His Heart's Got Ears

I'm a church-goer. I love being a church-goer. I love being religious in my religion, which is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've been a religious church-goer all my life. I just did the math, and according to my calculations, I've attended Sunday services nearly 1,450 times. And I plan to keep watching that number grow.

So. Fourteen hundred & fifty times. Who in the world would've thunked that today's Sunday services, out of all those other gazillions of services I've gone to, would be my favorite? If today's are not actually my all-time favorite, they're positively in my Top 3 Favorites, if I were to have a "Top 3 Favorites" list.

Okay okay, fine, I'll finally tell you why I loved church today so much. Good criminy, it wasn't even my own congregation that I normally go to, where I know almost everyone. I was visiting another congregation of my faith, a congregation where I knew almost no one. But what was splendid was that I still felt very welcome there, among all those strangers, and I felt the same peace and joy and enrichment that I feel when I attend my own congregation. Today, however, that peace and joy and enrichment were all part of an entirely different league. It was off the charts. It was terrific.

A lady named Kiersten noticed me a few minutes before church started, and she invited me to sit with her. She said she usually likes to sit clear up in the front of the chapel near the pulpit. And usually I don't particularly care to sit clear up there, so I frequently don't, but today I sat with Kiersten in the second row, center set of pews (our chapels typically have left, center, and right sets of pews).

I situated myself on the far left-hand side of the bench, which caused me to be in extremely close proximity to the front row of the left set of pews. On that row sat a man who was deaf. He sat next to one interpreter, and another interpreter sat a small number of feet in front of them, on a chair, facing them. The interpreter on the chair was approximately five feet away from me, at my eleven o'clock.

The two interpreters tag-teamed. The first one was a pretty young woman with brown hair, very nice teeth (I notice teeth, okay? I come from a dentistry family!), a lovely smile, and a way cute skirt.

The second was a handsome young man with a genuine and gentle countenance...and a nice turquoise sweater. He interpreted the hymns that were sung, and the two certain prayers that always take place in the middle of the meeting. She interpreted the opening and closing prayers, as well as the talks that were given.

I couldn't take my eyes off either of the interpreters, whenever they were sitting on the chair. I tried to make my staring not too terribly awkward. I was so fascinated in learning how to say words in American Sign Language (ASL). Not only that, but I felt the spirit of God --- the Holy Ghost --- so sweetly in my heart, even sweeter than most times I'd ever felt it in my life.

The Holy Ghost taught me something so special in that meeting, as I was focusing on the interpreters. It all really started when I focused on the second interpreter while he led the second hymn. It happens to be one of my favorite hymns. It's #169 in the current hymnal. It always touches my soul to sing it, but when I saw the second interpreter sing it with his hands, it made me pay more attention to the lyrics than I ever had before, and it made the message even more powerful and uplifting to me than ever before. His hands sang it so beautifully. I cried.

Then it was time for the first interpreter to sit in the chair again. It was time for the talks. I generally do a good job paying attention to church talks, but today I paid attention in a totally different way. I hardly ever looked up to my two o'clock to the person at the pulpit. Rather, I kept my eyes on the hands and the face at my eleven o'clock, five feet away from me. Again, I hope I didn't creep her out too much, because I seriously did stare at her for pretty much the whole time she sat in the chair.

The talks consisted of much talk about Heavenly Father, His Son Jesus Christ, Christ's Atonement, faith, repentance, endurance, obedience to God's laws, and blessings that God gives His children whenever they do obey. For lack of a better adjective, it was so sweet to watch the first interpreter's hands talking about these holy topics. It was like nobody in the history of mankind had ever talked about those things as kindly and earnestly as these two interpreters did today.

