It's been awhile. And I went private again. I read yet another lament by a mom who had posted public things about her kids over the years and then when her kids had grown up, they were mad at her for it. I want to respect my kids' privacy (sometimes). But I also think going private is a bummer.
Let's do a quick catch-up. Most importantly, last week was my birthday! 3!6! Dan took care of the kids all day yesterday so that I could: get a pedicure, massage, highlight and cut and do some shopping. Yes, it was awesome.
Except that my stylist asked me about getting some face frame to which I replied in the affirmative, and then she chopped my face off. The line "She's completely bald in front" from the movie Little Women comes to mind. Yes, the Winona Ryder one. Not that new one I didn't like.
My broken nose looks pretty good from that angle! Not so broken-y!
Also, we had Halloween!
You might be thinking . . . have we seen these costumes before? Yes. I feel like we've blown so much money on costumes in past years that this year I told everyone to pick their favorite one and to wear it again. So June was Wendy again, Gwen was a black cat again, Harris was Peter Pan again (but didn't cry while wearing it this year), and Beck was a mouse, but for the first time. It was Harris' costume first. And just to make sure you see Beck's face up close.
Smiling for the camera! A first! So cute.
How was trick or treating during a pandemic? Well, first off I found out about a month ago that each county in PA picks its own date to trick or treat. It's rarely on Halloween. Instead, it's usually the Thursday before. Well it rained all day that Thursday, so our county postponed trick or treating until the Monday after Halloween. November 2nd! My kids cried and cried that they couldn't trick or treat in the actual month of October. I kept reminding them that it was much better to trick or treat in November with no rain. And then of course, that Monday ended up being freezing and everyone had to pile on the coats, which really reinforced the idea for me of how great it is to recycle costumes since no one sees them anyway.
We did a couple of streets in our super un-busy neighborhood. Most people just left buckets of candy at the end of the driveway and said hi to us from their porches as we walked by. It was nice to see people.
Today, Dan gave yet another amazing Come Follow Me lesson which involved the kids scaling a mattress on the stairs while holding on to a rope. The rope was the Book of Mormon. Gwen said today, "I love Come Follow Me!" And that is thanks to Dan for making it fun. So what if she got all of the answers of the lesson wrong, she scaled the dang mattress, and she won't forget it anytime soon.
Lastly, I gave a talk in church today. I also played the organ. Also, no one is allowed to sing because of the added germs, so everyone just listened to me play while they thought about the words to the hymns. So, let's recap. Heather played, and everyone watched her play. Then Heather spoke and everyone watched her speak. Then Heather played again, and everyone watched her play. It was like the Heather talent show, but somewhat lacking in talent.
Here is a copy of my talk:
In March 2006, my younger brother Mark and I entered
the Missionary Training Center on the same day. Before embarking on that
now-retired farewell scene that used to take place inside the MTC, my dad sat
both of us down at my grandma’s house in Orem, Utah, in order to give a small
thought he had prepared. My dad was never one for casual words. He was a
lawyer, and he spoke with precision and careful calculation at all times. He
was also not an emotional person. But at this crucial moment, he looked up at
both of us, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and asked, “Why are we doing
this? Why would we send away our kids to far off places with limited
correspondence? Why would we do something terrible like that?”
For a brief second, I thought my dad had broken
character. I thought he was really truly wondering and questioning. I should
have known better. After a dramatic pause, my father looked in my eyes and
said, “Because Joseph Smith really did see God the Father and His Son, Jesus
Christ, in the Sacred Grove. It’s true. It’s really true.”
I start with that story to remind all of us why we are
here. We are here because Jesus Christ lives. We are here because Heavenly
Father truly has a plan for us. And we are here because the Gospel was restored
through the prophet Joseph Smith. We worship God the Father and His Son Jesus
Christ. We do not worship Joseph Smith, but we do revere him, and we are
grateful to him.
If I may, I would like to touch on one more story
about my father. You see, my father passed away shortly after Dan and I were
married, and it seems like in the ten years since his passing, I have only
begun to learn about the significant impact he had on me.
During the last few years of his life, my dad served
in the church in two different capacities simultaneously. One, he was a temple
worker at the St. Louis Temple. And two, he was a counselor in the mission
presidency of the Missouri Independence mission. I once asked him which of the
two callings he preferred. He immediately began to speak about his favorite
missionary stories, relating with excitement about how this lesson was taught
or how strong the Spirit was at a recent baptism he attended.
“So,” I concluded, “you prefer your calling in the
mission presidency.”
“Oh no,” my father replied. “Working with the dead is
much easier than working with the living.”
I have been asked to speak about magnifying our
callings. The most obvious approach would focus on magnifying our actual,
official, sustained and set-apart church callings, but I have felt impressed to
focus my words on our opportunity to magnify our ministering assignments and
also to magnify our callings as disciples of Christ both inside and outside of
our church community.
As my father pointed out, we all can be pretty difficult
to work with. Each person has his own set of strengths, weaknesses, talents,
vices, pride issues, spiritual gifts, addictions, ways of showing love and
deficiencies. It is easy to be overwhelmed at the prospect of showing every
single person Christlike love. Add to that the modern-day public discourse,
which encourages tribalism over unity, mistrust of anyone who thinks
differently than you, and which is quick to judge but slow to seek
understanding, and you have the perfect recipe to feel completely justified in
watching out only for yourself and padding the walls of your brain with convenience
and comfort instead of stretching yourself in selfless service.
In summary, it is easy to be filled with fear and
selfishness.
Stephen R. Covey often talked about our circle of
concern vs. our circle of influence. The circle of concern is everything you
worry about, and it’s often very large. The truth is—we don’t have much control
over many things in our circle of concern.
