Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

Today in Relief Society we had a lesson on Eternal Marriage.  I love talking about this topic in the church because marriage is something that I think is often misconstrued in the media and the world.  Our marriage relationships are of utmost importance and maintaining them is by far one of the most important things we will do in this life.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and not all of them necessarily connected to the lesson we had today.  This post is actually one that I started back in April but I finally decided to get it posted today.  I had some other thoughts that I’d like to put together on other marriage related topics, but I think for now this will suffice.

In last April General Conference I was listening to the Priesthood session and was struck by President Monson‘s talk.  President Monson said that the saddest part of his week was reviewing the cancellations of temple marriages. His remark was that most of those marriages didn’t have to end that way. He had two thoughts that I thought were particularly poignant “Choose your love, love your choice” and “Committment in marriage is absolutely essential”.

For those of you who know the story of how Eric and I got together, you might be surprised to find out that neither of us believe in “the one”. Meaning, neither of us believe that there is that one and only person out there that you are destined to be with and can’t be happy with anyone else. Now, this might be surprising because the short version of our story is this – Eric asked me on a date on Sunday, we decided to start dating on Thursday, we went on that date on Friday (no I don’t have those two out of order), I met some of his family on Sunday, he met my dad on Friday, he asked me to marry him on Sunday, we were married 6 months later and we’ve been happily married now for 4+ years. So, the question that begs to be answered is how do you decide to marry someone after just 9 days of dating them without feeling like you have an unshakable conviction that they are “the one”? Easy, after 9 days we knew each other well enough to know that we loved each other and we were willing to do whatever it took to make it work.

If you watch Disney movies or any chick flicks you will see lots of examples of people having these “fairy tale” romances, where they find this perfect person and when the movie ends you are left to believe that “they all lived happily ever after.”  While that’s a nice thought, I believe there’s no such thing as “happily ever after”.  What comes in the “after” is lots of work.  Good work, enjoyable times, love, laughter and LOTS of good things, but work.  Marriage is not, nor was it ever meant to be, sunshine and rainbows and romance.  What I’ve come to realize is that the most important element in a marriage is not that fluttery feeling when you look into each others eyes, but it’s the commitment that you made to weather any storm together that you made on your wedding day.  Quite frankly, it doesn’t even matter if you don’t even like your spouse in a particular moment, the important thing is that you committed to one another that you would love them and work together with them no matter what.  Love is an expression of caring for another person above yourself and you can do that even if you don’t like the person at the time.  Of course, it is best if you can like your spouse as well, and a lot of that comes down to attitude.  Obviously, there were lots of things you liked about your spouse when you married them, and it’s important to focus on those things that you do like rather than letting temporary annoyances get in the way.

I want to close this post with an awesome quote from Dallin H. Oaks’ talk from April 2007 conference.  He says simply pretty much what I wanted to say:

“In all of this, we should realize that a good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection. President Spencer W. Kimball taught: ‘Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage . . . means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all’ (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball [2006], 194).”

So I’m thinking of starting a project for a Christmas present for Daniel.  I want to make him a quiet book for church.  I’m thinking though to keep the project a little bit easier I would see if anyone else wanted to do it with me.  If you’re interested here’s how I’m thinking it would work -

Each person will make two pages.  I’ll buy fabric for each person’s pages this week and get it cut to the right dimensions and distributed to whoever is interested.  Then each person duplicates their pages 16 times (assuming there are 16 people who want to participate) and returns their completed pages to me.  I will then redistribute the pages so that each person gets 16 full spread pages, or 32 pages for their quiet book!  Then all you need to do is sew a cover for your book, sew the pages together and sew the pages into it and you’re done!

