Then came this picture, with Megan looking at her little daughter with such love. So profoundly comforting and inspiring.
Race, Priesthood, and Temple Blessings--
3 months ago
Monday, September 17, 2018
Amelia Mae Jacobson, born 17 Sep 2018
I was so relieved this morning, to get a report that Megan's baby, Amelia Mae, had arrived and that both mother and daughter were doing OK, born 7:31 am PDT in their Seattle hospital.
Then came this picture, with Megan looking at her little daughter with such love. So profoundly comforting and inspiring.
Then came this picture, with Megan looking at her little daughter with such love. So profoundly comforting and inspiring.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
All about my eye surgeries
A few days
before I made my regular 6-month visit to my dermatologist, Dr. Bradley,
a small blip arose on the top edge at the middle of my lower right
eyelid, brownish and the size of a small wart. He excised it and it
healed quickly without really leaving any trace. However after a week
or so he was calling, to let me know that it had tested positive as
squamous cell skin carcinoma. He referred my to a pair of surgeons, the
first to remove the growth using a Mohs technique and the second, a
plastic surgeon, to repair the damage caused by the former. These
surgeons were Dr. Tristani and Dr. McCann. It took a while to get the
surgeries coordinated and scheduled, and this finally happened on
Tuesday and Wednesday of the past week. On Tuesday, Dr. Tristani did
the Mohs procedure at the Revere facility which is across 500 West from
Utah Valley Hospital in Provo.
By the way, I learned I had to pronounce squamous as SKWAY-MUS with a long A. The vowel sound is not the same as for about every other the English word with the UA combination vowel sound such as squab, squabble, squad, squall, squalor, squash, squat, squaw, squawk, nor the word square which we pronounce with a soft E. And now I also know that Mohs is pronounced MOZ with a long O, and is named after the doctor who invented the process.
Mohs is an outpatient procedure, which is done in stages, while the patient waits between each stage. After the surgeon removes a thin layer of tissue, it is frozen and then examined under a microscope in an on-site lab. The testing process takes 45-60 minutes. If any cancer cells remain, the surgeon make a second incision in the precise area where cancer cells remain, removing another small layer of tissue, which is again tested. The process is repeated until no cancer cells remain. The whole process may be completed in an hour or so, or go on all day. The former turned out to be true for us, thankfully.
After the initial incision was made on my eyelid and I received some temporary bandaging, we were ushered into a waiting room, and there found two other couples with a member also undergoing this Mohs procedure from the Dr. Tristani’s team, which consisted of herself and 2 nurses. Interestingly we has some things in common with these pairs, especially the Stokers, a couple from Sandy where the wife was being also served by both Tristani and McCann, where she also had a carcinoma being removed from her eyelid, and that they were both currently serving as temple workers in the Draper temple. We also found this couple later in the day at Dr. McCanns office in Sandy and the following day at the IHC Hospital in Murray which was the site for our reparative surgery. I would guess that following Wendy’s MO, we will soon be going out to lunch with them.
We were blessed in the Mohs procedure that Dr. Tristani got all of the cancer the first incision, Good News #1. The incision was nearly square and approximately 1/4th or 5/16th of an inch in size as I recall it. After being released by the Tristani team, we then jumped into the car and headed to Dr.McCann’s office in Sandy for him to look at it and decide what he needed to do the next day. He talked to us about drawing the two sides of the cut together and filling some space that this would leave at the corner of the eye with some skin “he would steal” from just outside the corner of the eye.
The next morning, Wednesday, we awoke early and arrived before 8 am at the outpatient surgery center of the Murray IHC facility. Differing from the office setting of the surgery the prior day, this was a full-fledged surgical facility. I had to get dressed in a hospital gown complete with boxer shorts, and there was a surgical team, two doctors plus an anesthesiologist, along with a couple of nurses, and a real operating room. During the operation I was “sedated” according to their description, in which I could vaguely hear voices and see shapes and feel something happening to my face, but was about 95% oblivious to the world and didn’t care.
