Embattled Christian

Instead of heading to a tropical paradise or a desert golf resort for our escape-from-winter this January, we decided to go to Houston, Texas to visit our grandchildren. As luck would have it, we also brought a significant cold snap with us from Alaska. Temperatures plummeted to around freezing in the Houston area for much of our ten-day trip.  Oh well, we were warm with happy family gatherings. Most days the sun came out enough to give us a significant shot of vitamin D. Brynne and Liam showed us the zoo and the Museum of Natural Science. Together, we saw Avatar at an IMAX theater, an experience unavailable to us in Anchorage, and one that was surprisingly absorbing and impressive. Then we headed west to San Antonio.  Alas! On the morning that we planned to visit the Riverwalk we heard a news report that it was being drained for yearly maintenance. We went anyway and enjoyed strolling around this San Antonia landmark. Liam was fascinated by the bulldozers scraping up mud from the bottom of the river. At last, I have seen the legendary Alamo! We explored  spectacular Natural Bridge Caverns. With the help of multiple Iphones we found two Texas BBQ restaurants that had earned high praise: Rudy’s Texas BBQ and Texas Pride BBQ. We couldn’t pick just one so we went to both. At Rudy’s I especially liked the creamed corn and peach cobbler. At Texas Pride the pecan cobbler was a hit. Both had outstanding brisket, ribs, BBQ sauce, and finger-licking ambiance.  Back in Houston, we  watched Brynne do cartwheels and hand stands at her gymnastics class and went to the Rockets-Knicks game. Noisy, noisy, noisy but loads of fun. Brynne and Liam played Bubble Breaker on my pocket computer for half the game. Grandpa caught a Rockets T-shirt the size of a pup tent for Brynne.

In the evenings after playing games with the grandchildren, we spent some time watching movies with my son and daughter-in-law.  We also watched a few episodes of “THE OFFICE”.  We’ve tried watching “THE OFFICE” at home and just can’t seem to get into it. But watching with Dan is fun, because he has fun. Something about his reaction to the gaffs and personality conflicts makes it more fun to watch.  Something about knowing that he manages a real office full of absurdities every work day brings depth to the ridiculousness. As we watched Dwight and a co-worker’s dueling banjo and guitar scene: the self-conscious battling egos, the childish “anything you can do I can do better”;  IT HIT ME.  I realized why its hard for me to watch “THE OFFICE”.  It makes me embarrassed to be human. People are annoying, foolish, egotistical, self-absorbed, narcissistic, awkward, self-serving, self-conscious, and just plain dopey.  We long to be beautiful, graceful, pleasant, attractive, intelligent, and accomplished and “THE OFFICE” lays bare the fact that humans are silly.

Stay with me as I change the subject here for a moment. Leaving “THE OFFICE” let’s go back to the Museum of Natural Science where we saw exhibits of geodes and precious stones: cut, polished and beautifully displayed. All of those colorful sparkling minerals started out as rough, dusty, rocks somewhere on or in the ground. When I was a child I visited the garage workshop of a rock hound where he showed me a cylinder full of rocks tumbling round and round. He poured out a hand full of colorful stones polished to a glossy smoothness. As life sends me tumbling through challenges I think of that rock polisher turning dull, plain rocks into cool, gleaming jewel quality stones.

Back in “THE OFFICE” those embarrassing humans remind me of all my flaws and insecurities. The characters ARE caricatures: strangely lovable at the same time they are distinctly distasteful; exaggerated but all too real.  But there is hope. I am human but I am invited to draw near to the divine by submitting to the polishing that is offered.  I can tumble to no avail or I can submit to the the careful crafting of a loving Father in Heaven.

The theme I am attempting to address here is:  submitting myself to learn the virtues that are not easily grasped in our celebrity loving, prideful, self-aggrandizing culture.The first lost virtue,  the most illusive and most foundational is humility. “THE OFFICE” humbled me, my children humble me, my grandchildren humble me, my challenges humble me, my mistakes might humble me, my experiences can humble me.