Needless to say I was just all-in-all quite moved by what I saw during the duration of the meeting (sometimes I even kept my eyes wide open during the prayers, just so I could hear the prayers in ASL). I felt Heavenly Father's and Christ's love for me fresh within me, and I learned something too. Oh yeah! I meant to tell you what I learned from the Holy Ghost three whole stinkin' paragraphs ago! Here goes nothin':

I learned that God has a way of speaking to every one of His children. Usually hymn #169's message reaches me through my ears and plants itself firmly inside my mind and heart. But today it reached me through my eyes, by way of the second interpreter's hand gestures and tender facial expressions. The message reached me loud and clear, as it normally does through sound. But today, it reached me loud and clear in the same loud and clear way it reaches the man whose ears don't function the same way mine do. His heart's got ears --- ears that work perfectly. I looked back at him and the young woman interpreter during the closing hymn (#250 in the current hymnal). They were singing together with their hands. There was a bright and wonderful glow about them. "Happy [were they], happy [were they]." I could tell the song was bringing them cheer.

This was nuttin' but a whole bunch of rambling, but I just had to write it all down. To whomever just read this, congratulations for making it through! I can show you how to say "endure" in ASL, if you'd like! ;)

Slanderer Repellant

In Old English it's deofol. In Now English it's devil.

The Saxons called it diuval, and the Greeks possibly started it with their διάβολος (diabolos), meaning "the slanderer."

Several years ago at Brigham Young University – Idaho, I took a Media Law & Ethics class. For reasons unknown, the most memorable lesson from that class, for me, was the one about the difference between libel and slander. They both basically mean "to defame someone," but libel does it through writing, and slander does it through speaking.

I think the Now English word still holds true to its original Greek definition, and that the following statement is correct:

"If the devil is the slanderer, thus being a defamer, and he is everybody's adversary, then his mission is to try to defame everybody, implicating that everybody's got some 'fame' to begin with."

The "fame" that everybody's got… I really do believe that everybody in the world has something very special about them. Everybody's got a special light somewhere inside.

Granted, that may sound cheesier than the biggest cauldron of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ever brewed, but I said what I meant and meant what I said.

How does a singular person get to be defamed by the slanderer? It happens when a bad little birdie whispers "you're not good-looking enough" into your ear and you buy it. It happens when you get the stinking inkling that you're a doomed and rotten person just because you make mistakes. It happens when something warps your judgment into deeming it nobler and far more dignified to not forgive someone, than to forgive.

The slanderer slanders in sly and tiny ways. It certainly takes effort on our part to keep our lights bright and our slanderer repellant fresh on our skins, but it can be done. I am definitely not constantly free of all slanderer sludge, but I can recommend the following repellant brands that I've put to the test:

-Being honest and maintaining integrity

-Being kind in deed and in thought to others and to yourself

-Striving patiently to keep self-improvement a priority

-Making and working towards righteous goals

In my life, I've discovered that my prime success tool is remembering I'm a child of God, that there's a way I can communicate with Him and stay close to Him, and that He loves me and longs to offer His help whenever I need it.

The devilish defamer is everybody's adversary, and his mission is to drag down as many of us as he can. But guess what. As many of us who have διάβολος for an arch nemesis, also have God—who is our Heavenly Father—for a greatest ally. Each of us is God's child, in a majorly real sense. And God, who adores us, and whose power infinitely and eternally trumps the enemy's power, stands up for His children who choose to stand by His side.

Dejected Rejects: A freewrite about the worst day of my teenage life, and how it suddenly got better

Preface: The bulk of the following body of writing is written from the perspective of what was a very frustrated Alisonian teenager. Present-day Alison earnestly deems the Nevada All-State Choir as a wonderful organization that is run by exceptional and talented people.

I was a high school senior. I was possibly the biggest choir nerd my school had. I and somewhere around four other choir nerds from my school had all made it into the Nevada All-State Choir. (That choir’s audition process can be found in the dictionary underneath “nerve-racking,” and blessed were we to have been able to survive it.)