At the end, Dr. McCann taped a huge patch or bandage on the whole right side of my face, and after an hour or so of recovery we headed home. On Friday morning we were back in his office in Sandy, where the patch was entirely removed, and got instructions for what we need to do for the next month or so of healing–eye drops every two waking hours with a special nighttime lubricant at bedtime and twice a day application of an erythromycin ointment to the site. And I could also return to all my normal other meds, for heart, prostate, etc.
The good news was the report from Dr McCann that he was able to close the wound without having to “steal” some skin from the side of my face (his word). So there is only the one little incision to tend. I had the thought earlier that I have so much extra tissue around my eyes, he should be able to close about any size of incision without needing to borrow tissue from elsewhere. In fact I wondered if while he was working in the vicinity, he might take a tuck or two in the 81 year old bags around my eyes and make me look a few years younger. I didn’t say anything about this, of course.
Anyway, that was the second Good News, that in the repair they needed to do only the minimal repair work on my face. All that was left of the Mohs surgery was a thin vertical line about a quarter of an inch long, extending downward from the edge of my eyebrow, with the distinct possibility that when it heals the whole surgery will hardly or fully be not noticeable. There were no visible stitches–they used glue, they said.
I am left with a feeling of relief and humble gratitude. I was a little apprehensive about these surgeons messing around with their scalpels right by my eye, but they were very good at their work. And the cancer is gone, with a minimum of damage. I am very grateful to have been able to have a priesthood blessing by two good priesthood holders in our family, Matthew and Scott. And I am grateful to a generous and loving Heavenly Father for His support and help. All is well.
By the way, I learned I had to pronounce squamous as SKWAY-MUS with a long A. The vowel sound is not the same as for about every other the English word with the UA combination vowel sound such as squab, squabble, squad, squall, squalor, squash, squat, squaw, squawk, nor the word square which we pronounce with a soft E. And now I also know that Mohs is pronounced MOZ with a long O, and is named after the doctor who invented the process.
Mohs is an outpatient procedure, which is done in stages, while the patient waits between each stage. After the surgeon removes a thin layer of tissue, it is frozen and then examined under a microscope in an on-site lab. The testing process takes 45-60 minutes. If any cancer cells remain, the surgeon make a second incision in the precise area where cancer cells remain, removing another small layer of tissue, which is again tested. The process is repeated until no cancer cells remain. The whole process may be completed in an hour or so, or go on all day. The former turned out to be true for us, thankfully.
After the initial incision was made on my eyelid and I received some temporary bandaging, we were ushered into a waiting room, and there found two other couples with a member also undergoing this Mohs procedure from the Dr. Tristani’s team, which consisted of herself and 2 nurses. Interestingly we has some things in common with these pairs, especially the Stokers, a couple from Sandy where the wife was being also served by both Tristani and McCann, where she also had a carcinoma being removed from her eyelid, and that they were both currently serving as temple workers in the Draper temple. We also found this couple later in the day at Dr. McCanns office in Sandy and the following day at the IHC Hospital in Murray which was the site for our reparative surgery. I would guess that following Wendy’s MO, we will soon be going out to lunch with them.
 |
| After the Mohs |
We were blessed in the Mohs procedure that Dr. Tristani got all of the cancer the first incision, Good News #1. The incision was nearly square and approximately 1/4th or 5/16th of an inch in size as I recall it. After being released by the Tristani team, we then jumped into the car and headed to Dr.McCann’s office in Sandy for him to look at it and decide what he needed to do the next day. He talked to us about drawing the two sides of the cut together and filling some space that this would leave at the corner of the eye with some skin “he would steal” from just outside the corner of the eye.
The next morning, Wednesday, we awoke early and arrived before 8 am at the outpatient surgery center of the Murray IHC facility. Differing from the office setting of the surgery the prior day, this was a full-fledged surgical facility. I had to get dressed in a hospital gown complete with boxer shorts, and there was a surgical team, two doctors plus an anesthesiologist, along with a couple of nurses, and a real operating room. During the operation I was “sedated” according to their description, in which I could vaguely hear voices and see shapes and feel something happening to my face, but was about 95% oblivious to the world and didn’t care.