Strangely, I cannot evaluate my own humility, I can only guess at it and let the cosmic rock tumbler continue working on me.  Humility is to submit without anger to correction, to submit without excuse to confession, to submit without evasion to straightening, to not have to be right all the time nor center-front all the time, or even last and most obscure all the time. All this with a good solid dose of self-deprecating humor. This definitely does not come naturally to the natural human. T

I accept my embarrassing humanness but I refuse to settle for it. Gradually,  I will have become a new creature – thoroughly crafted by the divine to fulfill the image of God that is my heritage.   Starting with humility.

3 Nephi 12: 19 “come unto Christ with broken heart and contrite spirit.”

1 Peter 5: 5  “be clothed with humility:”

“Humility, that low, sweet root From which all heavenly virtues shoot.” THOMAS MOORE (Irish poet), The Loves of the Angels (1823)

DECEMBER 1st:  I believe in Christ because I believe in love.  I believe in the ” love of God that is shed abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore it is the most desirable above all things.”  (1 Nephi 11:22, Romans 5:5)  God’s love is the source of all love. Love we can choose to humbly embrace, act upon, and thus receive greater love. Christ is the physical and spiritual revelation of God’s love.

DECEMBER 2nd:  I believe in Christ because I believe in the worth of a soul. Christ gave his life as a ransom for all who accept that gift. The worth of a soul is the priceless gift of God’s Son.

DECEMBER 3rd:  I believe in Christ because I believe in the eternal nature of  the soul, of every child of God.  Just as matter and energy cannot be destroyed but only changed from one state to another. Human consciousness cannot be destroyed but is nurtured from one state to another through the love of God, the power of the atonement, and Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

“Now, verily I say unto you, that through the redemption which is made for you is brought to pass the resurrection from the dead. And the spirit and the body are the soul of man.And the resurrection from the dead is the redemption of the soul.”     (Doc & Cov 88:14-16)

DECEMBER 4th:  I believe in Christ because I believe in justice and mercy.  Not the limited and shallow justice of  men but the  justice of a loving God who judges with perfect justice and mercy, who looks not on outward appearances but on the heart.

December 5th: I believe in Christ because I believe in goodness.  The goodness of a perfect character to whom I can look for instruction, inspiration and example. Goodness without vanity, goodness that invites, and entices.

December 6th: I believe in Christ because I believe in humility. Christ is THE meek and lowly one.  In the presence of His greatness, one senses the peace and strength of true humility.

December 7th: I believe in Christ because I believe in patience.  In Christ, patience will bear fruit in this life and in eternity. His patience will bear with us as we patiently strive to see ourselves and others as He does.

“But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”  Luke 8:15

December 8th: I believe in Christ because I believe in freedom.  Freedom from the inside out.  The kind of freedom Christ had although he stood in bonds before Pilate, he still had all the power.  Freedom from ego, freedom from prejudice, freedom from bitterness and more.

December 9th: I believe in Christ because I believe in  His  healing grace.  Healing through a power beyond my own. Healing by and through the grace of God which I have personally experienced:  physical, spiritual and emotional.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, ” (Luke 4:18)

December 10th:  I believe in Christ because I believe in His complete empathy.  No matter what pain, sorrow, darkness or discouragement I suffer, Christ has “descended below all things” and can give succor born of complete understanding. No matter what I experience, I am never alone.  All my human companions will at some point be unable to follow me where life takes me. Christ can accompany me from the depths of the abyss to the heights of joy.

December 12th:  I believe in Christ because I believe in peace. The peace at the center of my being where Christ rules.  Peace in Christ is an anchor to my soul when the storms and turbulence of life try to pull me under

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” ( John 14: 2)

December 13th: I believe in Christ because I believe in the glorious being  that inspired the grandeur of Handel’s Messiah.  This evening I attended my first sing-along Messiah performance.  Musicians young and old worked long hours to prepare for no other reason than the privilege. Soloists sang for the joy of it.  A random choir of music lovers came together to sing thrilling and resounding praise. Handel gave the world an amazing and enduring gift by virtue of his encounter with the Son of God through the power of  the scriptures.