I’ve even already found a bunch of great ideas for quiet book pages so you don’t have to come up with your own ideas, just make some pages! Here are some of the ideas I’ve found -

• http://www.mormonchic.com/crafty/quietbook_church.asp
• http://servingpinklemonade.blogspot.com/2011/01/quiet-book.html
• http://quietbook.blogspot.com/
• http://www.familysafemedia.com/quiet_book_-_quiet_activity_bo.html

If I get enough people who are interested by this weekend then I can get the flannel while it’s on sale and it would only cost each person <$5 for the pages themselves plus whatever you spend on buttons, felt pieces etc to finish off your pages.  Ideally I think I’d like to find 16 people who are interested since that makes the fabric buying easy.  Here’s the guidelines I’ve come up with (although I’m open to suggestions depending on what people would like to do):

• Each person will get page spreads that are 10.5″x16″ to work with, please make your page spread include two separate pages that don’t need to be facing one another (i.e. You will need to split up your spread into two 10.5″x 8″ pages, but those pages might be pages 1 and 32, or 7 and 25 depending on how the pages get sewn together)
• Leave at least a 1 inch margin in the center of the spread (dividing the pages) to ensure enough space to sew the pages together and onto the cover
• Leave at least 1/2 inch on the edges of your pages to allow space for binding
• All pages should be returned to me for assembly no later than December 1st
• Each page should have some sort of interactive element – i.e. buttons, snaps, velcro, shoelaces etc.
• Ideally it’d be nice if each page was gospel themed in some way.  It doesn’t have to be real specific, but like there was one page I saw that had roads and a car, if the destination was like from home to church or the temple that’d be nice, or even something simple like adding the words “I’m grateful for seasons” on the top of a seasons page.  I figure these will mostly be used at church so keeping a gospel theme would be nice :)
• Each person will be responsible for making their own cover so feel free to do whatever you’d like!

I just finished listening to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  If you haven’t read it before and you’re someone who enjoys reading I highly recommend it.  It’s an interesting story about a young man who grew up in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded and took control of the country.  He flees with his father to America and returns later during the Taliban rule.  I don’t want to give too many details because I think the fun of reading a book is experiencing it for yourself (ironically this is discussed in the book as a very American attitude).

Coincidentally I also recently challenged myself to read through the entire Old Testament as it is the one book of scripture that I can’t say I’ve read cover-to-cover.  I’m pretty sure I’ve read almost all of it at one point or another, but I can’t actually say I’ve read every page so I’m working towards that.  I haven’t made it very far and I just read last night most of the story of Abraham (Genesis 15-21).  Reading that story while listening to a book about the unrest in the Middle East and the Muslims there led to some interesting thoughts which I figured I’d write about here.

One of the first things that struck me is that if Sarah hadn’t given Hagar to Abraham to wife, none of the problems in the Middle East for the past thousands of years would have ever taken place.  Which makes me wonder if the world would have been better off if Sarah hadn’t done that.  The whole feud between Muslims and Jews wouldn’t have existed because there wouldn’t have been any Muslims to begin with.  I’m not trying to say that the world would be better off without Muslims, just that the way that Sarah and Hagar dealt with each other afterwards has created an animosity between those two peoples that has endured through many centuries.  Perhaps under different circumstances Hagar would have married another man within Abraham’s camp, raised those children peacefully alongside Issac and everyone would have lived happily ever after.  I know that’s a big what if and it doesn’t even do any good to speculate on that issue, but I had a different insight that I thought *was* worthwhile to think about.  What if Sarah had kept her faith in God that He would keep His promise to Abraham and herself rather than doubting and giving her handmaiden instead?  Perhaps all of the turmoil that has happened ever since that point could have been avoided by exercising greater faith.

I’m not necessarily saying that what Sarah did was wrong, perhaps she was even commanded to by the Lord (which was what I had thought originally, but in reading through last night I didn’t see indication of that, please let me know if I just missed it).  I definitely think that it was a HUGE sacrifice on her part to give another woman to her husband to wife.  I’m probably too jealous of a woman to do that myself.  However, it was just a reminder to me to have even greater faith in what the Lord is capable of and allow him to do great things through us.  I think a great example of the converse is Nephi.  When the Lord asked him to build a boat he didn’t ask where he could find a boatmaker, he asked where to find ore to make tools and then let the Lord make him into the boatmaker.  It made me wonder in what ways I’m limiting the Lord’s power to make me into an even better person by accepting things as they are.