At the end, Dr. McCann taped a huge patch or bandage on the whole right side of my face, and after an hour or so of recovery we headed home. On Friday morning we were back in his office in Sandy, where the patch was entirely removed, and got instructions for what we need to do for the next month or so of healing–eye drops every two waking hours with a special nighttime lubricant at bedtime and twice a day application of an erythromycin ointment to the site. And I could also return to all my normal other meds, for heart, prostate, etc.
 |
| Two days with this bandage |
The good news was the report from Dr McCann that he was able to close the wound without having to “steal” some skin from the side of my face (his word). So there is only the one little incision to tend. I had the thought earlier that I have so much extra tissue around my eyes, he should be able to close about any size of incision without needing to borrow tissue from elsewhere. In fact I wondered if while he was working in the vicinity, he might take a tuck or two in the 81 year old bags around my eyes and make me look a few years younger. I didn’t say anything about this, of course.
Anyway, that was the second Good News, that in the repair they needed to do only the minimal repair work on my face. All that was left of the Mohs surgery was a thin vertical line about a quarter of an inch long, extending downward from the edge of my eyebrow, with the distinct possibility that when it heals the whole surgery will hardly or fully be not noticeable. There were no visible stitches–they used glue, they said.
 |
| After the repair |
Saturday, August 18, 2018
More Lewis family publications and a thanks.
 | |||
| The 12 Lewis Family books I have supplied to the Rockingham CC Library historical collection |
In 2010, while Wendy and I were in North Carolina as senior missionaries, we also had some good family history research experiences. Pres. Cotterell was generous in letting us slip over the line into the Charlotte mission to Rockingham County where we met Bob Carter who was then overseeing the Historical Room in the James Library of the Rockingham Community College in Wentworth, NC. Among other things the historical collection included two file cabinets full of documents of Lewis family history donated by researcher Guy Lewis before he died in 1990. I had been there before and used that collection in my family research.
When we arrived at the library in early 2010, we had the opportunity to get nicely acquainted with Bob Carter and he happened to mention that Guy Lewis had a brother, Fred, who was still alive and living in Greensboro, NC, which is about an hour south of Wentworth on the main freeway back to Raleigh. We expressed an interest in making contact with Fred, so Bob simply looked up their phone number and dialed their phone and introduced us to Fred’s wife Dot who answered the call. She was quite hospitable and invited us to come see them, so we did. When we got there we discovered that not only were they very warm, friendly people, but also that they had inherited 9 3-inch 3-hole notebooks which contained Guy Lewis’s personal notes and summaries of his many years of research about our Lewis family, which I concluded was really something superior to the documents he had shared with the Rockingham CC library.
We had a laptop and also a scanner with us at our apartment in Raleigh, so we asked for and received permission from Dot and Fred to return to their house and copy all of these records. To accomplish this, we had to make three more trips to their home in Greensboro (about 80 miles one-way from our apartment in Raleigh), and worked three long days to do this copying. We set up our equipment on the dining room table and Wendy pulled out and replaced the pages and I worked the scanner. We ended up with about 1800 pages of PDF files, which I have used extensively as a starting point for much of the Lewis early family history work I have done since. I also got permission to share these PDF records with the Rockingham CC library, and forwarded a copy of these files with Bob Carter. With this, I included a page-by-page index that I had created to navigate these records plus several pages of commentary. Bob arranged to have these pages printed off and placed in binders that were located on top of the cabinets that contained the other Guy Lewis materials.
Since returning home, as I have produced the successive volumes of The Lewis Family, I have made it a point to donate copies of each book to the Rockingham CC library historical collection.
Bob Carter retired some time after our 2010 visit but has continued his work regarding Rockingham County history as a volunteer with MARC, the county historical society. I have continued to maintain communication and friendship with him. He is wonderful resource about the history and people of his home county.
When Wendy and I were back east in May to attend Brian’s graduation in Richmond, VA, we scheduled a couple of days in Rockingham County, NC to pursue some family history things, including a visit to the Rockingham CC Library Historical Room with Bob. When we got to the room, I was glad to see all of my volumes in their place in the Historical Room bookshelves, and the Guy Lewis files cabinets still there. However, we were surprised to not see the binders that contained the 1800 pages of Guy Lewis records that I had given them. The librarian seemed a little chagrined, but explained that several years before they had moved the collection to a little bigger room on the main floor, and those binders were probably in boxes back in their storage. She went to look and couldn’t find them, but assured us that they were somewhere and that they could find them if someone wanted to see them.
