Grace, Faith and Works

I’ve been pondering lately the subject of grace and it’s relationship to faith and works.  I have always felt that if I have faith in the Savior, I would need to show that by keeping His commandments and serving Him.  If I didn’t do those things, I would think that it was a pretty clear indication that I didn’t love and appreciate Him and all He has done for me.  

It seems a little bit to me like the relationship I have with my husband.  I have the good fortune to be married to a really good man.  He loves me.  A lot.  He does everything he can to make my life good and to ensure my happiness. I appreciate him for that.  I love him, too.  Because of the love I have for him, and the appreciation I have for him and the things he does for me, I  try to do things that please him. To care for him and do everything I can to make him feel loved.  

There is a little part of my mind that realizes that if I didn’t keep doing the things I do for my husband, he might love me less.  Our relationship would suffer.  Realizing that, I could be doing the things I do, serving him, because I am afraid if I don’t he will love me less.  And if that were my motivation, I would always be worried that I’m not doing enough, that he might love me less anyway.  To all outward appearances, nothing would have changed; I’m still serving him, he’s still serving me.  Outwardly, it still looks like a great marriage.  But there is a very different feeling in our marriage.  I no longer would feel safe and loved, even though he is still treating me in exactly the same manner.  And he would no longer feel trusted, even though he has done nothing to deserve losing my trust.  Eventually, I would probably come to resent him for his unreasonable demands.  And he would wonder why I don’t trust and appreciate him.  

When I think of how I feel about the Savior, I am so grateful for all He has done for me.  He came to earth and lived and died for me.  Because of Him, I am and can be forgiven of my sins, my weaknesses and human failings.  I know there are things He wants of me, things that would make Him feel like I love Him and appreciate all He has done for me.  He wants me to be a better person, to be like Him.  He wants me to love other people and serve them to show my love for Him.

My loving obedience and acts of service cannot ever completely repay Him for all He has done for me.  In fact, a lot of the obedience and service I can’t even manage on my own.  He has to help me or I wouldn’t even be able to do it.  I could spend my life worrying that my works would not be enough to repay Him and that He would be displeased with me because I didn’t do enough.  Eventually, though His love for me had not changed, my desire to love and serve Him would diminish because I feared His judgement instead of appreciating His grace.  

I often hear people say, “I don’t know if I can make it.”  “I don’t know if I can be good enough.”  I just want to take them by the shoulders and look them in the eye and say,”you can’t!  Get over it.”  Jesus died for us for precisely that reason.  Because we can’t be good enough, because we can’t make it on our own.    

We are commanded in the scriptures to “Be ye therefore perfect, even as Our Father in Heaven is perfect.”   (Matthew 5:48)   We can’t achieve this without God’s grace.  Two things happen.  First, God forgives us every time we mess up and second, he changes our hearts so that we are capable of becoming like him.  It’s  not something that happens overnight.  Choosing to accept the Savior is our initial conversion.  Changing our hearts to become perfect is a lifetime work.  It is also conversion: converting our hearts to become capable of perfect Godlike love.  Giving up the natural man is a life-time process, but it’s one that we take on because of our love for God and gratitude to our Savior, not because we fear failure. For with God, nothing shall be impossible (Luke 1:37)   

 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It's the new year and I'm full of new enthusiasm.  At least I was when I woke up this morning.  My son has been in a good mood the past couple of days and the home has been calm and peaceful.  Last night we partied at home for awhile with good food and movies and the kids came and went to various activities.  This morning, in spite of very little sleep, my DH and I woke up cheerful and looking forward to the day.  Went out to breakfast and the tirade began.  I could go into the stupid details, but they really don't matter.  I went to bed optimistic about making things go better this year and within minutes of waking, it already seems impossible.  But I'm not giving up.  I have sent for a book (yes, another book, another reason to think there might be something else we haven't tried that JUST MIGHT WORK!) from a woman who may have some answers.  I have to keep trying....because what else is there?

