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[Originally published October 11, 2011] Six months ago, in the thro's of bleak mid-winter (yes, it was April, and yet, this particular year, it WAS the bleak MID-winter) I started to worry that I may be slowly dying. So much of my life was in a comfort zone, that - as often happens when we get a little older - I was starting to feel like that comfort zone was beginning, ever-so-slightly, to shrink. I'd been teaching piano, off and on (more on than off), for 28 years (yes, I started when I was 10). I had had teaching callings in the church for 12 consecutive years. I struggled with routines, but I was even used to that, recognizing my need to approach them with my unique little A.D.D.-ness, and knowing that with the ebb and flow of each year, it always felt like I was fighting my way out of a paper bag... When in May, as I was still fighting my way out of this year's paper bag, I started to have problems with tendonitis in my right wrist. I continued to nurse a war wound in my left foot as well - aka: zip line injury from girls' camp four years ago. I laughingly noticed one day that every single move I was making - to get in and out of my car, put groceries away, change laundry, etc. - was designed with one major objective: AVOID PAIN. As very often happens when I make these wry little observations, the spirit whispered the eternal truth connected to my observation, "You're doing that spiritually, too." That feeling I had had in the previous several months, that I was slowly dying inside, crystalized in this new realization, and with it, the further realization that if I was going to make the choice to avoid pain in this life, I was going to die before my heart had the sense to stop beating. If I continued on the path I had set my unwitting feet on, I was going to become incapable of feeling, all because I had decided it might be too painful. C.S. Lewis said, "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk [my italics] of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. "I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness....We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it." In my prayers, I began asking Heavenly Father to help me wake up, and live. In feeling the kind of pain connected with my current trials, I didn't want to shut down and be incapable of feeling anything. And as part of that, I didn't want to sleepwalk through life, incapable of being an instrument in the Lord's hands, to bless, and serve, and minister. I've always loved learning new things, and I didn't want to shut myself off to one of the biggest joys in this life, and in the next life: growth and progress. Fast forward to Sunday... I was talking to a friend about having too many new things on my plate, and it hit me how every single thing going on in my life right now has me in a huge learning curve. Six months ago, everything in my life was in my comfort zone. Now, everything in my life is OUT of my comfort zone. And since I begged the Lord to not let me die inside, it's all tender mercies. It's like the Lord plucked me out of my old life, and tossed me into the deep end of the swimming pool. To have EVERY. SINGLE. THING be out of my comfort zone puts me in a state far, FAR from grace. That learning curve is messy, and awkward, and clumsy. And when you've been in your comfort zone for any extended period of time, all your natural man instincts practically scream at you to go back to the old way, where you're comfortable, where it's easy. I just have to know that the Lord's grace is available in all of these new circumstances...AFTER ALL I CAN DO. And it's just going to look messy until that starts to happen. He is sooooo good to me, to answer my prayer in such a huge way. It's one of the reasons I feel hesitation to put anything down while I'm figuring it out. I keep trying to just take one day at a time, and since all these messy things are gifts from a loving Father, I plead for guidance, and strength, and FOCUS. Always focus... And then, as I get up off my knees, and wonder where on earth to plunge in today, I hear this hysterical little voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZF5r1F7nY

[Originally published April 21, 2015] Great fiction writers have taught me that there may not be such a thing as fiction at all. Great fiction – the stories that transcend generations – are just a new way of telling a true story – the story of the human condition. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with its make-believe hobbits, wizards, dwarves, hellish orcs, and celestial elves, is just such a story. In the very real battle of good versus evil that each of us fight every day, here are just a few lessons we learn from this fantastical battle of good versus evil: Evil never sleeps – not ever. If it looks like it’s been defeated, it just goes underground to build its strength back up, restructure, and resurface to fight again. The war between good and evil is waged on two fronts: it seems to be perpetually moving over broad, sweeping landscapes with legions of soldiers; but it always starts deep inside one individual heart at a time. The good who fight evil are in many cases not the “most likely to’s”. And yet, when you see the task at hand – what must be done to battle evil this time, the small, the weak, the “least of these” end up being not only the only choice, but very often, the inevitable, and best choice. When it comes right down to it, good would rather not fight at all. Those who are good look desperately for anyone else – ANYONE ELSE – to fight evil for them. Or, when the battle du jour is won, forgetting the reality of Lesson Number One – that evil never sleeps - they just want to go home. Like the hobbits that so sweetly portray the truly good in this world, those who are good mostly just want to stay home, visit with friends, bask in the sweetness of the shire, and, of course, have lunch…since it’s been clear since elevensies since anyone has eaten. The person in history who really got me thinking about this was George Washington – the most anti-hobbit-built military hero ever to mount a horse. Tall, handsome, disciplined – the man looked, sounded, and acted like a man who was born to be followed into battle. But underneath his Aragorn exterior, beat the heart of a Frodo Baggins. Washington continued to find himself at just the right place at the right time – or the wrong place, at the wrong time – depending on how you want to look at it. Because of his extraordinarily high character, he continued to be needed at critical moments of the beginnings of the new nation of the United States. But…he didn’t want the ring! After the French and Indian War, he just wanted to go home. After the Revolutionary War, he just wanted to go home. After the Constitutional Convention, he just wanted to go home. And finally, after serving two terms as president, he just…wanted…to go…home. With all his years of public service, away from home, there was no place Washington wanted to be more than Mount Vernon. It was most definitely his shire. And in spite of his lifelong yearning to be there, he responded to the call to serve – every single time. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, said this: "’To do good’ is the business of life. ‘To enjoy rest’ is the happiness of heaven. We pluck premature for forbidden fruit when we grasp at rest on this side of the grave.” Tolkien’s stories hold a beautiful analogy that affirms that reality about life: the shire is an almost Eden-like memory, and the beauty of Rivendell is a mere hint of a more heavenly future existence. George Washington possessed a nobility of character that instinctively seemed to know this. He said: “How, in the end, will we be able to live with ourselves when we weren’t our highest self and didn’t do the right thing in the first place?” Tolkien created 6-toed hobbits…but our country’s beginnings depended on a living, breathing, 6-foot tall hobbit. Both teach me that the fight isn’t over in this life, and call for something higher in me to step up and out…of my shire.