After thinking about what seemed to us to be the inaccessabilty or even loss of valuable research materials, I had this insight: you still have the PDF files, and you know how to readily publish printed books. Why not make the PDF files into published books? The library knows how to maintain printed volumes and make them easily available to be studied. It is doubtful that they would mislay or lose printed volumes.
So, that is what I did. I spent much of June and early July preparing the manuscript files, and ended up with three 600 page volumes containing the copies of the records Wendy and I copied in 2010, plus my indexes and commentary. When finished, I called the Rockingham CC library director, Mary Gomez, and asked her if she wanted these books. She said “Yes,” so I ordered a copy for her library, along with two other volumes from my The Lewis Family series that I had not yet provided. I just got back this gratifying response:
August 13, 2018
Dear Mr. Lewis,
I wanted to let you know that we received the five additional volumes of Lewis family information which you donated to the Rockingham County Historical Collections. We do appreciate your generosity very much and I’m sure researchers of the Lewis family will as well. As you said when we spoke, RCC is the place to come if you need to do research on the Lewis Family of Rockingham county and your donations over the years are the reason why...
Sincerely,
Mary Gomez,
Director of Library Services and Archives
Rockingham County Historical Collections
Rockingham Community College
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Our Family has another Eagle
On this evening, 16 August 2018, Trenton met with his Eagle board and passed. Congratulations. I am so proud and pleased.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
God, Heaven, and Families
Here is a doctrinal discussion continuing on from our Lewis Family Camp theme:
God, Heaven, and Families
(compiled from Terryl and Fiona Givens, “The God Who Weeps” and “The Christ Who Heals”)
...[T]he apostle Peter recognized [that] the “precious and very great promises” given to us are that we “may become participants in the divine nature.”
What is the nature many of us seek to emulate? What do we mean by this imitation of Christ? As we saw in Enoch’s encounter with God, the principle attribute of the Divine is love– costly love. Witnessing God weeping over His children is only half the journey Enoch makes. What transpires next to the prophet may be the only– it is surely the most vivid– example given in scripture of what the actual process of acquiring the divine nature requires...
As Enoch plumbs the mystery of the weeping God, he learns just what it means to be like Him. Seeking insight and understanding into external things, Enoch is raised to a perspective from which he sees the world through God’s eyes. The experience is more shattering than reassuring. “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.” (Moses 7:41)
Taught of the highest things by the weeping God, Enoch becomes the weeping prophet. His experience of the love that is indiscriminate in its reach and vulnerable in its consequences takes him to the heart of the divine nature. This is the mystery of godliness that Enoch does not just see, but now lives for himself.
Enoch’s encounter with God, his vicarious experience of infinite love, serves as a template for the path he– and all of us– hope to follow. That this path has as its end a communal heaven, and not a solitary salvation, is clear by the vision’s end...
At the last day, the ultimate consolation, and the shape of heaven, are revealed. God’s righteousness will “sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out” those who will have Him to be their God. Then, the Lord days to Enoch, “thou and all thy city [shall] meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us, and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion.”