December 14th: I believe in Christ because I believe in beauty for ashes.  Christ brought beauty for ashes.  He takes the ashes of my sins, disappointments, and sorrows and gives the beauty of forgiveness, healing, a new life, a new creature.

Isaiah 61:3 To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.

December 15th:  I believe in Christ because I believe in moral authority. All moral authority rests in the perfect life and being of the Son of God: His teachings, His example, His perfect judgment and mercy.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (St.John 1:1-5)

December 16th: I believe in Christ because I believe in redemption. The human race has inflicted unspeakable horrors and miseries.  Yet humanity also displays almost limitless potential for creativity, beauty, and goodness.  Christ is willing to redeem us according to our own desires. He knows our potential. He desires our association. He will cause that all things shall work for our good if we will accept His invitation to “Come, follow me.”

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:” (John 10:27)

December 17th: I believe in Christ because I believe in forgiveness. Forgiveness is the divine salve applied to all human suffering. Only in Christ can forgiveness achieve its full potency.

“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:32)

December 18th:  I believe in Christ because I believe in the wisdom and power of the scriptures that testify of Christ.

“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were ^bwritten for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” (Rom 15:4)

December 19th:  I believe in Christ because some of the best people I know, people who have been great examples to me,  have testified of Christ and shown the power of His teachings in their lives.

December 20th:  I believe in Christ because I have applied His teachings in my life and experienced His healing.

“If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” (John 7: 17, 26-29, 51)

December 21st: I believe in Christ because I believe that every longing of the human heart is fulfilled in Christ. We know him from long before we came to this earth. We knew him in a former life and in this mortal existence our longing for all things good is an echo of that past association that our spirit still yearns for.

December 22: I believe in Christ because I believe in more:  more light, more knowledge, more intelligence, more love.

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. ” (John 10:10)

December 23: I believe in Christ because I believe in reconciliation. In Christ human alienation from God and from each other can be bridged through His perfect understanding.

December 24: I believe in Christ because of the spirit and joy of Christmas: the innocence of a baby, the love of a mother, the awe of shepherds and wisemen, the music of angels, the light of a star illuminating the darkness . . .

the precious gift of God’s Son.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

This past week I’ve been posting “I’m Thankful for” messages on my facebook and twitter accounts.   Given how fortunate I am,  it seems appropriate to proclaim my gratitude often and publicly.   Here in Alaska as the dark descends and the cold deepens I am very grateful for my cozy home.  Grateful for warm boots, a fleece lined coat, gloves and a vehicle that blows heat on my toes as I commute from Eagle River to Anchorage and back each weekday.  I’m grateful for my well stocked pantry and grateful for numerous opportunities year after year to feed family, friends, and guests many satisfying meals whipped together from the contents of that pantry. That is something I do a lot of: feed people. Which I will do again on this  Thanksgiving Day.

On Friday the 13th, I posted:  “I’m thankful for MY problems.”  Perhaps throwing a challenge in the teeth of fate.  It  isn’t simply that my problems aren’t as bad as those suffered by others.  It isn’t just that my problems could be worse and I’m grateful that they aren’t.  No.  My problems have brought experiences and lessons I could have learned in no other way.

It is one of the prime directives of parenthood that we teach our children how to avoid pain and problems.  We teach them to stay out of the street, to not touch the hot stove,  to study for tests, to save and prepare to earn a living,  to drive carefully,  to be responsible, the list is obviously endless yet essential.  So much suffering is avoidable if we avoid problems to begin with.  My parents tried to make that point with me. I’ve tried to teach it to my children. We spend a great deal of energy avoiding problems but pretty regularly the sky falls on us anyway.

Twenty years ago, in a hospital in Richland, Washington, I spent a frantic night holding my shivering daughter as she lay on an ice bed to bring down a life-threatening fever.  She had been in and out of the hospital for several months and developed an infection which stubbornly refused to respond to antibiotics.   Over the next year she endured multiple brain surgeries and hospital stays before the doctors at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City corrected her problem.  During that year we wondered if she would ever be able to live a normal life.

