Sex Selective Abortions

Today as I was driving home from my 54th interview in the last 6 months (fruitless as all the others have been), I was trying to find some music to listen to numb my brain from another wasted hour of my life. I found nothing helpful. Then I tried sports radio, which in Utah has gotten considerably worse in the last week as the choices have been cut in half and all the talking heads which were retained are the ones I wish would get shipped to Mars.

I settled on some guy giving an interview to some lady about sex selective abortions, the topic du jour right now. Why is it such a hot topic? Well, come to find out Planned Parenthood is helping women find out if they are expecting a boy or a girl and some of these women (who knows how many) are electing abort their babies if it was a girl and keeping their babies if it was a boy.

Which makes me sick.

Let me stop here and admit that I know about 5-10 of my friends who read this blog on a somewhat infrequent basis are strong advocates of a woman's right to abortion. I don't understand it, but we all know where we stand on the subject and have retained our friendships with each other for decades. I hope we do the same here.

Leaving aside the subject of Roe vs Wade, let's stay with the subject of sex selective abortion at this point. Have we gone so far now with the abortion issue that we are unwilling to say that sex selective abortion is abhorrent? The woman being interviewed on this radio show was adamant that this was ok, that it was GOOD for a woman to decide if she wanted to keep a boy and abort a girl.

That baby girls matter less to a woman is somehow good for women's rights in some weird way is something that I fail to understand and comprehend.

But perhaps someone can help me with it.

What are we telling the girls of our community that we allow the aborting of fetuses who are girls while saving fetuses who are boys and that no one is stopping it?

Current legislation is pending making it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion solely based on sex selection.

Perhaps that is something we can all agree on.

Why I Pray

Somewhere today I heard a new song from Big and Rich called, "Why I Pray".  I couldn't tell you one lyric from the song but I liked it, and it got me thinking a bit.

I suppose you and I pray for the same things most of the time - health, happiness, protection, etc.

I also suppose that most all of us have had moments where our prayers are more intimate, more desperate and more heartfelt than the usual prayer that we offer before we slide into bed at night.

These prayers are powerful moments in our lives. I know about these kinds of prayers. I know what it feels like to not have anyone else to turn to for relief, to feel compelled to drop to my knees and to pour out my heart to the Lord and beg for comfort, peace, healing, forgiveness and help.

I bet you have been there too.

I love the words to the hymn, "Where Can I Turn For Peace?":

Where, when my aching grows,
Where, when I languish,
Where, in my need to know, where can I run?
Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?
Who, who can understand?
He, only One

I know that my challenges are not greater or bigger than your challenges - God help me to reach out better to those in need! But my challenges are mine and I feel them like you feel yours.

Sometimes I have forgotten about the Lord more than I should and I am grateful beyond expression that the Lord is forgiving as I come back to Him. Those moments in my life where I am trying to  reacquaint myself with the Father, and when I kneel on the  floor and ask Him to forgive my prideful heart, He is always there.

He answers privately,
Reaches my reaching
In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.
Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.
Constant he is and kind,
Love without end.

I guess I pray because my heart longs for my Father and I need the peace that only He provides and the help that only He can give. I guess that is probably why we all pray.

Thank heavens for this prayer.

Live Big With Love

Perhaps I forget from time to time just how beautiful life is. It's interesting, though, just what heartbreaks occur in our lives that temporarily blur that impression. 

Today I saw a friend of mine, a divorced father of one, talk to a really pretty lady. After she drove away, I heard him gush about how beautiful she was. She seemed awfully interested in him too.

"I don't usually have success with women that beautiful", he said.

I hope he marries her. I hope everyone has a happily ever after, especially those who had that hope damaged in earlier relationships.  I hope everyone lives big with love.

This week I spent 3 hours all alone on the side of a mountain. Not one other person was on that hike that day when I was. It was the most glorious feeling.

While I was sitting out on a cliff overlooking the canyon below, counting the lizards running by my feet, I felt exactly how you have all felt in those moments of unbelievable beauty - I was completely at peace.  Those hard moments of looking for a job and not having anyone give a darn about my resume, those moments when I was completely heartbroken and shattered, those times when I didn't have any idea where I would be sleeping at night or where my next meal would come from, well, they kind of all made sense to me.

I feel so grateful that God loves me enough to teach me through these moments. I'm not a great man, but I have so much more compassion for the broken and brokenhearted, those who struggle in shadows and those who are really good at hiding the many horrors that are challenging their heart. I have been there.

