The flowers on the side

Since as long as I can remember I've always loved riding horses. One of my best memories was a horseback trip south of Yellowstone National park with my cousins Levi and Josh and my brother Sean. We rode for a couple of days in and then we camped out, saddled up and rode back out. We only took one bath the whole week and that lasted about 5 seconds in a near frozen stream. The reason our trip was so enjoyable was because the horses did all the work and we got to enjoy the scenery. There were a lot of rotten things that happened on the trip. To start things off Josh's horse was on it's first trip and still did not like being ridden and so she fell down in the first river we had to cross and got all of Josh's things wet. Then there were bears and the second day in we rode all day in the rain. It was freezing cold and I remember having to pry my hands off the rains when we finally arrived at camp and got off our horses. The pack horse kicked me on the way in because he was being lazy so I had to flip him with my homemade switch. (Sean says I deserved to get kicked but he's wrong). I'm sure I could have left that trip thinking it was the most miserable trip I'd ever been on, but that wouldn't be right. It was enjoyable because there were many more good and fun things that happened than miserable things. First off, all of the miserable things (with the exception of the rain) were all pretty funny at the time. Second, I could go on for quite a while with all the cool things we saw. I'm just going to list them here:
1. I was amazed at the horses sense of smell. He could smell a bear a mile away and I was appreciative of that.
2. The scenery was just amazing. Everything back there was almost untouched by man.
3. When we made camp after finally getting all the way back in, the rain stopped and we enjoyed a warm fire (that was against the law but we all decided that it was worth the risk. If a ranger caught us we decided that we would all split the fine. If Bishop Hyde happens to read this or any other ranger then the statute of limitations is up.)
4. While we were enjoying the campfire a little fawn walked right up to our camp and just stared at us for a few minutes. It obviously hadn't been around humans much. It was really neat to see how it could be so close to us and not fear us.
5. I remember the injured eagle that sat on a limb by our path almost daring us to cross him. His talons here enormous! We were all afraid to admit it but that eagle was pretty darn scary. I got the feeling that if it wasn't injured it could have ripped us to shreds.
When I am driving my car through beautiful country I miss out on some of God's most amazing creations because I have to focus on the road. However on that horseback trip I got to experience all the sights while the horse followed the proper course. I think often in life we have a tendency to drive our cars through life rather than enjoy the scenery on horseback. Even worse we sometimes focus on all the negative things that are happing and let those things shadow all of the beautiful blessings that we have. Take for example the following quote from a talk by Elder Holland:

"If we constantly focus only on the stones in our mortal path, we will 
almost surely miss the beautiful flower or cool stream provided by the 
loving Father who outlined our journey. Each day can bring more joy 
than sorrow when our mortal and spiritual eyes are open to God's 
goodness. Joy in the gospel is not something that begins only in the 
next life. It is our privilege now, this very day. We must never allow 
our burdens to obscure our blessings. There will always be more 
blessings than burdens--even if some days it doesn't seem so. Jesus 
said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it 
more abundantly." Enjoy those blessings right now. They are yours and 
always will be." 
— Jeffrey R. Holland

As Elder Holland says, "there will always be more blessings than burdens". In our hardest days it certainly doesn't seem to be true, but if our spiritual eyes are open then we will see that it really is. I believe that when we let the negative overcome us that we are disobeying an important commandment of the Saviour. "Be of good cheer". When our lives and burdens seem too much to bare and we lose focus of the blessings let us do as the Saviour asks when he said "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28)  If we do this, Jesus will take our load, our spiritual eyes will be opened and we will be able to see the wonderful things that God has prepared for us to be happy in this life.
I think back to that day we rode in the rain. I wasn't smiling the whole time and I wasn't happy always either, but if I would have let the rain become my whole focus I would have missed out on some amazing views. 

Peter went out, and wept bitterly.