By contrast, the circle of influence is everything you
have the power to change, and it’s often quite small, though it can be grown.
How do you grow your circle of influence? You work on the things over which you
have control. You work on yourself. You serve the people you have been assigned
to minister. We don’t have power over them, but we can influence their lives
for the better. When we help people, our circle of influence expands because the
positive changes we have made will affect more and more people. I believe this
will help us meet Bishop Johnson’s challenge he issued two weeks ago, asking us
to become more united as a ward family. Ministering properly and effectively
will expand our circles of influence and actually change the very nature of our
ward.
I read a lot of news. And when I read it, I often
allow myself to be full of fear. But if I can force myself to go outside or to
run errands, I am always greeted by smiling faces from neighbors, a helpful
clerk at the grocery store, or the librarian who chuckles at our chaotic family
as we burst through the doors of the library carrying an empty laundry basket
to fill with books each week. I readily
acknowledge that there is much evil in the world, but brothers and sisters,
there is so much good. And good will prevail.
We do our part to contribute to the good—the building
up of the Kingdom of God—when we magnify our callings as ministers and as
disciples of Jesus Christ. What does magnifying a calling really mean?
Joseph Smith said, “To magnify a calling is to
hold it up in dignity and importance, that the light of heaven may shine
through one's performance.”
President Thomas S. Monson said, “And how does one magnify a calling? Simply
by performing the service that pertains to it.”
In the Book of Mormon,
Jacob said, “We did magnify our office unto the Lord, taking upon us the
responsibility, answering the sins of the people upon our own heads if we did
not teach them the word of God with all diligence.”
Do we hold up our
ministering assignments in dignity and importance, that the light of heaven may
shine through one’s performance? Do we perform the service that pertains to it.
Do we take upon us the responsibility?
We hear a lot about ministering, but it’s easy to let
it get swept under the rug. I, myself, constantly struggle to know how much to
contact people. I don’t want to annoy them. I also don’t want to neglect them.
It’s hard to find a quiet minute to even really think about what they need from
us. What if I gave you ten seconds right now? Ten seconds in which to think on
the names of the people you minister to. Have you reached out to them lately?
And what do they really need? Do they need a text? A note? A food order? Help
with a job application? A ride to church? Here are your ten seconds.
Now I don’t really think ten seconds will do the
trick. But maybe you could set an alarm on your phone every single Sunday to
think about the one of the people you minister to for five minutes and to write
down what you know about them and their needs. And then the next week you could
think about another person you minister to for five minutes.
In addition to our assigned ministering, I truly believe we also all have
ministering we need to do in our neighborhoods and communities. This will look
different for everyone. May I offer a few examples?
In 1939 Sir Nicholas
Winton, a British man in then-Czechoslovakia, secretly raised funds for 670
Jewish and other children to be transported to England in order to save their
lives from the Nazis. It wasn’t until 1988, when his wife stumbled across some
old ledgers in their attic, that she and the public became aware of Winton’s
good deeds. Later that year, Winton was surprised on the British television
show “That’s Life” when he found out that sitting all around him in the
audience were the now-grown children he had saved.
Sir Nicholas Winton
magnified his calling as a disciple of Jesus Christ. But I’m betting yours and
my callings as disciples of Jesus Christ will not include something so
grandiose and dramatic, though they may. Our calling may look much more like
the sweet 8-year-old girl who walked up to my mother before Sacrament Meeting
in my hometown of Blue Springs, Missouri, and handed her a note. The note said,
“My mom told me that your husband is very sick. I fasted for him today.”
Or maybe it will look
like a friend of mine, who one day in the middle of taking care of four
rambunctious boys, with their messes and stinky diapers, was fed up and ready
to give up, when she heard the Spirit whisper to her, “Thank you for taking
care of my boys. I knew I could ask you to be the one to clean up their
messes and change their diapers and give them love.”
Or maybe you will be
asked to serve someone who hurts you. I recently saw in the news a story about
a father who found out his son was being bullied at school. He decided to ask
around and find out about the young man who was tormenting his son. He
discovered that this young man had a hard family life and that his family lived
in poverty. The father invested time in him, got to know him. He took him out
to eat and listened to him. He bought some shoes that the young man desperately
needed. The young man became friends with his son.
Or maybe it will look
like a dear woman in our ward in Jacksonville, who learned about a new convert named
James, who was in his mid-40s and had never learned how to read. James desperately
wanted to bless the Sacrament each week. And so she called him every night for
weeks, and while he held the words of the Sacrament prayers in his hands, she
would read them over and over to him until he recognized the words enough that
he could say them without assistance. Every Sunday that James blessed the
Sacrament was a blessing to me. He had to say the words so slowly and
thoughtfully. Each word held so much meaning. Still, he would often mess up.
And at the end of a prayer where the bishop had to correct James, James would
often stand up and call out, “That’s okay! I gotta get it right for Jesus!”
When he would say that, it would make me realize that I, too, gotta get it
right for Jesus.
You could argue that each
of these examples vary in their depth or influence, but all I see is people
responding to the call to minister, whether that be ministering to family, ward
family, strangers, or new acquaintances. Each of these people worked within
their circle of influence and greatly changed a situation through small and
simple means.
President Hinckley once said, “We are all in this
great endeavor together. We are here to assist our Father in His work and His glory.
. . . Your obligation is as serious in your sphere of responsibility as is my
obligation in my sphere. No calling in this church is small or of little
consequence.”
I want all of you to know that I know the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and that I love it. I know
that the Savior, Jesus Christ, stands at the head of this church. I know that
President Russell M. Nelson is the prophet of the church. I know that
ministering is the Lord’s program. And I say these things in the name of Jesus
Christ, amen.
THE END.