I wrote the essay, below, for an essay contest sponsored by Utahns Against Common Core. It gave me the opportunity to highlight some of the glaring problems I have with the Common Core State Standards. More importantly, it gave me the opportunity to articulate what I am for. I am for the UNcommon The Common Core State Standards have raised red flags to watchful parents across America, and awakened the most fearful creature in all of nature: a parent who senses that the well-being of its offspring is at stake. The red flags are daunting, because there are so many. Here are a few: When parents can’t get anything more concrete from a teacher other than to call these standards “more rigorous”, that is a red flag. When teachers are afraid to speak against the Common Core standards for fear of losing their jobs, that is a red flag. When university education students are told that their professors don’t know what to teach them to qualify them as certified teachers, that is a red flag. When teachers skulkingly hand a parent a text book to help a child at home, as if that text book is contraband, that is a red flag. When a federal government, spending money from taxpayers who have not yet been born, bribes states to receive waivers from ridiculous practices or money to adopt untested, unused, unwritten standards, that is a red flag. When educrats advocate funneling a child into a system that will determine what that child will grow up to be, for the good of a global job market, which undermines the true self-determination that has been a prized value of liberty since this country’s beginnings, that is a red flag! It is at this point in the conversation that any good disciple of Saul Alinsky will hurl this question accusingly at the protective parent: “so aren’t you for any standards in education?” Parents: it is at this point that we must have an answer so ready, that it nearly bursts from us because it burns within us: I am for standards that are NOT common! Excellence is not common. And rigorous does not equal excellence. Rigorous is defined as “thorough, exhaustive, and accurate”. Do we as parents want that kind of education for these beautiful, snowflake-like individuals, these magnificent children, who came to us – as Wordsworth said, “trailing clouds of glory from God, who is [their] home”? Remember: the word ‘rigorous’ has the same Latin root as ‘rigor’ – as in ‘rigor mortis’ – the stiffening of muscles that follows death. In the context of Common Core, I pray that ‘rigorous’ isn’t referring to stiffening that leads to the death of our children’s ability to imagine, dream, create, and think for themselves. We are for the uncommon, the excellent, the exceptional. We are for the individual liberty of directing our children’s education – with decisions made locally in homes and local community schools and districts. We are for the individual liberty of local teachers – gifted and dedicated professionals who love and praise and encourage our children, who spend countless hours of personal time and too much unreimbursed personal funds on their students, and who often intuitively know – without multi-million dollar assessments – which of those students are struggling and how to adapt lessons to reach them. We are for the privacy of our children as guaranteed to us by the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We are for our children having the once-in-a-lifetime experience of a protected childhood, of them having the freedom to succeed – and fail! - and through their experiences, gain the strength and wisdom to choose for themselves the path their lives will follow. I quote Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, who delivered a masterful speech last summer, on what he was for in education. He said: “The goal of good education should be the pursuit of what is good…and true…and just…and right…and REAL, not the protection or the propagation of what is COMMON. Good education has never been about dumbing down the academy to a group of ideas that are agreed upon by the powerful and the popular. The goal of the educator should be the pursuit of truth, not the construction of what is common. Education should be about an open mind that challenges the consensus, rather than a set of closed constructs of commonality that capitulate to the mediocrity of the group, group think, and the collective opinion.” He goes on to say: “I am against Common Core because I believe in intellectual integrity – the integration of head, and heart, and fact, and faith that is directed by the student’s thirst for truth and not the state’s hunger for control.” I stand for excellence, for local control, for privacy, for teachers, but first, last, and always, I stand for my children.