The truth is she has not lived a normal life. She has lived a spectacular life. She flourished in spite of her health challenges. We learned how to cope with the affects of her condition.  She learned to be in tune with her body. She went to college on a scholarship, went on a two month mission, married, has two beautiful boys, and is living a very exciting life traveling the world with her husband.   She has taught me about grace, cheerfulness, and persistence.

Two and a half years ago a diagnosis of cancer seemed to overwhelm our family resources and resilience beyond repair.  And once again my problem became my instructor, my refiner, my intimate companion that revealed much about myself to myself. And once again with the help of loved ones and friends we not only survived but flourished.

I am absolutely and resolutely converted to the idea that all things can work together for our good.  To me it is the only option in the face of all that life can throw at us. I still avoid problems with all the energy I can devote to the task. But inasmuch as I cannot hold the sky up every time it threatens to fall, I will continue to bow to the tutorials God allows me to experience.  He has forseen my way through the labyrinth and, as in times past, will provide the grace fo me to reach the other side wiser, kinder, and more fit for His kingdom.

I am grateful for my problems.  If I endure them well I might have the privilege of being one of God’s lights on the path of another soul working their way through unexpected, uninvited, yet essential experience.

Doctrine and Covenants 90:24 Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one with another.

For a well reasoned analysis of why Congress’s current rush towards government take over of our health care system is a bad economic move and loaded with deception,  follow this link to an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert J. Samuelson:

“The campaign to pass Obama’s health-care plan has assumed a false, though understandable, cloak of moral superiority. It’s understandable because almost everyone thinks that people in need of essential medical care should get it; ideally, everyone would have health insurance. The pursuit of these worthy goals can easily be projected as a high-minded exercise for the public good.  It’s false for two reason. . . ‘

Congress is puffing itself up with moral superiority but the truth is our leaders need a good dose of Godly sorrow.

Thank you music
Thank you to all the poets, singers, artists
All the creative minds ever imagined and brought to past
Thank you Picasso, Raphael, Da Vinci, Michael Angelo…
Thank you Plato, Socrates, Aristotle….
Thank you Sparta and Athens
The 300 warriors at Thermoplyae
Thank you to Shelley and her Frankenstein
Thank you Shakespeare and his Hamlet
Thank you Emily Dickinson
Thank you Jane Austen
Thank you to the monks who kept records
Wrote stories and history preserved
In their faithful monastery walls
Thank you Achilles, Athena, and Thor….
Thank you all constitution signers
Thank you Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Jefferson…
Thank you Bill Gates and IBM
Thank you to Gray’s Anatomy and healers
Thank you to those who stand up for what is right and true
Thank you Gandhi
Thank you Martin Luther King Jr.
Thank you to those who defend freedom and the right to live
Thank you to warm showers, clean water, and plentiful food
Thank you to warm or light clothes
Thank you to teachers and educators and researchers
Thank you to health care and insurance
Thank you to those who listen, smile, or make others laugh
Thank you to strangers that compliment or comment
Thank you to strangers that help a dead car or person in the ditch
Thank you libraries and cafes
Thank you Lara Croft and Indiana Jones
The countries and cultures I have discovered
The adventurous spirit I have gained
Thank you dance instructors and coaches
Thank you to yoga and treadmills
Thank you to paper, my means of venting, recording
Sets my imagination and heart free
Thank you to those who broke my heart or rejected me
I am a lot better without them
Yet stronger and wiser because of them
Thank you pain receptors and emotional reactions
I can feel and experience and my heart grows bigger
Thank you to the liars and users
I can better avoid the manipulators and cold ones
Or act ignorant but still be civil
Thank you to those who dared me or pushed me
Thank you Mother Nature
The peace and inspiration I have gained on her mountains
In her woods and on her trails
Thank you to God
Who gave me life and a family
For answering my prayers, showering me with blessings
Thank you to my King and Savior
For forgiving me, holding me up, and healing me
Helping me through the worst of times
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
And the list goes on!
Just a few things
I cannot imagine myself without or the world without
By: Amara Van Orden