It was a particularly rainy day, sometime in the springtime. 'Twas the day before the huge and hugely fantastic concert for which we had been preparing for months. We had roughly a dozen amazing songs memorized. We’d even gotten to know the extravagant Jabberwocky by heart (and my heart still knows it till this day). It was dress rehearsal day. Dress rehearsal was to occur on the college campus. There were only a few minutes till call time. Tropicana Avenue was the best route from our neck of the woods to UNLV. Tropicana was where we were for what seemed to be time and eternity, stuck in the worst traffic I had seen in all my eighteen years. What made it bad? Bad rain that contributed to a smorgasbord of nasty automobile accidents. Yucky slugs on the sidewalks parallel to us probably got to UNLV swifter than we did. But we finally got there. Rehearsal began at 10:00:00am and we made it there in one piece at 10:00:11. SCORE! Right? Nooo.

Nope. They kicked us out. Kicked us and cursed us for being terrible children because only the most horrendous of children show up to the illustrious Nevada All-State Choir’s most important rehearsal of the season a measly eleven seconds after start time, when they soberly understand and revere that rehearsal to be most important above all other rehearsals, so they brave the ridiculous weather and treacherous-above-all-treachery traffic, obey all traffic laws regardless, at last arrive at campus, park legally in the next best spot yards and yards and yards away from the rehearsal’s designated building, book it like there were banshees, Tyrannosaurus rexes, saber-tooth tigers, great white sharks, Alfred Hitchcock birds, Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come, and angry leprechauns right on their tails, just so they could get into their respective singer seats as close to rehearsal start time as humanly possible. Good gracious, I am so beside myself due to how infinitely awful these children are that I daresay I need hours upon hours of psychological therapy!! said each Choir administrator.

The total number of kids they kicked out of the Nevada All-State Choir that stormy and dismal day was more than ten, close to fifteen. It wasn’t just us from our high school. It was several more from other high schools who courageously endured the same travel hardships we did. Vividly, as if it were just this past springtime half a year ago, I remember entering the rehearsal room—soaked and breathless—witnessing the rest of the Choir barely beginning their first warm-up of the session, desperately wishing I were safely sitting and warming up among them with no fear of being under condemnation, watching one stern administrator walk toward us and then lead us to the corner of the room near the glass doors through which we’d just come, waiting for “the boss” to decide what to do with us. I remember us standing there in that corner of shame for many grueling draggy moments, thinking they’d possibly let us just take our seats and we’d all let bygones be bygones. Falsehoods. Bygones were not to be bygones. The boss and all the boss’s administrative minions were determined to make frienemies of us, but in reality they failed to do that by instead making pure enemies of us; for, a frienemy is someone who likes you but secretly despises you in a tiny way or two, but an enemy is someone who doesn’t like you at all. How could you like anyone who hardheartedly sends your glorious and well-deserved All-State dreams through the shredder of doom?

There’s a moral to this story, and it comes in two halves. (And no, the moral is not “Well, uh, duh… just give yourself more extra time to get to your destination” because we DID give ourselves plenteous time, thank you very much.)

The first half of the true moral of the story is “Bad stuff happens to good people…” Like we’ve all heard multitudinously in our lives.

The second half is what we, as good people, can do about the first half: “…so try to help lift each other up.”

Here’s the positive way the worst day of my teenage life turned:

After gloomily trudging out the glass doors, departing from the beautifully-sounding Nevada All-State Choir that would forevermore be our destroyed destiny, we dejected rejects—we remarkable choir nerds from across the Battle Born state—decided to drown our sorrows together, as newfound friends in misery, in a Denny’s breakfast. We went there, sat down in there, circled around a big ol’ table, consumed our scrambled eggs, pig meat, pancakes, French toast, and juices, made each other laugh and smile, and resolved to shove our tears off a cliff.

I recall there being a girl among us named Beth, who I think attended Las Vegas High School, who was kind and bubblesome, who had really long, pretty, and curly brunette locks. Aaaaand that’s all I have to say about her. I just mentioned her because I remembered her specifically.

Now, the story I just told depicts “bad stuff” that wasn’t deeply heartbreaking, but it was rough enough for a sad teenager to notice her spirit significantly brighten when she was surrounded by friends who wanted to share cheer on a misfortunate day. Similarly she noticed her spirit brighten when she reciprocated sharing the cheer.