The beauty and power of this image is in its concreteness. God and His people, the living and the departed, heaven and earth, embrace. The immense distance between the spiritual and the mundane collapses, and we find holiness in the ordinary. Luke’s tale of the prodigal son turns out to be not symbolic foreshadowing, but literal foretaste, of a great reunion. As the evangelist told the story, when the son “was a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
In Enoch’s version, heaven shocks by its familiarity. God, is would appear, is first and foremost a relational Being, and the heaven toward which we aspire consists of loving relationships that are eternal. God’s title as Father is universally acknowledged throughout the Judeo-Christian traditions, but how that title is understood varies widely. We find an understanding that moves in the direction of a literal, familial relationship is more reasonable than one that emphasizes the metaphorical or figurative. (Weeps, pp.105-106)
...Heaven is not a reward for merit or a repair of Adam’s catastrophe; it is an eternal sociality of celestial beings, existing, striving, and creatively engaging in loving relation. [The] Atonement is primarily about healing the pains and strains of injured relationships incurred en route to that destination, fractures among ourselves as humans and with those gentle Parents patiently working to improve and guide us. The perfect harmony and synergy of a collaborative Godhead is not just a model for our own relationships, but a healing enterprise in which we are invited to participate, to collaborate. (Heals, p.74)
...[Regarding the death of his brother Alvin, Joseph stated] “It has been hard for me to live on earth and see [him] taken from us...” Joseph refused to believe that we could ever be comforted, in this world or the world to come, separate and apart from those we love. When the principle of baptism for the dead was revealed to him, the great significance he found in the revelation was not the fact that our ancestors could be saved, but that they could be saved with us. That was the whole point of Malachi’s prophecy, as Joseph taught a few months before his death: temples, priesthood, ordinances– they all existed in order that relatives “may Come forth in the first resurrection & be exalted to thrones of glory with us, & here is the chain that binds the hearts of the Fathers to the Children, and the Children to the Fathers which fulfills the mission of Elijah.” The revealed practice of evangelizing and baptizing the dead and performing their temple ordinances erases the dominion of hell over all of the earth’s unbaptized dead. It bridges a gulf that had separated millions of believing Christians from the their forbears as well as from the divine family.
The promise made by the Savior is one of unimaginable joy–perfect, untainted, unqualified joy: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” But if God shall wipe away all tears, he can only do so by triumphing over the cause of those tears, which is death’s severing of our most intimate family ties and connections. Any joy we savor in the absence of our loved ones is a partial joy, a fractured joy. Heaven apart from those we love is just hell by another name. Joseph said as much: “let me be resurrected with the saints, “ he said to his people in Nauvoo, “whether I ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, or go to any other place.”
...We believe in a real, literal heaven, and that families (and the whole web of kin and friends Joseph called “sociality”) can continue forever. Heaven is not a place we enjoy with other people; heaven is eternal companionship with other people...” (Heals, pp. 105-107)
When God created man and woman, He brought them together. That a man should cling to his wife and she to him, on the way to becoming "one flesh," was a pattern and order He estab1ished while they were still in paradise. It was not a compensating comfort for their passage through a fallen world, but a sacramental union established in paradise, and anticipating no end. Marriage is a heavenly order, modeled on a divine template– a relationship that may be sealed on earth, in order to be "bound in heaven." "Divine families encircled by his fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life; without them this earth– indeed this cosmos– will have missed the measure of its creation." (Weeps, p. 107, quoting Truman Madsen)
What God envisions for us, what His Son prayed most earnestly for toward the end of His life, was for us to achieve the harmony He shares with His Father. In essence, we are invited to participate in the heavenly family of God Himself. Not through metaphorical melding, but through the studied arduous practice of a holy life that prepares us to love as he does. [Orson] Pratt wrote that “our natural affections. . . are the main-springs of life and happiness– they are the cement of all virtues and heavenly society. . .From this union of affection, spring all the other relationships, social joys and affections, diffused through every branch of human existence. Man was designed for a social being.” (Weeps, pp. 107-108)
We pass through birth and death as individuals. But the years in between are filled with the unceasing search for community, for companionship, for intimacy. ...love is most essentially a term that address the complex forms of connection we make to other beings, and ... those connections are so various and layered that the Greeks needed at least four words to capture what we reduce to one amorphous catchall... Affection, friendship, romance, and charity (storge, philia, eros, and agape) dominate our social existence, revealing our lives to be an ongoing, comprehensive effort to find and secure relationships and connections on every conceivable level.
Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in his image. God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been, we sense it is the very basis and purpose for our existence. It is a belonging that we crave because it is one that we have always known.
Embracing the ancient connection that binds mortals to God restores to us a glorious beginning and portends a glorious future. It affirms that we are of divine parentage, with a home in the heavens... This sense of identity makes our search for the divine nature an act of filial love and emulation... It means that “nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side that to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar His face is to us.” (Ezra Taft Benson paraphrasing Brigham Young in 1977 talk)
...[T]he emphasis on a heaven that recovers and extends relationships forged in this life and before, gives meaning and focus to our life in the here and now.... (Weeps, pp. 109-111)
...Enoch’s vision is particularly instructive. It makes heaven and the process of building it, continuous with the best– but also most taxing– elements of the present...
