I am my father’s oldest child, born when he was 40. He died at 83, so while he lived he was even in memory always older than me. I’m now 46, and I remember having a 46-year-old father. I also have a child who is forty years younger than me, and thinking of him, I am glad for my father that I was born to him.
From mysliveroflife.blogspot.com
In Spring the gardener finds out death.
He finds which limbs did not o’erwinter.
Some stems twig and bud and bloom,
Some stems splinter.
I lost a limb some seasons back,
Of my flesh, my firstborn daughter.
Time dried the break, but I still lack
The fruits–a moiety of laughter.
Places long unseen often loom larger in memory than they really are. That haystack on the old farm . . . that green lane . . . that high fence in the back yard and the tree we climbed to look over it – surely they were an important part of the universe. And the old house had yawning caves in the closets, and untold mysteries in that deep cellar and up in that beckoning yet forbidding attic. Why, that house couldn’t have been as small as now it seems.
I remember these things, and they were real, and and they are real now where I keep them in remembrance.
But we can’t go back.
The LDS Church has announced the closing of another school, this one the 49-year-old Benemerito of the Americas in Mexico City. (link) This is said to be done as the only feasible option for providing training facilities for a surge of new missionaries, but it had probably been desired for some time to close the school. A drastic, permanent loss like that isn’t allowed merely to smooth over some facilities crowding issue elsewhere.
But our slaughter of the wholly innocent came two weeks ago. (more…)
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Read this article by apologist extraordinaire Dan Petersen. (more…)
Today would be Betsey’s 11th birthday. This is what I wrote on her birthday seven years ago.
(more…)
We will see like this, and that will be the least of our visions.
Why is it Korihor who preached against original sin? (more…)
This Christmas we will take the sacrament together. The ordinance will be, or can be, bigger than the time and place. Bigger than the place, because it binds us to all the Saints who are taking it with us worldwide, and to God in his heaven. Bigger than time, because it brings us to the foot of the cross and to the times when we made our covenants. (more…)
This is the time of year for Christmas Devotionals. Here are a few of my favorite Christmas essays and thoughts: (more…)
Brigham Young had a lot of zest for life, but you wouldn’t know it from some of his preaching. He seemed to take the position that this life is the time to prepare to meet God and only valuable insomuch as it prepares us. (more…)