Today as I watched the Easter Video on LDS.org something stood out to me and I started asking myself some questions. What brought Peter, the future leader of The Lord's Church, to deny his master? How am I the same?
When Jesus told Peter that he would deny Him three times that same evening, Peter adamantly said he would not. In his mind he could not betray his Savior. He believed, as do we all at times, that it would be near impossible for him to fall. I won't drink that beer, I won't break the law of chastity, I won't betray my family. Peter's fallacy wasn't in believing that he would be faithful to the end, it was in over estimating his own strength to the point of openly testing it. He went where he should not have been.
His plight was similar to Alma's son, Corianton. To Corianton Alma said, "Now this is what I have against thee; thou didst go on unto boasting in thy strength and thy wisdom." Corianton was so sure of his own strength that he went all the way over to the land of Siron to test it out. If he had stayed and tended to the ministry like he was supposed to than he could have avoided his problem.
Peter, as strong as he was, didn't believe the Lord's warning and so he went out to test his strength. Surely he just wanted to be close to the Lord in his final hours, but had he known how weak he truely was, he might have chosen a different course of action. Maybe he would have stayed home until he heard the cock crow. He wouldn't have put himself in a position to deny the Savior.
Being where you are supposed to be and not venturing out side the guidelines of the gospel is a good lesson to be learned, but it is not what I wanted to learn from Peter in this case. After Peter heard the cock crow, he "went out, and wept bitterly ". If this were the end of Peter's story it would be a sad one indeed. But it was not. What Peter did after this is what is amazing. He got up and proceeded to become the man that Jesus wanted him to be. It seams that he was no longer the boastful Peter who thought too much of his own strengths. Now he was the unquestioned leader of the Savior's Church.
Perhaps at times we too have wandered towards Siron, boasting in our own strength as we go along thinking, "I won't do this or that", but then we end up in some place where we should have never been in the first place, "weeping bitterly". But that should not be the end of our story. Just like Peter we must get up and with the help of the Savior,  become the men and women that we ought to be. This coming Easter, let us remember that even as we cry the tears of sin that Christ died and rose again to wipe them away. Let us come unto Him and let Him carry the burden of our mistakes. He will make us whole and he will show us who we need to be. I know this to be true, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

The Rest of the Story

A lot of you read my wife's blog post this week and I wanted to thank everyone for the response she has gotten. As her husband you can imagine that the hardest times for me were watching how sad my wife was. To see all the love and support that friends and family have given her in the last few days is nothing short of amazing and I guess I can only credit it to the love of Christ. Thank you all so much!

Now the title of this blog is "the rest of the story". Certainly this will not cover the rest of the story but I wanted to give a little insight for those of you who read her post, through my eyes.

As I mentioned earlier, the hardest part for me was watching my wife struggle with this trial. There have been many times in my life when I've had to wait for something that I thought I wanted right then and I have learned that God always fulfills his promises to me in better time than I could have chosen. So for me waiting for a baby almost seemed like waiting for a package to come in the mail (forgive my poor choice of a metaphor). I knew that when the time was right God would send us a child. But it is so much harder for me to watch my wife not receive something that she deserves and wants.

Now let me step back a bit in time with a couple of experiences so that you can know how I knew. As Ashleigh said in her post our "plan" before we got married was to wait a year before we started to have children. A couple of months after we had been married I was blessed with a dream. Now before you call me crazy I had never had a dream before that I had considered "revelation". Probably because I wasn't very open to the idea of having something revealed to me in a dream. That's Book of Mormon stuff I thought. So back to my dream; one night I woke up after having a very vivid dream. In the dream a little girl with long dark hair came up to me and said "Don't you want me daddy?" I almost started crying it touched me so much. When I woke up I was a little bit shaken, I wanted to think that it was just a strange dream and so I didn't mention it to Ash. After a couple of days the dream still weighed on me so I finally decided to do what I ought to have done in the first place. I knelt down and asked Heavenly Father if it was revelation or "just a dream". I felt strongly that it was indeed a revelation that we shouldn't wait any longer to try and have kids. That night I told Ashleigh about the dream and my prayers and as you can guess you couldn't have seen a happier wife. (As it turned out I was looking for a spot to bring it up because I wondered if she wanted to still wait and then we saw the episode of the Office where Jim and Pam find out they are prego, who knew?) So Ashleigh told you that she went off birth control so now lets fast forward a few months.