In the vision of Enoch, God gave the name of Zion to his abode. And Zion, he told Enoch, was where the earthly and heavenly societies meet, where “we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks.” This vision of heaven as he convergence of two societies, an earthly and a heavenly, is a beautiful template for the work we face as humans: fitting ourselves, our families, our communities, to be participants in a celestial society. What this means is that our present relationships are both the laboratory in which we labor to perfect ourselves and the source of that enjoyment that will constitute our true heaven.
What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society. Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show forth kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control. What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point. The confusion if understandable, since our current generation’s preference of “spirituality” over “religion” is often a sleight of hand that confused true discipleship with self-absorption.
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriage, families and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed. We need those virtues not just here, but externally because “the same sociality that exists here, will exist there, only it will be coupled with celestial glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” (Weeps, pp. 112-113)
What we are most certain of, is that “Our natural affections... are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society.” Ultimately we understand God’s nature, and human salvation, to be the simple amplification of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same– they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
So we learn, and we love. What we have learned, and how we have loved, endure. Those are the two constants in our continuing existence. Weeps, pp. 117-118)
God, Heaven, and Families
(compiled from Terryl and Fiona Givens, “The God Who Weeps” and “The Christ Who Heals”)
...[T]he apostle Peter recognized [that] the “precious and very great promises” given to us are that we “may become participants in the divine nature.”
What is the nature many of us seek to emulate? What do we mean by this imitation of Christ? As we saw in Enoch’s encounter with God, the principle attribute of the Divine is love– costly love. Witnessing God weeping over His children is only half the journey Enoch makes. What transpires next to the prophet may be the only– it is surely the most vivid– example given in scripture of what the actual process of acquiring the divine nature requires...
As Enoch plumbs the mystery of the weeping God, he learns just what it means to be like Him. Seeking insight and understanding into external things, Enoch is raised to a perspective from which he sees the world through God’s eyes. The experience is more shattering than reassuring. “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.” (Moses 7:41)
Taught of the highest things by the weeping God, Enoch becomes the weeping prophet. His experience of the love that is indiscriminate in its reach and vulnerable in its consequences takes him to the heart of the divine nature. This is the mystery of godliness that Enoch does not just see, but now lives for himself.
Enoch’s encounter with God, his vicarious experience of infinite love, serves as a template for the path he– and all of us– hope to follow. That this path has as its end a communal heaven, and not a solitary salvation, is clear by the vision’s end...
At the last day, the ultimate consolation, and the shape of heaven, are revealed. God’s righteousness will “sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out” those who will have Him to be their God. Then, the Lord days to Enoch, “thou and all thy city [shall] meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us, and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion.”
The beauty and power of this image is in its concreteness. God and His people, the living and the departed, heaven and earth, embrace. The immense distance between the spiritual and the mundane collapses, and we find holiness in the ordinary. Luke’s tale of the prodigal son turns out to be not symbolic foreshadowing, but literal foretaste, of a great reunion. As the evangelist told the story, when the son “was a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
In Enoch’s version, heaven shocks by its familiarity. God, is would appear, is first and foremost a relational Being, and the heaven toward which we aspire consists of loving relationships that are eternal. God’s title as Father is universally acknowledged throughout the Judeo-Christian traditions, but how that title is understood varies widely. We find an understanding that moves in the direction of a literal, familial relationship is more reasonable than one that emphasizes the metaphorical or figurative. (Weeps, pp.105-106)
...Heaven is not a reward for merit or a repair of Adam’s catastrophe; it is an eternal sociality of celestial beings, existing, striving, and creatively engaging in loving relation. [The] Atonement is primarily about healing the pains and strains of injured relationships incurred en route to that destination, fractures among ourselves as humans and with those gentle Parents patiently working to improve and guide us. The perfect harmony and synergy of a collaborative Godhead is not just a model for our own relationships, but a healing enterprise in which we are invited to participate, to collaborate. (Heals, p.74)
...[Regarding the death of his brother Alvin, Joseph stated] “It has been hard for me to live on earth and see [him] taken from us...” Joseph refused to believe that we could ever be comforted, in this world or the world to come, separate and apart from those we love. When the principle of baptism for the dead was revealed to him, the great significance he found in the revelation was not the fact that our ancestors could be saved, but that they could be saved with us. That was the whole point of Malachi’s prophecy, as Joseph taught a few months before his death: temples, priesthood, ordinances– they all existed in order that relatives “may Come forth in the first resurrection & be exalted to thrones of glory with us, & here is the chain that binds the hearts of the Fathers to the Children, and the Children to the Fathers which fulfills the mission of Elijah.” The revealed practice of evangelizing and baptizing the dead and performing their temple ordinances erases the dominion of hell over all of the earth’s unbaptized dead. It bridges a gulf that had separated millions of believing Christians from the their forbears as well as from the divine family.