The point is: tough stuff, of varying degrees of severity, happens to all of us. When any one of us is undergoing a trial, whether it's kind of big or kind of small, our heart feels so much lighter when someone shares cheer with us. It's especially such a lovely feeling to know that we have helped make someone else's heart light when that heart was once very recently heavier.

My 12th Patriot Day, and Life's Sanctity

It's a Patriot Day tradition in America to ask out loud: "Where were you?"

"Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?" is how the Alan Jackson song goes. I always remember vividly where I was when I first heard the news.

I was a Basic High School sophomore, chilling with my fellow marine biology classmates, 2nd period, waiting to start dissecting squids, when our teacher asked what seemed to be a pretty odd question:

"What does '9-1-1' mean to you?"

[Puzzled looks on our faces for a moment or two…] "Emergency," said one. "Urgent," said another. And those were the best answers we could come up with.

Our teacher, whom I remember being a kind and frank and red-headed lady, noticed that none of us had any idea what she was getting at, so she continued speaking her thoughts:

"Look at the clock. It's around 9:11am. Today is 9/11. And yes, 9-1-1 often means 'emergency.' Have you heard of what's been going on this morning back East?" I think none of us had heard; planet Earth had not yet entered the era of everyone having access to a world-wide-web-endowed smartphone. Social media wasn't a thing yet. Everyone didn't know everything about everyone else in everywhere, in every place, at every possible time. Our teacher was the only person in the room with a computer and with Internet; thus, she was the only person in the room with the back-East scoop.

She proceeded to explain to us a little bit about everything: the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania crash, the planes, the hijackers, the rubble, the smoke, the firefighters, the fatalities... She spent maybe 10 minutes talking about it with us, and then we continued forth with our squids.

I'm not sure I can speak for all my fellow marine bio classmates, but I, for one, didn't know how to digest what our teacher had just reported about the morning that was already being nationally termed as "9/11." It all sounded quite alarming, but to be able to wrap my head around it seemed a farfetched concept. For, in all my 15 years, I'd never known my country to be attacked, to be at war, or to go to war... That was something I had only read about in history textbooks. That was World Wars One and Two. That was Korea and Vietnam. That was the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. That was not now. Nowadays war didn't happen.

But things were different now. It took a while for my 15-year-old self to really internalize that things were different, and to this day I think I'm still trying to get used to the idea.

Two years ago, my youngest brother & I visited Sandy, Utah's 9/11 memorial,
which honored the Utahns who were present at the attack sites.

America and I observed Patriot Day for the twelfth time today. I daresay, on this 12th anniversary, my heart was touched more profoundly than on all previous anniversaries. I think it has something to do with something else besides 9/11 that my mind has lately been pondering over and over.

My mind has been revisiting something I heard a girl, who's roughly my age, say precisely a week ago. It went like this:

"We talk about the sanctity of life all the time. Usually when we say 'sanctity of life,' we regard either the birth or the death of a person. But a person's life is sanctified all the time, not just when they're a baby or an elderly person."

It was a fantastic comment. Life is a sacred experience no matter how old the person, whether afflicted or healthy.

A month ago, one of my coworkers and dearest friends (I feel like perhaps I have a lot of "dearest" friends :) got into a serious bicycle accident. He got pretty shattered up inside. God only knows how he survived. I'm pretty sure my whole office and I kept him (and his family) in our prayers constantly, from that initial moment we received word of his wreck. Miraculously he returned to work only one month later, for which God was to be thanked. I remember when he walked in wearing his usual suit and tie. He looked so good; I could hardly believe my eyes. His smile and cheerfulness were brighter than I had ever remembered them being. I could tell he had missed us, and the office.

If there ever was a Dutch oven that baked tangible miracles of angel-light countenances, my friend was one of those miracles. He walked back into our office, after being gone for so long, with a totally noticeable glow about him. It was when I saw that glow that I felt God's love so vibrantly in my every fiber. It was there in that office, very much so.