By the way if you’re interested in another book about Abraham and Sarah one of my very favorite books that I’ve read recently is Sarah: Women of Genesis by Orson Scott Card, it was excellent and I recommend it even more so than Kite Runner, but obviously they’re totally different books so it depends on what you enjoy reading :)

The other thought that I had was how much we are all really the same.  If you look at Christians, Muslims and Jews we think of those religions as being SO different.  However, we each branch off at tiny intersections.  Muslims and Jews came from the same spiritual heritage, are both the offspring of Abraham.  They just branch a little bit when Ishmael and Hagar are sent away from Abraham’s camp, but still at the roots and essence of Islam, they believe in basically the same things, and they’re worshiping the same God although by different names and in different ways.  Again Christians and Jews come from the same spiritual heritage all the way up until the birth of Jesus.  Then we differ in that we believe Jesus is the Christ and that He has already come, whereas the Jews are still waiting for the Christ to come.  But again we’re still the same at our roots and worshiping the same God, just in different ways.  I think we can often focus too much on our differences than on our similarities.

Now, that isn’t to say that the differences that we have aren’t important.  I think one of the things I see most frequently are people who say that we’re all good so don’t worry about how we’re different.  I strongly believe that it is very significant that Jesus is the Christ, that He suffered for our sins and was resurrected and that because of Him we can be forgiven of our sins and live again.  Eric was told by many people on his mission that there are “many roads that lead to the top of the mountain”, meaning it doesn’t matter what you believe we’re all going to end up in the same place.  I do believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only church on the face of the earth today that has the complete truth.  It’s why we believe in doing missionary work and that it’s so important to spread the truth to others.  What we have *does* matter, and we should be doing all that we can to share it with others.  However, that doesn’t exclude any other religion from having any truth.  Nor does it give Latter-day Saints a monopoly on God, I believe God loves all of His children regardless of race or religion and He will answer the prayers of a Muslim or a Jew or anyone else as readily as a Christian, so long as they’re asking in faith and with righteous desires.  Most importantly I don’t believe that people are simply damned for not accepting the fullness of the gospel in this life.

What I believe is best expressed in C.S. Lewis’ book The Last Battle (I know, lots of different book references today, what can I say, I love reading ;).  In that book  there is a young man who is a Calormene (i.e. not a Narnian or the equivalent of Christian) and he fights vehemently throughout the book for Tash (the Calormenian god) against Aslan and the Narnians.  At the end of the book **SPOILER ALERT** everyone dies and they have “judgement day”.  When they get to judgement day the Calormenian young man steps aside with Aslan for a little bit and they have a conversation where Aslan basically says – you missed it by a little bit and were fighting for the wrong side, but your intentions were correct, you are a noble and just person and if you will accept this path you still get to come and live in Aslan’s kingdom.

That’s the best explanation I can think of for how I believe things are going to be on the other side.  Yes, I think it’s absolutely important that Christ is the Savior of mankind and that the pathway to eternal life and exaltation means that we need to accept His atonement in our lives and do those things that will help us return to and become like Heavenly Father.  But if you were a faithful and good person in this life I fully believe that in the next life you’ll be told – you’re awesome, way to be faithful, here are the steps that you need now to gain eternal life and exaltation.  It’s why we do work for the dead in temples.  It’s not to force our faith upon people who have passed on or to tell those people that they were evil.  Quite the contrary, it’s simply to give them the opportunity to accept those things they might not have known before and have the chance to progress onward.

Which isn’t to say that it isn’t important to accept the gospel in this life if given the chance.  I think one of the most important things to realize about what happens on the other side is that we will still be the same people we are now – just dead.  We won’t suddenly be a completely different person with different desires or abilities.  If you weren’t going to accept the gospel in this life and feel inclined to do those things that the gospel requires, you aren’t likely to do so in the next life. (See Alma 41 for a more eloquent explanation of this)

Anyways, I know a lot of this is fairly off topic from the book itself but they’re things that I’ve thought about in the past and have meant to write down and post, this just provided a good jumping off point :)  As always, you can feel free to add in your two cents below.

Having a toddler who can speak very well teaches you a lot of things about yourself that you might not have noticed otherwise. Sam has recently brought to my attention, through the things he prays about, that my prayers of late have become rather stale. Not intentionally so, but each night my prayers seem to fall into the same routine. I’m saying thank you for the same things and asking for the same blessings.