The promise made by the Savior is one of unimaginable joy–perfect, untainted, unqualified joy: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” But if God shall wipe away all tears, he can only do so by triumphing over the cause of those tears, which is death’s severing of our most intimate family ties and connections. Any joy we savor in the absence of our loved ones is a partial joy, a fractured joy. Heaven apart from those we love is just hell by another name. Joseph said as much: “let me be resurrected with the saints, “ he said to his people in Nauvoo, “whether I ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, or go to any other place.”
...We believe in a real, literal heaven, and that families (and the whole web of kin and friends Joseph called “sociality”) can continue forever. Heaven is not a place we enjoy with other people; heaven is eternal companionship with other people...” (Heals, pp. 105-107)
When God created man and woman, He brought them together. That a man should cling to his wife and she to him, on the way to becoming "one flesh," was a pattern and order He estab1ished while they were still in paradise. It was not a compensating comfort for their passage through a fallen world, but a sacramental union established in paradise, and anticipating no end. Marriage is a heavenly order, modeled on a divine template– a relationship that may be sealed on earth, in order to be "bound in heaven." "Divine families encircled by his fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life; without them this earth– indeed this cosmos– will have missed the measure of its creation." (Weeps, p. 107, quoting Truman Madsen)
What God envisions for us, what His Son prayed most earnestly for toward the end of His life, was for us to achieve the harmony He shares with His Father. In essence, we are invited to participate in the heavenly family of God Himself. Not through metaphorical melding, but through the studied arduous practice of a holy life that prepares us to love as he does. [Orson] Pratt wrote that “our natural affections. . . are the main-springs of life and happiness– they are the cement of all virtues and heavenly society. . .From this union of affection, spring all the other relationships, social joys and affections, diffused through every branch of human existence. Man was designed for a social being.” (Weeps, pp. 107-108)
We pass through birth and death as individuals. But the years in between are filled with the unceasing search for community, for companionship, for intimacy. ...love is most essentially a term that address the complex forms of connection we make to other beings, and ... those connections are so various and layered that the Greeks needed at least four words to capture what we reduce to one amorphous catchall... Affection, friendship, romance, and charity (storge, philia, eros, and agape) dominate our social existence, revealing our lives to be an ongoing, comprehensive effort to find and secure relationships and connections on every conceivable level.
Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in his image. God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been, we sense it is the very basis and purpose for our existence. It is a belonging that we crave because it is one that we have always known.
Embracing the ancient connection that binds mortals to God restores to us a glorious beginning and portends a glorious future. It affirms that we are of divine parentage, with a home in the heavens... This sense of identity makes our search for the divine nature an act of filial love and emulation... It means that “nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side that to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar His face is to us.” (Ezra Taft Benson paraphrasing Brigham Young in 1977 talk)
...[T]he emphasis on a heaven that recovers and extends relationships forged in this life and before, gives meaning and focus to our life in the here and now.... (Weeps, pp. 109-111)
...Enoch’s vision is particularly instructive. It makes heaven and the process of building it, continuous with the best– but also most taxing– elements of the present...