Sanctity of life: my mind zoomed right to it when I saw my friend for that first time after his bike accident. I realized that, if my nice car were to suddenly be dropped into a boiling, bubbling, burning volcano, it would be infinitely more meaningless than if I were to suddenly lose my friend.

I think this is a similar epiphany to the one Americans experienced on that first Patriot Day. They realized that it was their loved ones --- their people --- that mattered the most, more so than virtually anything else.

(Here's one last utterly random thing that popped into my head that I feel prompted to document...) Believe it or not, a few days ago I actually shared a stage and sang with the great, one, and only James Taylor. The last song on the program was "Shower the People You Love with Love." Terrific message that song delivers, and so pertinent with what I've been trying to say here in this blog post. Let's shower our people with love, for they are our treasures.

Busy

Today is Monday. Monday is typically my craziest workday of the week. Crazy just occurs naturally on Monday, no matter which Monday it is. Sometimes the crazy is mild, and sometimes it's wild. Today was wild crazy.

Notwithstanding, in the midst of today's pool of crazy, a series of gently bright and soothing thoughts spontaneously bubbled in my brain. Here are the bubbles to which I refer:

Hard work is hard. Hectic busyness is hard. It all can be so gosh darn draining. Work and I are not strangers to one another; we are well-developed acquaintances, and today I've decided to consider work as not just an acquaintance, but a friend.

Today I've decided to be grateful for the opportunities I have in my life to be busy, and to be working. Today I realized that I usually feel like I'm serving someone else when I buckle down and work hard, and at the end of a session of working hard --- especially if the service recipient expresses their genuine thanks --- I feel like all my work was worthwhile.

At the end of this crazy Monday afternoon, my boss kindly thanked me for the efforts I put into the mandatory Monday duties. Upon hearing his "thank you" I immediately ricocheted that "thank you" to God for helping me land the great job I've got. I also thanked Him for blessing me with thousands of wholesome and righteous ways to stay busy in my life.

I hope I'll remember all this good stuff the NEXT time I have a crazy Monday!

Do You Love Me? Do You, Surfer Boy?

Eleven-and-a-half years ago I was a 15-year-old in Hawaii for a few days. One particular day was my last day visiting Hawaii. One particular moment on that particular day I was in the Surf n Sea store in Hale‘iwa, which is a historic surf town on the amaaaazing North Shore of Oahu.

The walls and aisles of Surf n Sea’s interior were LOADED floor-to-ceiling with surfboards of all shapes, sizes, designs, and colors, and I remember it being almost difficult to maneuver myself through the store. A little birdie, also known as my sister who lived on the island, told me I should purchase a pair a flip-flops whose position on the scale from 1 to Awesome was so off-the-charts in the affirmative, that the shoes could be found in one place and one place only on planet Earth’s globe: the store in which my feet did presently trod.

So I found the shoes, and here they are:

But actually that photo does not show the original shoes. The original shoes were bluely outlined instead of brownly, and I owned them and wore them religiously for about nine years until they broke. I think I underwent an emotional meltdown when they broke—a meltdown that was so heartwrenching that my family metaphorically picked up what I was laying down and they mail-ordered a new pair of Pyrameds for me. (Pyrameds are what the shoes are officially called, but all my friends call them the “boat shoes,” because they float like boats on water, and once I really did try walking on water while wearing them, but surprisingly it didn’t work.) I continue to wear my Pyrameds almost every chillaxingly leisure moment I can get my hands on.

Anyway, back to 2002… There I was, standing in the checkout line with my merchandise, when suddenly he appeared. I’m going to pull a Stephanie Meyer and call him brilliant, perfect, and beautiful, but he was so much better-looking than Edward Cullen. Soooo much better-looking. No boy I had ever considered cute could hold a candle to this guy. So vividly I remember this moment, which is a moment that he walked in through the store door adjacent to the cash register, turned ever so gracefully, and started talking to his friend who happened to be the cash register attendant. I don’t think it was just my imagination when that most handsome man in my world swiftly smiled at me in his process of meeting his friend.

