Our Compassionate God

Recently, I was staying in a hotel in Boise, Idaho with a friend. Our room was directly across from the guests' laundry room. On one side of our room were the stairs. On the other was the room of the ladies who had given me a ride to Boise. Sunday morning, my friend left to go home (had pressing business that prevented her from staying the full weekend). That afternoon, the ladies and I were going to meet some people for lunch.

I was in my room, pretty much killing time, when I heard what seemed like a year old baby throwing a fit. I didn't hear adults and supposed they were ignoring the child. A few minutes later, I opened my door to go out and right next to the door, pressed into it, was a two year old toddler, screaming and crying hysterically. I glanced into the laundry room as I picked her up. It was empty. I had felt incredible compassion for the child the moment I'd opened the door, and I told her, "We'll find your mom." She stopped being hysterical, but was still upset. I knocked on the ladies' door, and when I did, the toddler calmed down even more. When the door was opened, I explained what had happened and that I was going to take the child to the office (front desk) to see if they could find her mom. The ladies went with me downstairs and, on the elevator ride, one of them coaxed out of the child that she was two years old (she never spoke the whole time she was with us).

When we got to the front desk, I explained what had happened, and told them it was on the second floor. One of the ladies behind the desk came around and held her arms out to the child. The child hesitated for a nano-second. You could see her deciding if she could trust this person. Then she leaned over and reached out to the lady.

After we got back from lunch, we inquired at the front desk. Was the mom found? The man there had just begun his shift not long before. He said he had not seen the child, but had heard others talking about the incident, and, yes, the mom had been found.

Later that evening, I was talking to God, and he told me, "The child is a sign to you." He told me that the compassion I'd felt for the child was the same compassion he felt for me when I was hysterically scream-crying out to him because of being homeless (or threatened with it), not having enough food to eat, worried about other problems, or just plain having a freak-out attack for no reason that I knew of. He also let me know that just as I had taken immediate steps to solve the toddler's problem when I realized what was happening, so he, also, took steps to alleviate my suffering when I was freaking out.

I am sharing this experience because he told me to. He told me that this compassion he feels toward me is the same compassion he feels toward everyone. Our sincere prayers are always heard, even if we don't see immediate results.

Being a Missionary for the Lord

I have just finished reading a blog post. It is very, very long but the light and knowledge I received from it was very strong, and I feel-very strongly-that I should post a link to it. Please feel free to pass the link along; I'm sure the young man writing the blog would be very willing to edify any and all who can be edified by his post. I would post a synopsis, but the synopsis would be quite long and I could not do justice to what the young man says in his own words.

http://keepit100withchapterandverse.blogspot.com/2017/07/life-off-old-ship-year-sojourn-through.html

Teach Your Children to Honor God

These are just some random thoughts I'm having. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about.

Teach your children to honor God. How do you do that if, like me, your kids are grown? What does "honor God" mean anyway?

I thought about that, and came up with nothing about a week ago. But, today, something did come to mind. We honor God by loving and forgiving each other. We teach our children to honor God by loving and forgiving them, as well as loving and forgiving all who cross our path.

For example, this latest fiasco in the restorationist movement. A blog post written in haste, accusing Denver, casting aspersions on the new scriptures, raising an alarm about a man no one knows - only to find out that the person writing the blog had her facts wrong. What was wrong with her heart? Nothing? Something? That is only for God to judge. My point in bringing her up is that I, also, have reacted in alarm and anger in my life, saying and doing foolish things that I later regretted, things that did not show charity toward my fellow humans.

Matt Crockett wrote a blog post some time ago, in which he essentially commanded Denver, using God's authority (in vain/erroneously, in my opinion) to be our king. This was because Matt did not know that many of us did not need Denver to be a king, and would resent having one, because we were working with God, even if we listened to and believed every word coming out of Denver's mouth (believing every word is probably not wise, as he is a man and prone to error; I simply used that as an example). I reacted to the post uncharitably. I even emailed Denver, complaining about the post. I was so focused on that part of the post that I did not notice the good things in it.

Here is some insight I have gotten recently (quoted from messages I wrote on Skype to a couple of friends):

I think we each saw different parts. Kind of like the blind men and the elephant. I saw that part and was "offended" that he would command Denver to be my king when I was relishing my freedom from kings, thank you very much! I think I feared that if he was listened to I would be brought back into bondage. I've been in bondage to [exhusband], to the LDS Church, to the school system, to the judicial system, and to the medical system (albeit only when I was young, as far as the medical system goes), and there's no way in hell, on earth, or in heaven I wanted someone to push bondage on me again.

You, having no such issues, saw more expansively. You saw several good things in there that I saw later (after you pointed them out, most likely), but my fear of Matt having the power to force me into bondage to Denver ticked me off, and made me protest.

One of my friends replied:

Yet the bondage would have been of your own choice.

I replied:

But I couldn't see that. In fact, the insight I'm sharing here in regards to my own feelings was something I couldn't clearly see then. But now, today, I can clearly see that it was all my own issues. The problem was me, and whether or not Matt was out of line really made no difference - because, as you say, I still had a choice though I feared that choice would be taken away from me.

My point in sharing all this: We honor God by owning our weaknesses, and ceasing to be offended by others. We honor God, and teach our children to do so, by our willingness to own our offenses and not project them onto others, who are only acting as humans will act. We honor God by our willingness to forgive and to love.

Linguistics

I love languages. I love linguistics. My mother had a book about the history of the English language years ago. I gobbled it up.

I love languages. I dabble in them. I play with them. I don't know why I don't drop everything and just do languages all day. (I actually suspect it's because something that fun that I'm not paying a university a ridiculous sum of money to teach me, must be a wicked thing to do, a terrible waste of time.)

If I could have unlimited time to do anything I wanted, I would play with languages. Okay, let's get this out of the way: I am fluent in American English only. I play with French. I used to know Spanish better than I do. (I had a perfect accent when I read, but I had very little or no idea of what I was reading.) Once, I knew a little sign language (enough that a deaf person came up to me in a restaurant in Michigan to talk to me - alas, I didn't know enough to hold an intelligent conversation). I've exposed myself to Chinese, Swedish, Irish Gaelic, and Russian, as well as to English from the British Isles, Canada, Australia, NE United States, and SE United States.

I would also be part of a linguists' group that met for two or three hours once (or more) a week, just to speak to each other in languages we wanted to learn (or to learn better). I would be fluent in fifty languages. As an aside, I'd also adopt kids from all over the world, in all colors that humans come in, here, on this planet.

Oh, yeah. I make up languages, too. My oldest daughter and I would speak nonsense to each other when she was very, very young. She loved the game as much as I did. My cousins and I made up a backwards language, which had probably been invented millions of times before, in the history of this planet. I made up a code for words in L'Jn - the Novel. In one part, she meets some people and cannot speak their language. The reader can figure out what the people are saying if they are good at cryptograms (which I love to do, by the way).

And the ironic thing in all of this? I took a language test before I went on a mission for the church I belong to. It was geared to find out how fast a person can learn to pretend nonsense words are real words. In other words, you had a chance to learn to speak a non-existent language. The man who gave me the test assured me that everyone got at least xx points (I forget the number) in the test. I got a fraction of that. Needless to say, I didn't go to any foreign countries. But the thing is, there was no intelligence behind that test. Real languages have real intelligence behind it. Real people speak them. Even the languages I made up, had intelligence behind them, except for the gobbledygook that my daughter and I spoke to each other and, in that case, there was no need to pretend that meant anything.