Letter - YM YW Missionary Activity, Fossil Springs Hike, Celebration of Light

August 24, 2014

Today has been a nice Sabbath Day.  I love Sundays.  We had spiritual ward council this morning as we discussed the wonderful church wide 2014 auxiliary training videos that are on lds.org and as the bishop told us about a man in our ward who needs our collective faith and prayers in a special ward fast next week because he is going to have brain surgery.  It is a very serious, dangerous surgery.  I am so, so sad for this family.  They are good friends of ours.  The auxiliary training videos made a big impact on the way I plan on teaching my children and my young women from now on.  They were awesome.

Last Monday I had an experience that I felt motivated to write about.  You can read about it HERE. 

Tuesday we had a really fun combined YM YW’s missionary activity.  The young men were in charge of it.  They had four adults set up in different classrooms around the building prepared to teach a 15-20 minute lesson about their missions.  The presenters shared a funny mission experience, a spiritual experience, explained how their mission has impacted their lives even now, and shared a small sample of food from their mission.  The young men’s president prepared four different sealed mission call letters (not individualized) for each of the YM and YW to open to determine which of the four missions they would learn about first and which room they would start in then we rotated so everyone got to listen about each mission.  That helped us to get the YM and YW split up into different groups so they would hang out with different friends than normal.  There were four very different missions that were presented, Brazil, Mongolia, New Jersey, and Italy.  Brett Lantz, the man in our ward who served in Mongolia served with Grandma and Grandpa Angle.  Brother Lantz shared about a man he baptized who later became the branch president and then a little while after that got to go to Salt Lake and meet Pres. Hinckley and help translate the temple film into the Mongolian language.  Pretty cool.  The youth really loved this activity, Spencer said he really felt the spirit and really wants to go on a mission.  It was so successful we’ve talked about doing this activity every six months or so with four new missions and missionaries each time.

Wednesday I did sealings in the Mesa temple since the Gilbert temple is closed.  The Mesa temple was recently closed and remodeled a little bit.  They’ve put beautiful stone tile by the recommend desk and in the foyer and they’ve also combined sealing rooms 2 and 3 into one big sealing room.  I saw Pres. Christensen from our stake who is a member of the Mesa temple presidency and he told me that the tile in the foyer is in a checkerboard pattern because when the temple was originally built it had a checkerboard pattern and they are trying to restore the temple more like it was when it was originally built. 

Marlee being silly after school on Wednesday

Thursday Spencer had his first flag football game.  Sadly they lost by two points.  Friday morning I went visiting teaching.  The kids had a half day of school so that afternoon Spencer went to hang out with several friends at Tyson Moore’s house while the other kids and I went swimming at the Lamoreaux’s.

Bryant got this fun mustache on his birthday date with Grammy Sanders at Peter Piper Pizza

Yesterday morning Chad and I woke up bright and early to go hike and swim at Fossil Springs near Strawberry.  Our friends Kyle and Heather Robinson came with us.  At one point there were going to be eight couples going, but one by one they all dropped out and it ended up being just us two couples, which was ok.  I know people have busy lives.  We left at 5:45am.  It took us about one hour to hike the four miles down to the waterfall near the spring.  We swam and explored for a couple of hours.  Chad even convinced me to swim through an underwater hole in a rock into the “whirlpool”.  Since he was there to help me I decided to try it.  It was scary because the current is pretty strong in the whirlpool and whips you around a bit and it is too deep to touch the ground.  You get tired really fast.  Even if you’re holding onto the rope.  You have to be a pretty strong swimmer to get out of there or else be able to climb up the slippery, wet rope or get pulled up the by the rope.  Earlier this year one our friends got stuck in that whirlpool for a long time and almost drowned before someone noticed she needed to be pulled out.  Chad told me he helped his young men get through it by holding onto the rock and sticking his leg part way through the hole so they could use it to pull themselves through and promised me I could to that too.  I’m so glad I did it because it was SO COOL!!  After swimming, we ate the lunches we packed and hiked out  It was quite a bit harder to hike out.  It was almost like climbing stairs for 4 miles, we made it out in one and a half hours.  We got home about 3:45pm.  I’m not too sore today.  Only my calves hurt.  I was so self-conscious of my huffing and puffing on the steep parts climbing out.  I’m not used to that kind of elevation.  I wasn't really huffing and puffing that bad, but I was still worried that everyone was noticing my loud breathing that they would think I was really out of shape.  I shouldn’t worry about what other people think so much. A big THANK YOU to Brenda for coming to stay with our kids while we were gone!!  She's wonderful.

This picture was taken last Fall when Chad went to Fossil Springs with the Young Men.  It shows the whirlpool area that I swam into.  The whirlpool is on the left and you have to swim into it through an underwater hole in that rock in the middle of the picture.

I'm a lucky girl to be married to this handsome guy.

Me floating in the current that flows into the big cave.  It was a natural lazy river.

Going into the little cove behind the waterfall.

There were tons of fish in the water 

For my quote today I’ll share an experience I had and wrote about Thursday morning.

Thursday, August 22, 2014

6:30am

Yesterday our Relief Society started a “Celebration of Light” where for next three weeks we have been asked to share thoughts and messages from our personal scripture study with each other on our Relief Society Facebook page leading up to a Sept. 11^th Thursday night Relief Society Dinner.  On a side note, I think it is cool that we are doing this activity, which has been planned for a while now, during the same week that the church shared this video encouraging all to “#ShareGoodness”.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Anyway, this morning just after 5:00am when I was in a semi-conscious state  between awake and sleep I had a dream where I saw three objects that had people or a person in them go through a force field of some sort.  When they went through the force field they lit up but for only a short time.  Some stayed lit longer than others and some had a brighter light.  Then in my dream I had the thought, “The human body can only stay lit so long”.  I have been thinking of this dream ever since.  Initially I interpreted that dream and thought to mean that humans can only feel light and stay lit for so long, but with the gift of the Holy Ghost they can feel that light longer, even permanently.  That is why it is so important to stay worthy of the Holy Ghost and to share the gospel with others so they can receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.  Then shortly after that I realized that the words “human body” that I thought in my dream can also mean the natural man.  In Mosiah 3:19 we learn that “the natural man is an enemy to God … unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”  As we qualify for the gift of the Holy Ghost by putting off the natural man we can feel Heavenly Father’s light longer and more strongly in our lives.

Love,

Mindy