My heart agonizingly plummeted when I realized that I had no time to dilly-dally and linger in Surf n Sea as beautiful man’s innocently adoring creeper; I had a plane to catch if I ever wanted to make it back to the mainland. Did I truly want to go back to the mainland? Back to the desert? Did I make a mistake? Should I have stayed in Hale‘iwa and learned beautiful man’s name? It was now or never, and I chose never. Ohhhh myyyy goooosh!!!!

While riding in the car that took me to the Honolulu airport, a certain song came on the radio. I remembered hearing it once when I was very young. It was on one of those “Music From The Heart” TV infomercials that advertised ginormous collections of sappy “timeless” love songs that supposedly will never get old no matter how old you get. One of the infomercial’s example songs was called “I Go Crazy” by Paul Davis.

I go crazy

When I look in your eyes

I still go crazy

That old flame comes alive

It starts burning inside

Way deep down inside

Oh baby

Now, every time I hear that song I think of him, who cannot be named (because his name is romantically unknown). When iTunes became available to consumers, I obtained it, and guess what was the first song I ever did buy from the iTunes Store? Need the question even be asked?

I went crazy

When I looked in your eyes

I still go crazy

……uhh, not really. I don’t really still go crazy, but I wanted to finally write down this fun childhood memory, for it had never previously been documented.

Peacefinding Pointer

Last night, several good friends and I attended a nice little workshop-type dealio, wherein was discussed the topic of peace—its sources, how to obtain it, and how it doesn’t always mean “the absence of war.”

Since there strangely was no opportune moment during the workshop to share a personal experience, I’d like to share it here.

February 27, 2010—Utah. ‘Twas the wee small hours of the morning on a Saturday. “Wee” means sometime between 3:00 and 4:00am. I was slumbering at my family’s house, and I was out like a light, up until the point my mom came in to gently shake me awake and tell me that an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck right near the place where my younger brother was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was alarmed enough to make the lickety-split decision that I had slept long enough. I hopped out of bed and followed my mom downstairs to where a TV was blaring breaking news about central Chile’s urgent state. Our TV stayed on for hours, because we wanted to keep ourselves in the loop as best we could. We waited and waited for some sort of clue that my brother and his mission companion were alright. The clue kept on not coming, and I began to feel too anxious to keep watching the tube, so I chose to escape for a tiny bit.

I drove a short ways to a local park that was endowed with dozens of big, tall trees. Upon arrival, I got out of my car, walked over to one tree on the east side, wrapped myself up in a huge cozy blanket, and sat on the dead grass with my back leaning against the tree’s trunk. No one else was in sight. No one typically goes to the park on a chilly winter afternoon. This was the perfect chance for me to strike up a conversation with God.

I told Him about the concerns of the day, and then I made myself as still as possible as I awaited His reply, which sweetly came mere seconds later by way of the Holy Ghost: “Whatever happens, everything will turn out alright.” Very few words, but it was all I needed to hear in order to find peace in the currently crazy South American situation.

Nothing in that divine reply referred to anything about the status of my brother’s physical well-being. Neither I nor anyone else definitely knew he was still healthy as a horse. All was still mysterious, and danger was still existing, but peace was still available. And peace was what my family and I had lodged pleasantly in our souls as we stayed prayerful.

The cherry atop this sundae of a peaceful situation is the phone call we received a day or two later—from my missionary brother! He called to say he and his companion were okay! In fact, I think I remember learning that all missionaries there were okay. This warranted some jollity, as well as another dose of thanks to God.

And thus endeth my personal attestation that peace isn’t the absence of turbulence, but it certainly can be found amid turbulence.

Sometimes I have a “peacemaking pointer” for you, but today I’m offering a peacefinding pointer: “Be still and know that I am God…” (Psalms 46:10)