So I’ve tried to add more variation to my prayers.  However, I’ve run into a problem –  I don’t really have anything else to say.  For those of you who aren’t stay-at-home moms let me explain what I mean.  Every day I do pretty much the same thing – wake up, breakfast, entertain kids, lunch, nap time, more entertaining kids, dinner, try to make some family time, bedtime for the kids, teensy bit of time to myself, bedtime for me.  Exciting things in my life include things like trips to the grocery store, a walk to the park or talking to my mom on the phone.  More frequently than not the entire day passes by without me leaving the walls of our home or interacting with anyone aside from Eric or our kids.  So at the end of the day I don’t have a lot of unique things to be grateful for.  I’m grateful for my boys good behavior, for our comfortable circumstances, for the time we had to spend together as a family etc.  Likewise my concerns or things that I’m praying for help with don’t change a lot.  I want Sam to sleep through the night, I pray for my little brother to have success on his mission, I ask for wisdom in how I parent my children etc.

Now, I’m not saying this as a pity party that my life is pretty boring.  In fact, while I could use more adult interaction, I really do enjoy my life.  Each day may be a lot of the same things over and over, I enjoy what I’m doing and I can’t think of anything that is more important or fulfilling than my current endeavors as a wife and mother.  However, how do I keep from saying the same things in my prayers each day, when each day consists of the same things.  I could stop thanking the Lord for the blessings that I tend to thank him for regularly, or stop praying for the desires which I have, but that seems strange at best.

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve come to the conclusion (feel free to put on your false doctrine glasses now, this is the gospel according to Brittny) that my repetitions aren’t a bad thing.  While I think we should always be mindful of new blessings in our life and putting our faith to good use in new ways, I don’t think that negates the need to be grateful for and pray for the routine things in our life.  Even though I make dinner for Eric every single day it doesn’t mean I don’t like it when he thanks me for making a meal.  Sure you could say that he’s already made manifest that he’s grateful for my efforts by thanking me once, and even if he didn’t thank me after a particular meal I wouldn’t necessarily think he was suddenly not grateful for dinner.  However, it’s always nice to hear it anyways.

I think that’s part of how prayers work.  Even though I’ve already said once that I’m grateful for my sweet little boys that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t express gratitude for them again the next day.  I’m still grateful for them!  In fact, each day I’m more and more grateful for them, even if I don’t  have different words to express that gratitude with.  And I think Heavenly Father still wants to hear about that gratitude from me.

More to the point (ok, really really have your false doctrine glasses on now :P) I believe that in large part prayer is more for our sake than for Heavenly Father’s.  I don’t think we’re telling Heavenly Father anything He doesn’t already know when we thank him for the blessings we’ve been given or ask for other blessings.  He can easily enough see how we act and know whether we’re grateful or not, and He can definitely see the things we stand in need of.  I think that a large part of expressing gratitude in our prayers is to help us see the blessings we’ve been given.  I think it is to better help us realize what we’ve been given to help us have a more positive outlook on life and find ways that we can spread the joy and blessings we’ve been given with others.

Furthermore, I think it’s good to continually pray for the same things.  I think it shows that they truly are important to you and it keeps the things on your own mind.  Plus we’re taught that prayer is a form of work and in many cases it’s the best way that we can help others.  Case in point, each night I pray for my little brother who is out on his mission.  I prayed for him at the beginning of his mission and the things I’m praying for don’t necessarily change all that much, so why bother?  For one thing, it helps me to keep him in my thoughts and finding what I can do to help him.  Even if it just helps remind me that I ought to write him a letter, that’s a positive outcome from praying for him daily.  I also think that it helps him to know that I remember him each night and realize the importance of what he’s doing.  And of course, I think by praying for him each night I’m asking for a renewed portion of the powers of heaven to help him with what he’s doing.

Recently I read a book by Orson Scott Card called Enchantment. It’s an excellent book that gave me a lot to think about.  The book is a fantasy novel and as such it has different people who possess magical/spiritual powers.  In the book the people of a particular village avoid the name of a particular evil witch because as they use her name more frequently they give her more power.  In another part of the book there is a deity whose power is greatly diminished because the people in his time have forgotten his name.  I think there’s some interesting truth to that principle.  As we call upon the power of God, His power is in some way strengthened.  Not that He had less power before but that we are combining our faith and energies with His power and together those powers are more potent than either one alone.  I think as we pray for the same things over and over we are giving over more of our faith/trust/energy/power or whatever you want to call it over to the Lord and He can make better use of our power than we can ourselves.

