

One thing about potato digging though: it is HARD work. When I left the garden with my little bucket of taters, I was covered in dirt and ready for a forty-year nap. I like picking lettuce, or tomatoes, or squash. I like picking berries or pulling beans. These things are easy work--you use your eyes, pull the prettiest, plumpest fruit, and stay relatively clean. Potatoes are different.

I don't know anything about potato growing other than what we've been told by some Idaho folk and what we've managed this season, but here's what I've got so far--when you plant potatoes, you plant them in mounds. (And here in the high desert, in our poorly funded student co-op garden, that mostly means planting them in a bed of sandy, rocky, dirt.) And then you let them grow. For the most part, you just kind of leave them alone. And then you wait. You wait until they shrivel up and die and you think the rot and the bugs are just around the corner and you're pretty sure you messed up and that God shouldn't trust you to tend to things when He's better at it anyway.

And then you stick your hands in that dry, rocky, hard-as-can-be dirt, you push aside the old dead plant, and you start digging for the roots.

Potatoes can grow deep, well below the mound you made for them, deeper into that thick, dense, desert sand. If you're lucky, and if you dig deep enough, you'll dig up some beautiful gems--small ones, big ones, all under that rotten, rocky mess, emerging a few at a time as proof that there is something bigger than you at work under the soil.

The Mister and I are often described as "poor as church mice." My father has used that phrase on us a few times, and our church leaders too. When we started this journey, we knew it wouldn't be easy. And to be honest, sometimes it is a little staggering to think of how far we still have to go. At times, it's easy to think of what we've given up, of the things (all that old STUFF) we could have if we were living the same lives we decided to abandon. If we let ourselves, it would be easy, after a long week of endless studying for him and nearly-single-parenting for me, to look at our lives and see the shriveled up plant of what we used to have. It would be easy to forget that we were led here and that there are greater forces at work. The trick is remembering that we're still digging; we're still reaching for what comes out of that pile of dirt and dead.

So we keep digging our potatoes. We may come out dirty as hell. We'll be tired and our muscles will ache, but after the ache we'll be stronger for our efforts. We'll have grime under our fingernails and dents in our knees from the rocks we knelt on, but we'll have what we came for. We'll leave behind a pile of rubble, but we'll know the love of God and hold it right in the palm of our grungy, weathered hands.

Enriched

These past few weeks have just been a whirlwind for us. The semester ended, and the Mister officially has a whole YEAR of school behind him (thanks to the trimester program here) with pitch perfect grades!  Say HALLELUJAH with me! This journey has been one wild and crazy ride and it is such a huge milestone for us. He is positively amazing!

Then, with the end of the semester and the summer break, the apartments we manage cleared out; much paperwork and many meetings accompanied the girls' departure, and I am only just emerging from that.

Additionally, my fabulous family came to visit during that last week of the semester and we played and played and played. I'm sure I'll be posting lots of photos from our fun.

Finally, I am so blessed to have such an awesome spouse who gave me what amounted to a three day vacation to attend BYU-Idaho Education Week. It was such an incredibly uplifting experience. The amount of light and understanding that came into my mind and heart over those three days was astounding.

One of the highlights was getting to hear Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles speak. He gave a beautiful talk about being on the Lord's side. One of the things he spent considerable time talking about was the trial of wealth. He quoted Brigham Young and Ezra Taft Benson as it relates to this trial.

Pres. Young:
“The worst fear I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and His people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty, and all manner of persecution and be true. But my greatest fear is that they cannot stand wealth.” 

Pres. Benson:

"This particular test [the test of wealth] seems like no test at all . . . and so could be the most deceiving of all tests.
Do you know what peace and prosperity can do to a people--it can put them to sleep. . . .
The Lord has on the earth some potential spiritual giants whom He saved for some six thousand years to help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly, and the devil is trying to put them to sleep.


Throughout Education Week, I was struck again and again about the need we have to dedicate our time and our talents and our means to the kingdom, of our responsibility to save the literal seed of Abraham and bring all God's children into the covenant. The Mister is ultimately on a course that he hopes will lead to medical school, and we talk often of how we want to use the means from a medical career to serve others, both temporally and spiritually, and not to live the "good life" for ourselves. Even now though, it is so easy to fall into the trap of the "I wannas." Because of the lifestyle change we have undergone in the last year, there is much we deny ourselves, usually out of necessity. While we often talk about remembering to live well within our means as our circumstances change in the future, Elder Bednar's talk was a good reminder to be grateful for what we have now.

After listening to Elder Bednar, I am reminded that one of the surprising blessings we find ourselves in possession of is our considerable lack of wealth. I am grateful that in this time of busyness and a significant NEED to have constant help from the Savior--help we rely on for my work with the girls we watch over and the Mister's help in his schoolwork--we don't have to face the trial of wealth. We don't run the risk of relying on the earthly blessings and forgetting who they come from. Our humble circumstances bless us because they keep us in a position close to the Lord and keep us from falling asleep when we so desperately need the guidance of the Lord.

I may not have fancy clothes or a big screen television, but we have enough. In fact, we have enough for our needs, enough to share a little with those who have less, and some left over. And in this I find myself full of gratitude, my Spirit fed, and my life rich.