Life is absolutely beautiful, if for no other reasons than the fact that in this life we can be happy for those who have happy things happen to them, sad for those who struggle and to feel the warmth of love when we reach out to those in either circumstance.

 

To My Single Friends Today. . .

Today, tens of millions of mothers in this country will have children and husbands and fathers and friends express love and kindness and feelings of gratitude for the inexpressible love that these amazing women have constantly given. I want to join them. I love my mom. Her love for me is abiding and gentle, as is my love for her.

But today I want to share a Mother's Day thought with the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of my single friends who have not had the chance yet to experience what I know they would love more than anything in the world - to be a mother.

This day is complicated for you all. I don't propose to know and fully understand the depths of what is being felt. But I have seen the many, many tears and I have heard the sadness.

So I want to say just one little thing: I hope you know how much us men value you. As is our usual mode, we express these feelings pretty badly. While you probably get angry at how long it takes us to get our collective acts together and wonder why we don't seem to see the good thing in front of us as often as we should, I hope you know how much we love you.

You are everything to us.

You are the very real angels in our lives. You are the very real angels in the lives of so many more than you imagine. I can't comprehend what I would do without any of you.

While the wait is longer than any of you probably ever imagined, you are every bit the amazing and wonderful and beautiful woman that God intended you to be.

And I thank my God that I know you all.

Happy Mother's Day.

A Wedding And A Party

A few weeks ago my home teaching companion sent me a text asking me if I would be his witness at his wedding in the Oquirrh Mountain Temple. I was there when he met his wife. I was sitting in sacrament meeting at church and turned around and said hi to him, noticed a cute girl sitting with him and said hello to her as well. About a half an hour later I turned around again and they were almost in a snuggle position, canoodling like a well established couple. I was thinking that this friend of mine had neglected to tell me that he was dating a girl. So after the meeting was over, I asked him who the girl was. He told me he didn't really know - they just met there on the bench.

So, basically love at first sight.

His wedding was yesterday and it was beautiful. His wife's father told me that he was awfully nervous, shaking a lot. But when he was married he looked composed, even as tears streamed down his face.

I loved to see him that way. When I was first assigned as his companion he was fighting his way through terrible drug addictions to meth, heroin, marijuana and several other things. He was an alcoholic and, until a short time before, had not been to church in over 25 years.

So it was a very touching, emotional experience to see how Christ can change a life. In the process, my heart was softened and changed as well.

Yesterday evening, a group of friends and sisters, cousins and nephews of our dear friend Nalene gathered to celebrate her life. It was beautiful and fun and just perfect. It was the right end to a solid week of deeply emotional moments. I even got suckered into dancing for one of those dance things on Playstation. There is a video out there and if it ever sees the light of day on Facebook I might crawl under a rock for the rest of my life.

I can't figure out how to say how much I love my friends in a way that doesn't sound trite, but I will try to do a better job of letting them know how much I love them, how grateful I am for their influence in my life and how much it means to lean on each other when we need it.

What's Inside

I have had a book written for a few years and I don't think it was very good. So I have been writing a new one the last year or so. It probably isn't all that good of a book either.

But I don't know that for certain. But I kind of want to know. And I will know before too long, I guess.

I love to write. More than any thing else I have ever done in my life, nothing makes me happier than writing. I write constantly. I love to write letters, private blogs, short stories, essays and anything else that just allows me to get what is in my heart out on paper.

So it is time to see if I what I have inside is worth the figurative and literal dime, and the whole thing scares the crap out of me.

Healing Our Hearts

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. - C. S. Lewis

Over the last few days I have spent a lot of time talking with friends - friends who are nursing very tender hearts. I saw those who are very dear to me who looked like they hadn't stopped crying either night or since Nalene died on Friday. Sharing a hug, a note, a conversation, a text have all been so much more intimate and meaningful than they were just last week. In many ways this group of friends love each other more because of what they have experienced the past few days. It is a collection of broken hearts that helped each other mend and begin to heal.

I am a relative newcomer to this group of people. Nalene was in this branch for a decade, I was here only two years.  But I have been allowed to feel like I have been a part of this group for longer than I have. I have been loved before I deserved it and despite the times when I haven't been worthy of it. Nalene was part of this love. She always seemed to be where I wanted to be in my spiritual life.

The weeks will go by now and joy will come in the eventual morning. Tonight at her funeral as friends and family gather to share in our love and memories of her there will be more healing. The Spirit of the Lord will be there to calm the rough waters and stormy seas that rage in the still very raw hearts of her friends and family.

And Nalene's steady and bright influence will be there too, I am certain.