Ashleigh also mentioned a blessing that I gave her that helped her receive some comfort. Before I gave that blessing I decided to go to my bedroom and pray for a bit so that when I gave the blessing I would say what the Lord wanted said and not what I wanted to happen. I hadn't really ever done this because I hadn't ever been in a situation to give a blessing where my will played strongly into the situation. As I prayed I felt comforted and I knew that the Lord would put words into my mouth. As I laid my hands on my wife's head I felt the Spirit come over me very strongly. I can only remember a few things from the blessing besides that feeling. First I remember I told her to be strong and have faith, the Lord loved her and really was looking down on her and was the only one who really knew how she felt. Second I advised her to continue keeping the commandments even when things got hard. Last I remember I told her that she could be comforted because "we would have a baby soon". As I took my hands off her head I wondered what it meant to "have a baby soon". Soon for me would be next month but soon for the Lord could mean a few years. It didn't really matter though because I knew it would happen, I had felt the Spirit testify on multiple occasions now and so now I was only waiting for a package to be delivered. I do know that it will come when the Lord sees it best to come. He has always blessed me with what he has promised.

Again I want to thank all of you for your love and support. The Spirit has comforted me when I read your comments to my wife and I know that she is blessed with lots of support and in way that takes a lot of worry off of my shoulders. So thank you again and may we all continue to show Christ's love to those around us!

Facebook in the Bible

If Facebook was a time machine...

Focus on the Savior

I just wanted to share something really quick on this wonderful Sunday afternoon. Today in Sunday School our lesson talked a little bit about building our foundation on Christ. The teacher asked us the question of how do we get rid of confusion in our lives or what do we do when the spiritual storms come to our lives? Believe it or not the first thing that I thought of was a song on the new Zac Brown Band CD. It's a song called "Quiet your Mind". The basis of the song is that with everything going so fast in life sometimes you just need to quiet your mind because "if you're too busy talking you're not busy listening to hear what the land (I thought it said "Lamb" the first time I heard it and it would fit here) has to say. The fact is that sometimes we have so much going on in our lives that we forget to quiet our minds so we can hear what the Lord has to say. Often he tries to speak to us through the still small voice of the Holy Ghost but our minds are so cluttered and so loud that we drown out what the spirit is saying. We need to quiet our minds so that we can focus on the Savior. This point was brought home to me in a dream I had a few weeks ago. Some of you are probably thinking, "A dream? Is this one of DJ's crazy action packed dreams?" Well actually this is one of a very few dreams where I woke up and immediately knew it was from God and had an actual meaning. In the dream I was in a room filled with my immediate and extended family. Everyone was talking and having a good time but I was very confused. Everyone was loud and having their own conversation. Yeah I know this sounds like family home evening right? Well then the room started to swirl back and forth and I couldn't focus on anything. I began to be worried and wasn't sure what to do to relievethe confusion. I caught a glimpse of a picture on the wall of Jesus. I knew right away that if I wished to get rid of the confusion I had to put all my energy into focusing on that picture. As soon as I did this the confusion left and the room stopped swaying. I woke up soon after but the message was clear to me. I had so much going on in my life that I was forgetting to focus on the Lord. I knew what I needed to do and as soon as I did that I literally felt the confusion leave my life. I still had the same tasks that needed to be performed and still had the same amount of time to do them but now my focus was in the right place and the confusion was gone. Sometimes we just need to quiet our minds and listen to the Lord and place our focus and our trust in him. If we do this then Satan will not be able to confuse us.