“Maybe God wants us to meet a few wrong people before meeting the right one so that when we finally meet the right person, we will know how to be grateful for the gift.” – Unknown

“When you are grateful fear disappears and abundance appears.” -Anthony Robbins

“Both abundance and lack [of abundance] exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend … when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present—love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature, and personal pursuits that bring us [happiness]—the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience heaven on earth.” – Sarah Ban Breathnach

In the late 90’s we lived for two years in the small village of Dryden N.Y.   Upstate New York was a great new school for our western sensibilities.  Unlike our ignorant vision of New York as a densely populated city of skyscrapers and concrete canyons,  upstate is a green velvet panorama of picturesque villages, orchards, old Victorian architecture, mill streams, and even wild life.  Our favorite season was autumn when the hills were ablaze with color and roadside stands overflowed with apples, squash, cider and pumpkins. We bathed in pools beneath raucous waterfalls and hiked mossy shale gorges.

We also experienced a style of government and politics we were unused to.  The layers of taxation were mind boggling: village, town, county, state racked up tax bills that were Halloween scary. The property tax on our modest home was three times what we paid in Utah on a comparable home. We watched in dismay as several nearby plants that employed large numbers of the local populace closed to move where the tax burden would be lower. Economic growth had been stagnant for years. Home prices had plummeted drastically for several years before we arrived. Rural upstaters are more conservative than the city dwellers. As residents faced the likelihood of new state taxes they grumbled their perennial resentment that the bulk of the funds would end up being siphoned off to the liberal spending appetite downstate: New York City. Peggy Noonan’s column this week in the Wall Street Journal echoes what we experienced.

“This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion. You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They’ll raise taxes.”

This gives you a clue as to why cutting taxes and negotiating tax incentives can actually raise tax revenue.

In January, after the coronation of the Democratic Party behemoth led by the golden child from Chicago, I declared myself a political agnostic. My fellow citizens made a hard left turn and I would just have to live with it.  I decided to watch, wait, and rethink everything I believed about politics, the constitution, the economy, etc. Perhaps my political point of view had grown rigid and outmoded. Maybe I had it all wrong.  Maybe the rallying cry of Ronald Reagan “Government is not the solution, government is the problem” was a naive sentiment that I would be better off shedding.

After ten months what I have observed has not impressed me. A large portion of our government doesn’t  really care what we think of their plans for us.  The majority in Congress is telling us by their rush to enact huge new social spending that they know what’s best for us and we will just have to give up a large chunk of our freedom, our income, and our children’s and grandchildren’s income,  to let them establish their version of a righteous kingdom. Witness their scramble to back down on the “public option” when met with the ire of their constituents in town hall meetings only to slip it back on the agenda once re-entrenched in the halls of Washington.

Clearly there is no vision except the vision of making Americans more and more dependent on the government for their well-being.

In the Newsweek magazine with the head line “The Case for Killing Grandma,” there was an article about government health care programs around the world: “No Country for Sick Men.” Canadians and Europeans expressed confusion as to why Americans, who believe all are created equal, don’t care enough to assure equal health care.  But what the author entirely overlooked is that Americans care a great deal about each other BECAUSE our country is rooted in the ultimate caring for each individual:  giving them the  liberty to make something of themselves in an environment that encourages personal responsibility and productivity. Our nation also has an equally strong Jeffersonian heritage of deep suspicion of government excess. And rightly so.  We are a stubbornly independent people.

Government programs are a mythical panacea for whatever ails us physically and economically.  Government kills the spirit by creating a labyrinth of gray, faceless bureaucracies that live to perpetuate themselves and punish creativity, enterprise, productivity, ambition, and prosperity.  Have you ever gone into a government office and felt to say “Oh joy, isn’t this a wonderful place to be!  I love standing in these lines and filling out these forms.”  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are hollow promises when human beings no longer work for themselves but live to serve the great collective through a maddening concatenation of government regulations.

