short post

There is so much I want to blog about but I can't do it right now. Still, I do want to wish Karla a belated happy birthday. I loved Stacey's post about you Karla. I have seen all those good character traits in you as well. I love the way you express them to everyone. You are so good hearted. You are a blessing to our family. I love you. Thanks for being you.

Thankful for Stacey's suggestion

So here's my "thankful" list. I am thankful that:

~I have such a great husband

~he has such a good job

~he has changed so much for the better in the last few years and that he has been so affectionate this last week

~I had SUCH a great 4th of July this year

~I am still losing weight

~Joe and I are having scripture and Church History and novel study every night. (we end up talking alot during that time which is really nice.)

~we have nine wonderful children and nineteen sweet grandchildren who bring us such joy

~everyone in our family is healthy

~I have been feeling good for several weeks now

~that the heartache I had for one of my children is resolving itself somewhat

~that I live in SUCH a good country

~that I have daughters-in-law that I really like (yes, I love them, too, but liking is really important as well)

Thanks again Stace for suggesting this subject.

Random thoughts

~I got my hair cut today. I'm not wild about it. She thinned it out a little too much.

~I'm in a stew about two of my children. I won't say who but it is causing me to actually hurt in my heart. I'm not sure how it's going to work out. Actually, There are four other of my children that we pray for special blessings on them in our family prayers. Of course we pray that all nine will prosper and have their faith strengthened, but this heartache is real sorrow and hard for me to bear.

~I haven't yet written about the 4th of July, so I will now. This was the funnest holiday we have ever had, for me. I loved the squirt gun/water fight the kids and grandpa had and seeing them play in the pools and on the water slide. The huge blow up slide was great (though I was too old to do it, it was fun to see everyone else on it.) But best of all for me was the "Second Annual Southern's Not So Special Olympics." I loved seeing the children and adults compete together. The balloon toss, three legged race, the wheel barrow race, the "gunny sack" race, the pie eating contest and the family obstacle course were so incredibly fun to watch! And the obstacle course the men did at the end was the greatest. I'm glad everyone was such good sports though next year we may have to be more careful about who is disqualified on some of the games so the scoring is fair, but even so, it was the funnest holiday I've ever had, a I said above. The fire works with Jonathan's music was a fitting end to it all. Thanks Emilee and Daniel for organizing the Olympics and thanks everyone else for making it such a good day. I'll remember it forever! I can hardly wait for next years 4th to come.

~I've been going to your Uncle Joe's house every Thursday for the last month to work on our genealogy. We had a slow start due to our lack of experience but this last week we actually started making some progress. We have about fifty cards/names that need temple work done on them. Janice and Jennifer have taken all the female names and are doing the baptisms, confirmations and initiatorys so now we need all the women in the family, who are willing, to take some names for endowments and sealings. We need to have the men in the family to do the same. I am going to check to see if I can get the youth in our ward to do the baptisms of all the men unless someone wants to do it. If so, let me know. (Wives, if you will pass this along to your husbands it will help.) I guess I should put this in an email and send it to everyone. If I do, I hope you'll pardon the repeat.

~The mission is going great though I still haven't received an official call or been set apart.

That's all for now.

Hugs to you all,

Mither

It's too late to write!

I just stopped to read the latest posts from everybody from the last 6 days(which I thoroughly enjoyed by the way) on my way to bed tonight. I am too tired to comment on everyone right now but I especially loved everyone's description of the 4th of July celebration we had. I would love to have hard copy's of all the pictures. I can't see them well enough on the computer.

Just one comment on Stace's last post.....

There was a Sunday that I was crying in my Bishop's office about my situation at your age. In fact I even had 4 children at the time. I'll just say this. Things have a way of working themselves out. Keep praying and keep serving the Lord and He'll find a way for us to win in the end no matter what the problem. That's a fact.

That's all for now. Love to all my blogging buddies

And the answer is.....

I am going to accept the call to the Employment Resources Center in American Fork. As I thought about it, I became more and more convinced that this was the place the Lord wanted me to serve. Plus, I asked the Lord if it wasn't His will that I serve this mission, that I would continue to feel the dark unhappy feelings I was feeling just anticipating having to do this mission. Lo and behold, the next day I went to try it out for a month and, what do you know, I felt good that whole day, the dark feeling was gone. But I still wanted to feel really good about it.

Well, I have been feeling really good about it but was still not convinced until talked it over with Joe. In his unfailingly common sense way of stating things he said he thought I had received an answer and that I should go ahead and accept it. Also, I had been thinking that there are no coincidences with the Lord, that those mission papers had not been sent to the employment center by accident. I also thought of the song that says "I'll go where you want me to go dear Lord, I'll be what you want me to be."