Now What?

My 21-year-old son moved back in a month ago.  We hadn't intended for it to be permanent, just bring him home for a weekend so we could talk to him about a new development in his life that we were concerned about.  When I picked him up, I was in the truck.  He had all of his stuff and I thought we'd move it into his new apartment.  (college housing, his lease in one apartment ended and he was supposed to move into a different one.)  He said his new apartment wasn't ready and he wanted to be completely moved out of the old one.  I was reluctant, but said OK.  Things didn't go well at home that week and I was ready to have him move back over and into his new apartment.  He didn't want to go.  I started loading the truck with his stuff.  He got angry and was ready to hurt me.  His dad stepped between us and calmed him down.  Because we already had an apartment arranged, (that we were paying for) I wanted him to go live there.  My husband told me privately that he thought our son was suicidal.  Big surprise.  He's been threatening suicide for years.

Next day, Sunday, I stay home from church because we're worried about him.  Husband has to go out to work for a while.  Big deadlines.  I decide it might be worth it to have son living at home if he can find a job.  I start looking for jobs online and he seems enthusiastic.  When husband calls home to check on things, I tell him things are going well, son seems to be in an upbeat mood, no need to worry.  Husband worries anyway.  Unbeknownst to me, son has researched online the amount of aspirin that will kill a guy his size.  He takes it while I am researching jobs for him.  Husband comes home, everything seems fine.  I leave to go up to church.  Husband goes outside to check on a few things.  When he comes in, there is an ambulance at our house.  Son has called 9-1-1.   He spends two days in hospital, acting all happy and bubbly and like life is a great party.

He comes home.  We sell his lease in Logan.  We begin more seriously to look for jobs.  He doesn't put much effort into it; though he seems to think he is trying as hard as he can.  Spends most of his time playing video games, watching movies and surfing the internet.  

This morning, he has followed me around for an hour monologuing about video games while I have cleaned the kitchen, tidied my bedroom and gotten the laundry under way.  The subject turns to religion.  I am sitting in my computer chair in the bedroom while he's sitting on the bed going on and on about how my God is puny and worthless and his is wonderful.  I say nothing and say nothing and say nothing, hoping he will finish, but knowing he will not.  I finally say something rude about his beliefs because, let's face it, I'm not mature enough to just keep turning the other cheek.  Infuriated, he picks up my cell phone off the bed and hurls it at me, striking me in the back of the head.  My head injury bleeds profusely and he is immediately contrite.  Does he feel bad for striking me? or just scared to death about what I will do about it?

Now I have a dilemma.  I have always said I would press charges if he struck me.  He never has before.  I don't want my son to go to jail.  But I don't want to continue having this abusive and controlling relationship in my home.

I feel like I've failed him as a mother.  But allowing him to treat me or anybody else like he does is failing him again.

Streaming Thought

My son has been talking lately about a science fair project he's thinking of pursuing. He wants us to buy him an EEG machine so that he can play around with it and figure out what he can do with it. He thinks that we can pick up waves from the brain that a computer could translate into musical notes or words. He thinks we won't need keyboards anymore, but that we could think our music right into the air. It's almost unbelievable to me, until I think how far we've come.

My kids are tired of hearing about the computer that took up a couple of rooms the size of the whole main floor of our house. In my first years of college I was trying to learn to program on that computer. Then I went on a mission. When I came back to school two years later, I signed up for another computer programming class and they sat me down in front of an Apple II. A desktop computer. It was amazing. I'm afraid I was less amazing. I never did learn much about computer programming.

For my birthday last week, my husband gave me a Kindle. Now I can carry around a whole shelf full of books (library? I'm not sure yet exactly what it's capacity it is, but I know I can browse the internet.) I also have a little tiny mp3 player that can hold eight or more complete audio books as well as six sessions of General Conference. We have pretty much given up on television, but through our WII we can get Netflix and have thousands of movies available any time we want. Some of the television series that we missed because we didn't get cable are available to us now. There is always information and entertainment available everywhere I turn.

