Come, See the Miracle

San Bernadino shooting yesterday.  When I first saw the story I got angry.  Not again.  More lives lost.  More hate.  More pain.  More sorrow.  And the media and the politicians spin it.  We need gun control!  We need to close our borders to refugees!  But clearly the problem is here, or there wouldn't be more than a dozen people dead in a city that is probably more like mine that I realize. Someone told me that the solution is to arm everyone.  If all the good people have guns too, maybe the madness can be stopped.  But it's only a matter of time until the madness overtakes us all.  The perpetrators of these horrific events are human, after all.  And we all have human frailties.  So the solution doesn't lie in relying on the goodness of the people you arm.  That goodness is fallible, corruptible.  There is truly only one solution: Alma 31:5--"And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had

Home school has been a challenge lately.  I thought--years ago, when I was planning to home school all my children--that I had it all figured out.  That I understood what it would take for me as the mom to teach my children life-lessons AND acedemics. That I would be able to handle--even predict--the challenges that lay ahead. Not so much. I feel like a complete novice.  The baby steps as I go through this learning process are difficult, because I expect to be immediately successful at everything.  Often, when I'm not, I give up.  That's not an option in this situation.  For whatever reason, my daughter needs to be home, and for whatever reason, I need this experience with her.  It is heartwarming and bittersweet to hear her pray in the mornings, thanking Heavenly Father for this home school opportunity, knowing that at some point during the day she will probably melt down and scream at me because she doesn't like what she's learning.  I can hardly blame her.  She i

Our home school adventure has begun again.  I guess it never really ended, since all of the kids were home all summer.  Like it or not, believe it or not, home IS school.  But this is official home school, the file-an-affidavit-with-the-district kind. And I've been dreading it. We started home school for our 3rd daughter last year, mid-way through the school year.  After fighting several times a week every week about whether or not she would even go to school that day, I finally went to the Lord in prayer (though not for the first time on this subject).  The fighting between us couldn't go on.  It was destroying our relationship, and driving the Spirit out of our home. I told God that the only solution I could come up with was to withdraw her from public school and teach her at home.  For the first time in nine years (which is when my desire to home school began), I felt His approval. It wasn't easy.  I didn't do a good job of it.  I also had a baby at home, and

I have been taught to pray all my life.  I have been taught that God hears and answers prayers.  I have been told what an answer to prayer feels like, and because I have taken questions to God in prayer, I also have personal experience with receiving answers.  I know what an answer to prayer feels like because I have experienced it first hand. I have also struggled with prayer.  I don't always pray as regularly as I ought to.  Sometimes I pray as fervently as I know how, truly desiring an answer, and I don't feel like I get one.  Or I fervently pray, feel like I receive the answer, and then a short time later, the answer seems to change.  The answers that change have been the most challenging to my faith, but I have learned a little something about those answers and about prayer, and it's something that I've learned because I stuck with it. Years ago, about the time my oldest child was three, I started investigating home schooling.  I had been introduced to the conc

I have some pretty big biases in my life.  I have a "crazy right-wing" tendency, which I really have to work sometimes to shut off.  I was raised in a family where the more traditional view of things was not dismissed, necessarily, but also not blindly accepted.  As I have grown, I have discovered that when I "research" an issue, I usually am not doing anything of the kind.  I am really looking over a whole lot of information, and the pieces of information that resonate with me are the ones that support my already firmly established opinion. A particularly difficult and firmly-held belief of mine was challenged recently, in a way that didn't address my bias, exactly, but did bring a question into focus for me: is my way of thinking about this issue correct? I had to pray about it.  It was a hard prayer, because there was a real chance that I had been wrong about this belief.  It was an attitude that had been passed down for generations, and changing my mind