In the vision of Enoch, God gave the name of Zion to his abode. And Zion, he told Enoch, was where the earthly and heavenly societies meet, where “we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks.” This vision of heaven as he convergence of two societies, an earthly and a heavenly, is a beautiful template for the work we face as humans: fitting ourselves, our families, our communities, to be participants in a celestial society. What this means is that our present relationships are both the laboratory in which we labor to perfect ourselves and the source of that enjoyment that will constitute our true heaven.
What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society. Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show forth kindness. Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control. What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point. The confusion if understandable, since our current generation’s preference of “spirituality” over “religion” is often a sleight of hand that confused true discipleship with self-absorption.
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriage, families and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed. We need those virtues not just here, but externally because “the same sociality that exists here, will exist there, only it will be coupled with celestial glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” (Weeps, pp. 112-113)
What we are most certain of, is that “Our natural affections... are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society.” Ultimately we understand God’s nature, and human salvation, to be the simple amplification of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same– they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
So we learn, and we love. What we have learned, and how we have loved, endure. Those are the two constants in our continuing existence. Weeps, pp. 117-118)
Sunday, August 5, 2018
Mountain pictures
Here are some pictures we took of Mt. Adams while on the Memorial Day reunion trip.
These are pictures of Mt. Hood looking southward from the White Salmon Ward parking lot.
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| This is Wendy's favorite picture |
These are pictures of Mt. Hood looking southward from the White Salmon Ward parking lot.
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Memorial Day Trip: Attending temples on the way home
We did a session at the new Meridian first thing Tuesday morning
Then we drove to Twin Falls (one of our favorites) and did another temple session. The pictures are form other visits
We got home late Tuesday night.
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Then we drove to Twin Falls (one of our favorites) and did another temple session. The pictures are form other visits
We got home late Tuesday night.
Memorial Day trip: Starting the trip home
On Monday we began the return trip. We stayed Monday night in Meridian, ID.
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| On the way we passed this nice pastoral scene near Baker OR |
Memorial Day trip: Visit to the Glenwood Cemetery on Sunday
We attended church at the White Salmon ward, then drove back to Glenwood, first visiting the Mt. Adams Cemetery and then spending some more time with Kathleen.
My Adams cemetery visit
Other graves nearby of relatives:
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| The White Salmon ward still was displaying my missionary plaque listing |
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| Hank and Lorene graves in Lewis family plot |
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| My brother Donald's grave |
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| Whole family plot |
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| My Grandma and Grandpa Lewis' graves |
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| Mt. Adams from Lewis family plot |
Memorial Day 2008 weekend trip and family reunion
Flowers we placed on my parents' graves in Ogden
Logan temple. Thursday was the wedding day for Krysta and her fiance Nathan G in the Logan temple. We enjoyed that ceremony, and also their reception in the USU Alumni House.
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| Krysta and Nathan |
The trip to Oregon
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| This was a really fun cafe just off the freeway in Meridian ID, where we ate lunch. It reminded us of Andy's in NC |
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| The decor was Marilyn Monroe, etc. |
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| Here is our first sight of the mighty Columbia, just past Umatilla, OR |
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| A little farther on, the John Day Dam |
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| Across the river from Wishram, a sports opponent of GHS. I hit a (near) home run on a field up on the flat beyond the river. |
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| A few miles further along, the Wishram bridge |
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| Water above The Dalles dam, and Dallesport, WA, across the river. |
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| The Dalles dam. Bridge at the very far left |
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| The Dalles dam outlet. |
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| Entering Glenwood valley, at Lakeside. |
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| A mile of so north, the Snake Island ranch, where my grandparents first lived after coming from Virginia |
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| With my cousin Kathleen. How could you ever find a more attractive background for a picture? |
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Kathleen with her husband, Manuel P. |
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| Kathleen's daughter, Joleen, with husband Clinton C. and their daughter,Isbella |
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| Joleen, Isbella, and Clinton, again |
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| My cousin, and Kathleen's brother, Warren Ladiges, wife Vickie to his right, and children, Michele, Genine, Matthew, Brody |
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| Another cousin, Roger Woosley |
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| Roger with his wife Lindamay |
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| Glen and Mary Pierce, son of our old neighbors Jake and Wally Pierce |
Cousin Marylin Hilton at her home in The Dalles Saturday evening
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| Marylin had some beautiful roses at her little place |
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