I think maybe I have ADD. Everywhere I look, there is something demanding my attention. Current events, politics, the news, legislative causes all seem worthy of my attention; they even seem important enough that I should feel guilty if I'm not informed. Health and nutrition information for myself and my family is more readily available than ever before and surely, that's my responsibility to know all of those things. Anything that has to do with education opportunities for my children who are still in school, vocational and career opportunities for my children who are out of school; any loving mother would research those things for her children. Cute projects I could make for them, fun FHE ideas, home decorating ideas, the list of project ideas is endless. And while I'm learning about important things, I'm easily distracted by the constant flow of truly random things; random because they fall into no explainable pattern. What were they thinking?! How did they think of that?! Or Wow!! that's amazing!! Truly random and infinitely available things that people are saying or doing or filming and putting on Youtube. What a distracting world this is.

I'm finding, too, that the more I read and listen to all of these various input, the less I think. It seems my mind is becoming numb from the constant overload. I need to spend more time pondering my own thoughts and thinking for myself about what life really is and what it's all about. Otherwise I run the risk of not being anybody at all, but only a leaky vessel that information is being constantly poured into and drained out of.

And then I think about William's science fair idea. The idea that brainwaves or thoughts can be translated directly by the computer. And I think about the eternities. I wonder if, when we are not limited by the mortal nature of our bodies, communication consists of thinking to each other. I wonder if out there in that eternal world there is a constant stream of thoughts and communication from an infinitude of sources. If that were the case, we would have to constantly choose whose voice to listen to, whose thoughts to participate in. It could be very overwhelming. I can get a pretty good idea of what my own choices are when I think about how many hours I spend with novels playing in my ears compared to how often I choose to listen to the Conference talks, or how often I am reading novels or email or playing games on my Kindle compared to the amount of time I spend studying the Scriptures that are also installed there. I imagine my choices throughout the eternities will be very like the choices I make now.

New direction, new title

When I first started my blog a year ago, I was inspired by my young friends who are writing about their young children and the fun/crazy/awful/cute times they are having with their kids. I thought that as a mother of older teens and twenty somethings that I had a different point of view to add to the mix. I was right. But I hadn't realized that I couldn't focus on issues with the kids anymore because they have a right to privacy in their lives. I still have thoughts and feelings and ideas, but I need to change my focus. After I realized that, I got inspired and wrote another post. And then it took me another half hour to figure out how to find my blog.......again....  (I wrote this in 2011,  I just read it again on January 6, 2017.  Some things never change.  I still have trouble finding my blog.  But hopefully that will change as I have another idea to branch out with.)

Ah hah, I found you.

It's only been three weeks, but I have found my blog again! : ) I knew it was in here somewhere. I finally did the thing that helped me set it up in the first place: I read somebody else's blog and tried to post a comment. Somehow, trying to get the world to recognize who that opinionated person is who is sitting behind this keyboard turned into discovering the venue for getting my own story out into etherspace.

So, what is my story? This week, half of the story has been that I substitute teach at the local high school. It's not a very big school, only about 900 students in the three grades; but even so, my classes manage to be 30 to 35 in number on average. Usually I get along pretty well with the students. They are often surprised to find that my son, William is a student at their school. They are always very complimentary about him. There's something about electronic nerdliness that fellow students admire. They can already see the benefit of having a friend who knows how to fix your computer, or who can program games on his calculator.

I'm learning to know the names of many of the students, too, but that is taking time. There are so many of them and I'm rarely in the same classroom two days in a row. But some of them make a point of standing out. On Monday I filled in for a teacher who taught 'bonehead math'. Granted, geometry is not for boneheads. These kids are going to have to really think if they want to learn this stuff. Heck, I only remember about half of it. It's been a quarter of a century since I studied it in school. But most of them either don't want to learn it (don't want to think that hard;) or they're convinced they can't learn it. Either way, it's required for graduation and they don't feel they have a choice of whether or not to take the class.

