Josh's Froz-T-Freez Internet Drive-Inn

And now the rest of it falls into place. You’re never supposed to be just for yourself. I should have recognized that.

In 1840 the Prophet Joseph sent an epistle to the Twelve wherein he taught that “love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.” (History of the Church, 5: 227)

. . .

Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the pathway of discipleship. It comforts, counsels, cures, and consoles. It leads us through valleys of darkness and through the veil of death. In the end love leads us to the glory and grandeur of eternal life.

(Wirthlin, “The Great Commandment,” October 2007 General Conference)

This blog is getting a little churchy lately, I guess. I hope that’s not a problem. Just so you know, I have no plans to turn this into the General Conference quote of the day blog or something of that nature. The secular content will continue.

Re: My Scripture Study Quandaries

I stumbled upon this today, and although it isn’t exactly the whole answer, it is a start for me.

There is another thing you can do. You can study the word of God, not for yourself alone but to be an emissary of the Lord Jesus Christ to all the world. When you increase your power to teach the gospel, you are qualifying to help Heavenly Father in gathering His children. As you do that, another blessing will come. Should the need ever come in family life in this world, or in the world to come, to draw back lost sheep, you will have received more power than you may now recognize.

The Lord describes that wonderful blessing in Alma 13:6: “And thus being called by this holy calling, and ordained unto the high priesthood of the holy order of God, to teach his commandments unto the children of men, that they also might enter into his rest.”

(Eyring,“Faith and the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood,” April 2008 General Conference)

On Sunday I gave a talk in church. I didn’t know I would be giving a talk until Wednesday (I guess the original person canceled). I spent a big chunk of Friday and Saturday studying for it, but of course wasn’t able to pull everything together until I was abut to run out the door at 10:20 A.M., Sunday.

While I was studying I felt like a total mess and I wasn’t sure what I should focus on (which is why I kept studying), but once I had given the talk I felt pretty good about it. I realized that a big part of my feeling good has to do with the fact that I really burrowed into the scriptures and learned some new things as I studied my topic out of desperation. I haven’t been good at studying the scriptures lately (well, okay, for quite a long time). I guess it is much easier for me to be motivated in scripture study when I have a specific topic and a specific need to share or teach, rather than just studying out of a generic duty or curiosity or in the hope of getting some sort of abstract positive feeling just from words on a page. It turns out that the scriptures aren’t often very useful when not applied or shared, which is why I don’t get all fired up about them except when in my extremity.

So how can I change this? Can I motivate myself to stockpile knowledge and insights for some eventual teaching/sharing need? Can I fake the feeling? Am I intuiting that I am soon to be called to teach Sunday School or something of this nature as a motivation to study the scriptures? Maybe I need to have more faith that the scriptures can apply to my life and my situations right now. Maybe I need to learn what to study. Maybe I need to be putting myself in more situations and thinking and speaking more of the gospel in my life. Anyway, any thoughts? If anyone out there in bloggie land has any suggestions for scripture study motivators/methods, feel free to chime in. It would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading.

One of the weird things that you don’t anticipate about marriage is the immediately impending and seemingly insurmountable task of sending out thank you notes to everyone who gave you a wedding gift of some kind. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am extremely thankful for all gifts that were given to us, some from people we don’t even really know. We were blessed in a multitude of ways by kind people in ways we never anticipated or expected. But the ridiculous scope of the thank you note project is in all soberness somewhat of a burden, and, as a newly conscientious wedding gift-giver has made me think twice. In my post-nuptial consciousness, I recently gave $20 to a friend as a wedding gift, now thinking that, rather than giving them help in starting a new household or some money to do something fun, it would cover at least a small portion of the couple’s soon-to-be-incurred cost of buying thank you notes and the stamps to mail them. Unfortunately, there is no way to compensate them for the time they will spend creating these thank you notes, other than to ghostwrite for them, and that is something I’m not willing to do.

We started on the process about a month ago (already a belated effort, I’m sure many would say) and we cranked out a fair number, but never came close to finishing all of them. And then we kept putting it off. It has been weighing on me, though, and last night we picked it up again. To our dismay, upon opening our materials we discovered several notes to dear friends and relatives (you are probably reading this right now, actually) that I thought I had sent off a month ago, sitting in their envelopes not yet addressed or stamped. AAARRGGGH! People I have seen since then, and assumed they had received my wonderful and precious thank you note. Oh well. And then as we started, I pulled out a card and wrote a heartfelt note to a relative, addressed and stamped it, only to discover upon consulting our check-off list that I apparently had already sent them a thank you note…or had I? Is it worse to send someone two thank you notes, or risk the chance that you never actually sent them a thank you note at all? The whole thing starts to seem incredibly silly and ritualistic and you wonder whether it’s even worth bothering, especially when you pull out a gift card that was signed by twenty different people in your parents’ old ward and you realize that this portends twenty separate handwritten thank you notes and twenty stamps. And it takes me a long time to write these notes, because if I’m going to bother to write it I’m going to try to say something sincere and decent. Which is also why there are those ones I keep skipping.