[Originally published October 31, 2011] You can learn a lot from your kids. Grant spoke in church yesterday, and gave a beautiful talk about what he learned on his mission: 1. Don't be a baby. This is never a bad thing to learn, and generally needs to be learned over and over. And over. 2. Put God first in your life - He is your DAD. No one loves you more, and your prayers should be TALKING to Him. It's so much more than "We thank Thee, we ask Thee...." from Primary. Grant told a story about a little tiny boy, Tino, the stake president's son, who gave a prayer and kept calling Heavenly Father "Poppy," as he asked Heavenly Father for things that Grant felt that he specifically needed at that time. Grant said he was very grateful to have learned to TALK to His "Poppy" from Tino. He told about a tiny little outpost of the church, down at the tip of the continent, called the 28th of November (it's cooler in Spanish). He said one member's home was the most holy place he had ever been, besides the temple. He said the man felt his home needed to be sacred, because of being so off the path of any church jurisdiction. Grant said he could feel that the Lord had not forsaken these few saints in this tiny little area, out in the middle of nowhere - that no one in the world may know about them, but the Lord knew about them, and watched over their lives. "For can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on ths on of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, O house of Israel. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me." (1 Nephi 21:15-16). He learned that he is not alone from the 28th of November. Lastly, Grant told of David and Maria, a family who had a huge trauma befall their family the day after their baptism. He told of counseling David that this event could bring him closer to God, or tear him away from God - but that he, David, would be the one to decide. He said one of the most meaningful moments of his entire mission was watching the change come over David's face as he made the decision to stay with the Lord. He learned to stay with the Lord, through anything that could happen to him, from David. The last area in Grant's mission was a return to an area where he served very early in his mission. He spoke about how powerful it was to see different people's choices to move closer to the Lord - or not - over that year and a half in between. It reminded me of Alma meeting Ammon and his brothers after their fourteen-year mission to the Lamanites, how overjoyed Alma was at learning that his dear friends were still faithful to their covenants. It was particularly poignant to consider, after hearing about a family who could have been ripped away from their tender, newly-planted gospel roots at the very outset of their planting, but instead, to reach down deep into that soil and cling to their covenants, and to their God. I love what I've learned and how my faith has been strengthened as I've watched my son serve a mission. I'm sure gonna miss those Monday emails.

[Originally published October 21, 2011] Two days ago, we had a taste of what I imagine it's like to pass through the veil at the end of our lives. As I stood in the airport waiting to see our missionary man child come down the escalator inside the terminals, we waited with three other families whose sons were traveling with Grant: Elders Harris, Healey, and Peterson. Naturally, we were all instantly friends, because we were all there for the same purpose, to welcome valiant sons home. Then we caught that first glimpse of them, predictably near the end of the disembarkment, and suddenly, we weren't one big group. We were four individual groups, sacred family units, sharing a private, sweet moment of reunion. Suddenly, Grant wasn't the disembodied idea of Grant that he had become over the past two years. He was my Grant, our Grant, that sweet little boy, loping down that hallway towards us, a man home from his first big commission from the Lord. It was Wednesday afternoon, and because of changed travel plans, the dear boy had essentially been up since Monday morning at 6:30 Buenos Aires time. He looked dazed and confusedly happy. This must be what heaven will be like, welcoming each other after completing our life's missions. There will be people there to greet us and welcome us home again. It will be familiarly strange....and strangely familiar. Being together again with people we may have been separated from our entire mortality, it will surprise us that we remember and know grandparents and others whom we never met in this life. You can't really say that it feels like he's never been gone, because the separation mattered so much. It was vital that Grant's first two decades of life be tithed for the Lord, and all four of us are different people because he served. I am so grateful for this son. It was joyful, yesterday, to watch him get up and study, make his bed (!), clean up after himself, ask every few minutes, "What do you need? What can I do for you?", thank me for the meals I've fixed him, allow me to chase him around the bar in the kitchen for hugs, the way I used to before he left.....only now, turn around suddenly and run right into my arms. I'm so grateful for children who grow up and still want to come home! The apostle Paul calls followers of Christ "children of light." I am so grateful to have raised children who love light. Light is the way by which we see everything else. The Light, is what helps us discern truth - "things as they really are."

[Originally published October 17, 2011] So much to do in the next 30 hours. So for now, I just have to say that tomorrow, my little boy is coming home. He'll get on a plane in Buenos Aires @ 10:30 tonight (their time, 7:30 our time), and land in Miami tomorrow morning @ 7:00 a.m. He will be in my arms @ roughly 4:45 p.m., tomorrow afternoon. Being in Grant's air space is a very, very good place to be. He really knows how to be present. In fact, I love to say that he will never be mistaken for being absent! He sees people, and he loves what he sees. He has one of the most beautiful hearts that I have had the privilege of knowing in this life, and I'm honored to be his mother. His patriarchal blessing said he asked to come to our home, which I will marvel over until my dying day. After that, I'm hoping it'll make a little more sense. :) The very best thing I have done with my life is bringing up two amazing human beings that are making this planet a better place. Today, I am having joy in my posterity. Gotta go make somebody's favorite peach dessert.