Be assured that what we are witnessing in America today is not an efficient, money saving, labor saving road to an idyllic progressive state. Efficiency and fairness are not the guiding force. Political favoritism, corruption, abuse of power, and ego are riding on the coattails of misguided altruism used as a means to increase the power of the few: a secular paternal entity with a voracious appetite for our hard earned money.

Our current economic meltdown did not happen because of unregulated greed but because of Government sponsored and enabled greed. We don’t need more regulations. We need simpler ones that are enforced. Our system of regulation is so mind boggling that the expense of even understanding, let alone enforcing millions of regulations is unsustainable.  Witness the rampant corruption and waste in Medicare recently highlighted on 60 Minutes.  Ineffective administration and enforcement, whines the bureaucrat, is because “we don’t have enough funding to police the system.”  So we create more rules that we cannot afford to enforce. Politicians create entitlements and bureaucracies that citizens become comfortable with and grow to depend on.  Then politicians wield greater and greater control over the populace through the entitlements they create.  Entitlements become corrupt, wasteful, unimaginative arms of government that exist largely to perpetuate themselves not the good of citizens. At some point government handouts and intervention become a prison where the only freedom is the freedom to quit being productive.

I believe in giving people a helping hand. I believe in helping people to help themselves. Then they can exercise  virtue by giving freely rather than being forced to by the paternal hand of a government sanctioned pick-pocket.

UPDATE: Related story

“27 Million Reasons to Leave New York”

Fall is here in all its glory and if my dear webmaster gets my picture posting capacity fixed I’ll share some pictures. We’re digging potatoes from the garden. I made a delicious zucchini chocolate cake with one of three zucchini that made it to significant size before the return of the dark stopped growth cold. Now, after taking a vacation from writing for a month and a half, I’m ready to launch my fifth year of Embattled Christian.

We had planned to do a lot of hiking this summer.  We ended up doing more golfing than hiking.  But as it turned out, I’ve had to do some serious metaphorical rock climbing.  I’ve been driven from the spiritual plateau that two years of cancer treatment and miraculous recovery along with tremendous loving support have blessed me with. Somewhere in the rugged spiritual mountains that tower over me is wisdom that can only be obtained through pain and hard work.

Years ago I stumbled on to a mountain climbing movie from which I’ve taken both inspiration and indignation.  “Into the Void” documents a terrifying dilemma of survival which haunts the climbing world to this day. After conquering the west face of  Siula Grande in Peru and beginning their descent, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates were engulfed by a storm. The two men were tied together when they slipped and fell. Simpson’s calf bone was thrust up through his knee and into his upper leg. After heroic efforts to save his companion, Yates, unsure whether Simpson was alive or dead and certain to fall himself if he stayed attached to Simpson’s dead weight, decided to cut the rope. Simpson fell into a crevasse and miraculously survived the fall but was alone in the dark and cold and in excruciating pain.  He managed to crawl to a place in the crevasse where he could see light.  He then inched his way toward that light and out onto the glacier, then across the glacier, down the mountain and finally back to camp. Crawling toward that light, toward safety, healing, and warmth is powerful imagery for all us as we struggle through life’s dark wildernesses.

Simpson comments,  as he reflects back on that moment at the bottom of the crevasse that, had he believed in God, he doesn’t think he would have made it. I suppose he thinks the godly would have slipped blissfully into the afterlife without a struggle. Elsewhere I’ve read of a skeptic expressing the opinion that his lack of belief in an afterlife made his last moments with a dying loved one more precious.

In response to the above sentiments I indignantly respond, “Since you don’t believe in God how can you possibly know what sweetness, bitterness, intensity of feeling, or love a believer feels!”  Having fought through cancer, chemo-therapy, and devastating radiation treatment I’d say I have some insight on how hard a believing Christian is willing to fight to live. But then I am stopped by my own argument. What do I know about the heart of an atheist and what an atheist feels?

What I do know is that believers and unbelievers are all subject to the same human hungers, passions, desires and temptations. Believers and unbelievers have access to wisdom and sound principles of living. Believers and unbelievers respond nobly and ignobly to life’s challenges.  We all spring from the same fountain of life and suffer the same variety of afflictions.