I’ve never been much of a gift giver for weddings up to this point, and I’m not a visiting teacher, so I’ve only received a couple of thank you notes that I can think of in my life. I mean, they were nice to receive, I guess, but I was heedless of the toil and sorrow that may have gone into their creation. I have to wonder what kind of goofy person sits around waiting to receive thank you notes from people. Do they have a little Excel spreadsheet of gifts given and the date? These people are out there. Gin actually got an email from one such person, checking to make sure that we had, in fact, received the wedding gift she had sent to us. Bizarre. These are the people that rightfully should be skipped. On the other hand, one couple wrote in their card that we shouldn’t worry about sending them a thank you note, and for that thoughtfulness and common sensefulness I feel like they deserve a personalized thank you more than pretty much anyone else. The fact is that the people you really want to thank probably aren’t the ones expecting to be thanked. Such a tangle of propriety, friendship, sincerity and insincerity, expected reciprocity, logic games, and laziness. Is this really what our loved ones wanted? It’s certainly not what I would wish on any one

Maybe I sound like an ingrate and like I’m making too big a deal of this, and maybe I am. But it’s not like we got married so as to participate in some ritual in which people give us a bunch of stuff. Far from it. When going over who I wanted to invite and who I should invite, I was always hesitant that an invitation would be seen as a solicitation. It was entirely calculated that we did not give any indication on our invitations that we were registered anywhere. We only after the fact succumbed and registered under duress because people started hounding us about it incessantly. Propriety demanded the big reception and the myriad invites and the registration and got us the possibly begrudged gifts in the first place, and propriety yet propels the process forward with begrudged gratitude. If someone interpreted our invitation as a call for presents rather than a call for their presence at our wedding, I guess that’s their problem. And if right now they are sitting at home looking at an empty cell on their spreadsheet, I don’t know that receiving my thank you note is truly going to give them what they need. And yet, I am still impelled to push forward.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cards to write. And, no, in the time it’s taken me to write this, I could not have come anywhere close to finishing the notes.

So, it turns out that one of the million things that is fun about being married is listening to each others’ music collections. I don’t know if that’s fun for everyone who gets married, but it’s fun for us. We actually started this long before we were married. For example, we made mixes of sorts for each other while we were dating, which I then attempted to merge and expand into a wedding reception mix, which we in fact used at our wedding reception. But now things are getting more entangled, as they should. She brings things home for me from the library. I sometimes try to think of new things she might like. We listen to things together. I’ve desired to purchase certain albums that were on her computer because I have a fetish for owning the actual CD. Okay, so maybe I already have purchased a couple such CDs (honest music nerd confession).

What I’ve been delighted to notice through this process is that Gin has a lot of music that I have been interested in or curious about but never actually investigated, probably because it was too “folky” or too “feminine” or too something to grab my attention away from my usual obsessions. So far, she’s opened my eyes to the likes of K.T. Tunstall, David Gray, Patti Griffin, Hem, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (I’m not kidding! It turns out that since the old Hymns of Faith record from 1960-whatever, the one where Bruce R. McConkie guest raps on “I Believe in Christ,” their arrangements and song selection have actually gotten a bit more interesting, but in my silliness I never gave them a chance.) On the other hand, at least at one point Gin said that she hasn’t had the impulse to find new music in a while because she said that the music I have is fulfilling that need. She is now enjoying the likes of the White Stripes, Beck, and Radiohead, thanks to me. I think she may even be rethinking her dislike for U2. I’m not sure if that’s a fair trade-off — I may be corrupting her tastes, while she is improving mine.

And right now, I’m listening to the Sundays. Years and years ago, in my first naive junior high acquaintance with what was then called “alternative” music, I heard “Here’s Where the Story Ends” on the old X96 radio a few times. I liked it, but I never knew who the artist was. It’s troubling to think back on how hard it was to find music before the Internet. Years later, I somehow was aware that the song was by a band called the Sundays, but at that point I never bothered to check them out. I dismissed it as too much like the Cranberries, or some such nonsense. (More like the other way around, but anyway.)

But suddenly this beautiful little album pops out of my wife’s old travel CD folder, and I’ve listened to it at least three or four times in the past few days. It’s not like my life would have been vastly different if I had listened to Reading, Writing and Arithmetic all those years ago. It’s just a good little album, nothing that will change one’s life or even one’s musical worldview. It’s very much in keeping with a lot of other music that I have listened to over the years. But it’s nice that my wife has opened my eyes to things I didn’t bother with before, or was afraid to try. We don’t like everything that is in each others’ music collections, but’s it’s nonetheless an enjoyable process, and music’s just one little thing. Marriage makes it a lot easier to expand your experiences and have the guts to try new things. At least my marriage does. Last month, we went together and donated blood for the first time in either of our lives, and neither of us fainted. We tried the Opera (and left at intermission). We went to our ward wood project and I learned how to chop wood with a good old-fashioned ax, which was hard, fun work — without her encouragement I would have probably stayed home and felt stupid. Gin is getting to church on time almost every week now. This coming month we are going to do some actual honest backpacking, and we are going to hike Timp, both things that Gin has done but I never have. I’m starting to show Gin all the obscure dirt roads I know that are fun to explore – the fact that we both think they are fun to explore is what makes the difference, I guess.

I feel that one of the idiosyncratic usages of this blog deserves a slight explication, since I continue to use it:

In his poem that prophesied of the first 28 years of my life¹, T.S. Eliot wrote, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” (45-46), and later, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” (122)

I just decided to change it to a beet.

The beet is a quiet, unremarkable root vegetable. It grows beneath the ground, and someone must dig it out. It has a strong flavor and a rich, deep color that can stain. It actually has a lot of sweetness to it. It’s not everyone’s favorite. In fact, it may not be anyone’s favorite. But still, the beet waits patiently in the cool of the cellar for its time to come. I like it in salads and on hamburgers.

New things will be coming shortly. Enough with the photograph cop-outs.