So we're stuck there together in classes that are much too long, given a 5 class-period day. Usually the teachers' lesson plans leave about 20 minutes of unstructured time that a substitute must scramble to occupy. When students decide not to do the assignment, we can have nearly an hour of free time staring us in the face. Monday's assignment should have been fun. A creative student, enjoying the assignment, could have taken the whole time making a colorful circle design with compasses and colored pencils. When I was their age, I would have hated an assignment like this one and completed it quickly. But then I would have pulled out my current novel and spent the rest of the hour escaping quietly into oblivion.

But that was then, and now I was the teacher. Something whizzed past my ear. I turned about quickly, trying to ascertain what had been thrown and who had thrown it. All I saw were the faces of angels. Every eye looked at me in innocence. 'Surely you don't think I did it,' they seemed to say. By the time twenty more minutes had passed, the colored pencils were flying from one side of the room to the other, in a wild pencil-fight. (it's a good thing our compasses were the flat plastic variety and not the ones with the angle and the sharp metal point!) I had lost total control. At least the more innocent side of the room (the ones who hadn't started it) had managed to find trash can lids with which to defend themselves.

I picked up the wall phone in a firm display of 'I'm calling the office now'. And the battle was over. I hated having to use that tactic, but it worked. I hated even more having to complain about their behavior to the regular teacher. It felt like giving myself an 'F' for that hour. And I knew that the kids who got into trouble didn't need any more trouble. What they needed was an education system that engaged their interest and taught them something valuable. And for that hour, I had failed them.

On the upside: the problems were in third hour. Fourth and fifth hours were reputed to be as bad or worse than third hour; but I was ready. They didn't get away with anything. At the first sign of the smallest infraction, I was all over it. It never got carried away. Nobody got in trouble. I learned from third hour.

I'm going to have those same students again. Different days, different classrooms. It remains to be seen who learned enough to come off conqueror.

Fledglings

I'm at the stage in my life where I'm losing sleep, losing kids, losing my mind. But it's a good thing. I'm enjoying this stage of my life as I have the others. I have been enjoying my friends' blogs and I thought that I, too, would like to share thoughts on the stage of life I am experiencing. I don't really know what I'm doing yet, I guess that's part of this stage of life, too! All my children and my nieces and nephews are so comfortable with technology. I used to think I was, too, but (dang it!) they keep changing stuff just when I start to get it figured out. That's why my cell phone is 'old', because I know how to use it already. It's a funny world we live in where really expensive stuff is 'old' and outdated after only four or five years (? or less?)

My blog name (since changed.  Fledgling Launch Pad)  is reflective of one of my favorite analogies: The young eagle that stands at the edge of the nest flapping for all he's worth, ready to take off at any minute, creates a lot of turbulence for those still in the nest. More on that later. For now, I'll push the magic buttons and see if my blog disappears into cyberspace or actually posts on my blog site.


Here's more on the fledgling story:  After both Emily and Jennie had been the obnoxious older bird flapping wildly on the edge of the nest, I shared that story with John C. whose turn was coming next.  In typical John fashion,  he mimicked standing on the edge of the nest with both 'wings' clasped tightly to his sides, peering anxiously over the edge of the nest looking terrified.  I shared that story in private with his father.  We both laughed.  A couple of years later when we had just installed Nathan at the university we feared we had just thrown a baby bird with a broken wing out of the nest....sigh...

I asked his psychiatrist several years earlier, when I was worried about Emily who had just left home, "What do you with these kids when they're adults and you can't supervise whether or not they take their medication or anything else?"   He held out his hands and he said, "You catch them when they fall."   And that's what we've been doing.  We throw our little birds out into the world and then we catch them if they fall.  At this point, January 2017, they're doing pretty well.