We are all children of God. So it should be no surprise that whether we believe in God or not we all have within us the divine source, the spark of life and goodness that is in and through all creation. We all need and have the capacity to respect and love one another and behave decently toward one another. We all listen to or bury the call of the divine within us by our thoughts and actions. We all suffer or are blessed to the degree that we seek out that which is true, just, pure, lovely, honest, virtuous, of good report or praiseworthy.

What we believe does not change our common template, “the image of God”. What we believe or do not believe does not change our common origin, as Wordworth so vividly wrote, “from God who is our home.”

I was on a roll. Three days of faithfully exercising, either lifting weights or some kind of aerobics or both. On day four, I dressed in a spiffy new exercise outfit and new walking shoes. I was full of energy and  impressed with the discipline I displayed by dragging myself out of bed early. I stepped out onto the front porch, took in a deep breath of birch scented air, strapped on my ipod , and strode out onto the driveway.

There in the middle of the blacktop, like “the blob” from my childhood nightmares, was a fresh mound of black bear scat.  An electric charge of alarm zinged across my shoulders and down my spine. I did an instant three-hundred and sixty degree appraisal of my immediate surroundings. No bear. I looked east up the street, no bear.  I looked west toward a fork in the road. Across the street on the corner was a huge moose placidly chewing on a tree in my neighbor’s yard.

Once I knew I was in no immediate danger, I stopped to consider that it might be wise to give up on taking a walk at all.  But it was too late to go to the gym and the treadmill in the basement was torn apart for repairs. It was walk or break my exercise streak.

I was either very brave or very foolish. I figured that the moose wasn’t nervous so the bear must not have headed west in his direction. So I fired up the Ipod and took the road towards the moose but then took the left hand fork away from the moose because spooking a moose into charging is as bad as or even worse than running into a bear.

I walked a large circuit down Trail Bay Drive, under Eagle River Loop Road, through Parkview Terrace, back under Eagle River Loop Rd and down Driftwood Bay, keeping to the busiest streets less likely to be frequented by wild life.

I love where I live.  I love the beauty, the wildness, the likelihood of adventure at any time. This is Alaska where a thin crust of humanity clings to the edge of the wilderness. And where in the middle of the night that moose dined sumptuously on the broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower in my garden and left me only the bok choy.

I’m sure there is some pithy life lesson here.  You choose.

Two weeks ago we spent a day hiking and boating at Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. We arrived on a Friday night and set up camp at Upper Skilak Lake Campground.  After dinner I hiked the Vista Trail with my sons, Dan and Mike.  The trail headed uphill pausing at well marked points for spectacular views of the lake. We took dozens of photos. As we hiked, we talked about books, authors, faith, philosophy, the politics of ideology and the politics of practicality. The most interesting thing we talked about was the value of stories. The stories we read, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories God tells us.

Dan pointed out that we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives.  We are both experiencing our lives and observing them.  Most of us want our lives to have meaning and moral value.  The stories we tell ourselves reflect our lives and also create them. What we are becoming is based not only on the facts of our lives but the story we write with those facts.

We are in the process of creating ourselves every day. The stories that have emerged from my life are a collaboration between myself and God.  I am not alone in the creation of my story.  The stories I tell myself have spiritual underpinnings and are enlivened by my experiences with the word of God.

I cannot prove to anyone that God lives.  I can only prove it to myself as I act upon the truths taught in his word.  Every step I have made to more fully weave the principles of the gospel of Christ into my life’s experiences has led me to greater understanding of myself, greater patience with others, greater peace, and greater joy in my family.  In other words, born fruit that is both sweet and nourishing. My life is a great experiment upon the word of God.

As with all experiments,  I cannot have the results before the research, study, and acting upon what I have learned.  Does the scientist say, “Give me a sure sign that this hypothesis is true and then I will experiment”?