Another reason I think I have difficulties coming up with original material for my prayers is that I try to communicate with God as I come up against different problems or situations.  I’m not always good at stopping, kneeling down and saying a formal prayer, however I frequently will pray in more of a conversation with the Lord.  For example, we have dealt a lot with getting Sam to sleep through the night.  So when I’m trying to come up with what our next steps should be I’ll often just start thinking through the problem and ask the Lord to help me come up with a solution.  Then I’ll try to go through in my mind the process of “studying it out” and consider what things we’ve tried, what I think the problems might be etc.  I try to listen for feedback, if you will, on the ideas and thoughts that I’m having.  Most of the time the answers that I get will just come as ideas that hadn’t been presented to me before or a good/bad feeling as I consider different courses of action.  So while my nightly prayers may not seem original there’s still communication that’s more personalized throughout the day.

Anyways, maybe this is all just rationalization, but as I’ve considered the stale nature of my prayers lately I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not as bad as it seems.  I don’t think I ought to artificially change my prayers to have different things that I’m being grateful for or praying for because those are the things that are dearest to my heart.  I think by praying for them continually it is just a way of expressing their importance to me.  I still ought to look for other blessings in my life and places that my faith ought to be applied, however that should be in addition to rather than in lieu of my repetitions.  So long as I am sincere in the things I’m praying for they defy the definition of being “vain” so I’m still in good shape.

I would love to get other people’s feedback on these ideas.  Like I said, I’m not preaching this as doctrine, just the thoughts I’ve had as I’ve faced a situation in my own life.  Does anyone else have good ideas on how to keep your prayers from becoming rote?  Do you totally disagree and think that repetition is always vain?  I welcome any constructive feedback, positive or otherwise… so long as it’s constructive :)

Our neighborhood has a recipe group that meets once a month to exchange recipes and visit.  They come up with a theme and then anyone who wants to participate makes a dish that matches that theme and brings some to sample as well as the recipe.  The theme this month was breakfast foods and I decided it was time to try my hand at making a quiche again.  I don’t really have a recipe, just the vague suggestions from my mom, so I had to write down what I did as I went rather than just copy down a recipe, so it’s a very forgiving recipe.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a printer right now so I couldn’t make up recipe cards to take with me, but I figured I’d do the next best thing and post the recipe on my blog and then just put my blog address next to my quiche.  Then at the last minute Eric wasn’t able to come home in time for me to go anyways.  But since it turned out pretty good and I’d like to have the recipe available for a base next time I try to make quiche I figure I ought to post it anyways. So without further ado, here is my quiche “recipe”:

Please note, almost all of the measurements are approximate and represent only what I did, not what would yield the best results.  For instance, I have 1 1/2 roma tomatoes… that’s just because I had half a roma tomato in the fridge and decided to use it.  The romano cheese was likewise an addition that was just because I happened to have some lying around.  So feel free to modify as the ingredients in your fridge inspire you!  My mom’s suggestion was to add in some red pepper, which I meant to do but I forgot until after the quiches were already in the oven.

Quiche à la Brittny

Ingredients

• 6 oz frozen broccoli (thawed & drained)
• 6 oz frozen spinach (thawed & drained)
• 1/2 large onion diced
• 1/2 tsp garlic
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1/2 tsp Morton’s Nature’s Seasons (or salt & pepper)
• 9 eggs
• 1 cup half & half
• 2 tbsp grated Romano cheese
• 14 oz grated Monterey Jack cheese
• 2 pie crusts

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. In a large fry pan melt butter and sauté butter with onion, garlic and Nature’s Seasons.  When onion starts to brown add in broccoli and spinach until well combined and heated through.  You want to get some of the excess liquid out of the green veggies but not really get them browned or overcooked.
3. Give a slice of Monterey Jack cheese to Sam so that he remains happy for the duration of the cooking process.
4. In a separate bowl combine eggs, half and half, romano cheese and Monterey Jack cheese.
5. Give another slice of cheese to Sam
6. Roll out pie crusts into two pie pans.  Spoon half of the vegetable mixture into each pie pan to form a layer on the bottom.  Pour egg mixture over top so that it covers the vegetable mixture.
7. Bake quiches for 30-45 minutes.