Where was my faith in all this? It was that the Lord would give me an answer. My problem was that when the answer came I was still so unsure of my qualifications for this mission that I almost missed it. I had little faith in my abilities but since then I remembered someones comment that there is nothing too hard for the Lord.

Jonathan came to visit the other day and as we talked of this, he said he read that we should all do something that challenged us every three years or so to keep our brains young so we wouldn't get dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that. The idea was to keep exercising our brains with problems to solve, challenging problems that we think we can't do.

Well this mission will be a challenge for me but I continue to feel good about it. So I told Sis. Jones to go ahead and send in my papers. I still won't get the formal call for a few weeks but I'll continue to work there until it comes.

There is one thing I still hate about it all. I have to wear dresses every day. Still it is a small sacrifice. I'm sure I'll get used to it but I'll be going through a lot of nylons along the way as my heels are so rough that they snag them so badly that they run on the first or second wearing. Oh well, as I said, it is a small price to pay to serve the Lord.

{{{hugs}}}to you all,

Mither

To Mission or Not to Mission, That is the Question

Today was the first day Sister Jones, the managing director of the employment resource center, asked me to do some of the actual work I would be doing everyday. Wouldn't you know it involved computers. I distinctly said on my missionary form that I was not willing to learn new computer skills (because of my poor memory). I got very nervous but thankfully we got interrupted and I was given other work to do. So far its just been paper pushing, not really that helpful to Sis. Jones.

If I were to go to the employment center for a job, my skills definately wouldn't be in office work. Why can't Sister Jones see this? I think she is just so excited to have some one come, she is overlooking my poor abilities.

She is so bound and determined that I'm sent as a gift from heaven that she got me an official missionary badge, A black one that looks just like the ones the real missionaries wear. And today she talked about what I would be doing two and three months from now. HMMMMM! How can I get her to remember and understand that this thing was supposed to be for a trial of one month!

OK, I can't get the bold to go off so the rest will be in bold, Sorry.

I am missing being on vacation now. Yesterday I spent the whole day watching TV. Yes, I know, a total waste of a whole day! My OA friend said she thought it was a well deserved rest from the many things I been doing for the last several days. Nice thought but I have had pleanty of rest as well lately. At least I'm not beating myself up for it, which I would have done in years past. I found that doing that just paralyzes me and I get nothing done for days at a time. Better one bad day without guilt than two weeks of nothing getting done with huge guilt and paralysis. This friend is a jewel!

Well I'm going back to bed now. I hope I can sleep this time.

Love and Hugs

Mither

New News

I got a call from a Sister Missionary at the Church Employment Center in Am. Fork last week (we were on vacation) telling me that they had been sent my mission papers as a possible missionary for them and would I call her. I was caught completely off guard but was interested in what she had to say so I called back yesterday morning and she wanted me to come in and talk about serving a mission there. I went in at 10:30 a.m. and we talked until 12:30. I wasn't very interested in working in an office as a mission, especially compared to the way I absolutely loved serving at the MTC. As I have prayed about it I am trying to tell whether I have a bad feeling about it just because I don't want to do it or if the Lord is saying it is not the right thing to do. I have thought of the song "I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go" and wondered if this is one of those times when I should just do it whether I want to or not.

I finally agreed to try it for a month and see how I felt about it but now I'm thinking I don't even want to do that. My thought is that I really loved my MTC mission and was really good at it, so wouldn't it be better to do something I'm good at rather than trying to learn something that I'm not good at? It's not as if the Church is calling me to that mission. They just sent the papers there as an option since they rejected my initial application to serve in the 12 step program. There are more details to all of this but I don't want to go in to it all right now (this post is long enough already) Suffice it to say I am in a quandary. I wish I could know what the will of the Lord is in all this. Then again maybe He doesn't care where I serve, just that I DO serve. I will have to pray about this more.

Our vacation with Joe and Eileen was great. It went way too fast. They were so much fun to go with and we saw an incredible show, the Cirque De Soliel - O. We also did a LOT of walking around the at the Belaggio and the motel where we were staying (can't remember the name of it.... my memory is so bad sometimes) We ate some really good meals, some expensive and some at the local Denny's and Ihop to save money. I love eating out! We also visited my Uncle John and Aunt Alta and also Uncle Dick and Aunt Marilyn who were overjoyed to have us come. I'm sorry we haven't visited them when we went to St. George before. They were very happy to have some company. Their children all live away from Utah so they are lonely, I guess. Anyway, the whole vacation was wonderful (and no fibro pain at all)

Well that's all for now.