Avoiding the curse of Laman

OK so some of you are probably thinking one of two things: RACIST! or Why in the world would I want to be any whiter than I already am? Let me just say that if having perfect olive dark skin is a curse then it's one I guess I'll live with the rest of my life! (Don't hate). So what curse am I talking about? Let me just throw a scripture  in here to illustrate it for you:

And after the ^aangel had spoken unto us, he departed. And after the angel had departed, Laman and Lemuel again began to ^amurmur, saying: How is it possible that the Lord will deliver Laban into our hands? Behold, he is a mighty man, and he can command fifty, yea, even he can slay fifty; then why not us? (1 Nephi 3:30-31)

Seriously Laman? My mom always told me I had a disease called selective hearing (My wife would argue that I still do) and selective memory but this is bad! One minute you have an angel come down from heaven, lay down the law as you are beating you younger brothers with sticks and then literally a few seconds later you are already murmuring. How can you faith be so weak? I mean c'mon! Right? I'm sure we're all thinking the same thing: There is no way my memory is that bad or that my faith is that weak! Well in the words of Lee Corso let me just say "not so fast my friend". To convince you that you probably experience the curse of Laman just let me share a personal experience from my life.
Before I get into the story I will share a brief background: Prior to this semester I was an Exercise Science major looking to get into the Teaching Physical Education/Coaching program. Since I had only taken the prerequisite classes the semester before, I had planned on applying for and entering the program in the Winter of 2011. Longer than I wanted to take but it looked like the best I could do. After dabbling around in college for a few years it was time for me to get finished with my major so I could support a family. So lets jump right in then.
Monday: First day of classes at BYU. I had my class schedule all worked out and my work schedule was perfectly placed around it. It was shaping up to be a pretty good semester with most of my classes in my program. The only problem was that I wasn't actually in the program so there was a slight possibility that I would have to retake a couple of them. Here was where the Lord stepped in and started working miracles. When I arrived at my second class of the day I spoke with one of my teachers and explained my situation and asked if I should take the class I was in and if it would count for my major when I got accepted. She told me that it would not, but she told me that the program head was in her office and I should talk to her because they had already admitted someone into the program that same day. I went straight to her office and spoke with her. She simply handed me an application and told me to fill it out. Then she sent me to another professor to get some other stuff straight. I was in the program! It was amazing actually. Everything seemed to be falling into place. It was quite obvious that the Lord was indeed on my side and preparing the way for me. Then there was the hang up: I had to had a couple of classes to my schedule that conflicted with my work schedule. I began praying and decided that if this was what the Lord wanted me to do then he would continue to prepare the way.
Tuesday: I went into work on Tuesday and explained my situation to the people in charge of scheduling. I told them how I had to add a couple of classes and that I needed to change my work schedule. I wasn't really worried about it because this company is usually very good at working around school schedules. To make a long story short they were "unable" to make the changes and I was forced to quit my job in order to continue my schooling. As I sat at home wondering about the future I began to doubt if I had indeed made the correct decision. "What if it was a mistake to quit,"I asked myself. Maybe I should have just dropped the classes to continue working. Did we really have a sufficient enough income to pull this off? Like Satan always does he began to introduce doubt into my heart. As the doubt crept in my faith crept out and I started to waiver in my convictions. How soon had I forgotten the feelings of the spirit in guiding me to the direction I had come. Now here is how you avoid Laman's curse and forgetting altogether. You may murmur for a moment but there is only one way to nip the curse in the bud. I got down on my knees and began praying for faith. I asked my Father in Heaven to reassure me that I was indeed doing what he wanted. I asked that the way would be prepared so I would know that it was the right path. As I got up off my knees my memory was restored. I began again to remember how good the Lord had been to me and how he had already prepared the way. Because Ashleigh and I had been faithful at paying our tithing I was not worried that we would not meet our financial needs. Soon I remembered that even before I had lost my job the Lord had already helped us. Just a few weeks earlier Ashleigh had been given a promotion at her job and her new income would be more than the combined income of both of our jobs before I had to quit. How amazing and loving is the foresight of the Lord? I wonder at how quickly any of us can forget all of the good things the our Savior has already done for us! We should all look at our own lives and see where we have let Laman's curse destroy our faith and then get down on our knees and ask God to renew our faith in him. I promise if you do this you will, like me be allowed to remember again "the greatness of the Holy One of Israel".