Like the precious oil in the lamps of the 10 virgins of the New Testament parable, the experiences with God that I have had as I have experimented upon His word cannot be given to others.  I try with all my might to appropriately share “my stories” with my family, friends, and especially my children. I want to share the insights and the fruits of my life’s great experiment.  I want to transfer to others the faith that has grown in me to the degree that I have been faithFUL.

But I can only illustrate a pattern, offer a possibility, hold up my light.  I cannot GIVE them the  “oil” of experience in Christ that will give them their own light.  They must purchase it for themselves by their own experiment. No debate, no argument, no eloquent expounding of some endeniable wisdom can transfer to others the “oil” that comes from life experiences enlivened by the revelation of God’s love.

Before the miracle of creation comes the work of faith. I hope and pray that what I have created and will continue to create, by the grace of God, is a good and true story.

Alma 32:27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

I spent much of Memorial Day weekend remembering. I didn’t go to any cemeteries or monuments to our fallen heroes. I took a tour of my closet full of photos, family histories, old letters, and crumbling albums.  I dredged up piles of neglected family debris and started making sense of it.

I found faded letters from my parents when we lived in North Pole and the long lost account of our 1991 move from Alaska to Utah in an old yellow school bus. There’s the photos of our 1998 ferry trip back to Alaska to move to Anchorage. There’s the story I wrote about a November family overnight at Bald Lake Public Use cabin. We had to lash all our gear (games, fuel, sleeping bags, and dutch ovens) onto sleds and trek nearly a mile through knee-deep snow because the Nancy Lake Parkway was gated off.  And their are boxes and boxes of unorganized photos.

I am not a scrap booker.  For some reason scrap booking is painful for me. Too many decisions about paper, and cut outs, and lettering, and color coordinating. I just haven’t got a mind for that. I look at a shelf full of scrapbooking materials or browse a catalog full of the same and I get queasy.

But I did have the where with all several years ago, before my year of cancer, to purchase a half dozen handsome leather photo albums at Costco.  And over the weekend, finally, I sorted the last ten years of family photos into chronological order and began neatly labeling and stuffing them into the slots in the photo albums. It has given me an enormous sense of accomplishment.  Tokens of my family memories grow safer every day.

Perhaps it is my brush with a fatal illness. Perhaps staring into my mortality so graphically has stirred in me the need to get my life in order, in order that it will make sense to those I will sooner or later leave behind. I want our family and friends to enjoy them in the hear and now. I want my loved ones to be able to open my closet full of memories and quickly be able to lay hold of the joy stored therein.

In a speech at University of Kentucky nine years ago, Judge Ilana Rovner, whose Jewish parents escaped the Holocaust, said the following:

“I think that if I could leave you with but one thought, it would be to keep alive your history, your memory, for in doing so, you give constant life to that which is best in us. And teaching others about that which is best in one’s own heritage and one’s own history is a form of pursuing justice and remembrance . . . Each one of you, in memorializing and keeping alive the flames of your ancestors,  your heritage, your history, you become rememberers. Each one of you will have a legacy to leave.  Hopefully, that legacy will be one nurtured and furthered by your understanding of the law and justice. And perhaps you will reflect now and again on Anthony Hecht’s words which apply to each one of us: ‘Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.’”

She has experienced a life-long awareness that hundreds of her family members perished in the Holocaust and never had the opportunity to pursue their dreams, to create, to accomplish, to leave a legacy. So she has wanted:

.” . . to accomplish not only for ourselves but in memory of others. My thoughts are often with the family I have never known. These are the people who have been my inspiration and my guide–”

Holocaust survivors, all of us, are guardians of   “. . . the future of the past.”

Heritage, remembrance, ancestors, family history, pioneer stories, are deeply ingrained in my Mormon faith and upbringing.  I am aware that my life, my privileges, my opportunities are gifts from those who went before to prepare the way.

I am sustained by the past, but I am dedicated to the sustenance of the future.  A slice of the future of the world has been raised within the walls of my home. There is nothing more important to me than my family. And there is little more important to the solidarity of family than preserving family memories. The future of the past will serve us well if we never forget.

As I remember, and keep in remembrance,  the hand of God in my life is revealed.