Learning from Dog Poop

Visiting this lady

Lisa Hale (aka: Angel on Earth)

last weekend reminded me that the name of my blog insinuates I believe there is good and bad in life. Happy and sad. Incredible, fabulous, fantastic experiences, and things we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies. I also realized I have almost exclusively written about the positive lately. Time to talk about the negative...but not necessarily in a negative way.

This woman?

She either volunteered or was volunteered by her husband (the story is different depending on who you ask :)) to watch my brother and I (ages 2 1/2 & 8) when my mother died suddenly in 1994. Heaven knows my dad-who was left with two young children, a full-time job, and a bucket-load of grief-needed the help. She and her husband honestly saved the lives of a little family whose world had been turned upside-down. Subconsciously, I was learning for the first time that positive things can come from crap (for lack of a better term).

When my dad's brother died my freshman year of college, I learned again, more poignantly this time, the same lesson. My uncle the science teacher, happy and always full of life, who would answer the phone with something like: "Hey sweet girl! Did you know an elephant can fit on the tongue of a blue whale?!" had died. Amidst wrapping my mind around the concept of mortality, I flew to Texas the next summer to help my aunt and cousins make the drive to New Hampshire for our family reunion they had always made with their dad. IT WAS FABULOUS. I had an incredible time with their family and met my aunt for the first time. She had always been in my uncle's shadow (at least from my perspective). I talked to her SO MUCH-her personality came to life for me and I gained a great friend.

In summary, when terrible, almost impossibly difficult things like this happen,

I have always learned more than I would have had God allowed my life to be perfect or simply easy or entirely peaches and roses. ALWAYS! I am so thankful for each experience I have had in life. I learn something from every single one.

Purpose of Life

I know, kind of tackling a giant but certain events on Sunday got me thinkin'...

Sunday was a great day; it pretty much always is. I went to church and learned, listened, pondered, and conversed about great topics: like the love of God for each of us, scriptures, and the Priesthood (the power of God here on earth).

I am so blessed to have been raised by parents who did everything they could to provide us with a solid foundation, including our family's membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not only was I surrounded by people, friends, and associates of faith growing up who shared common values but I now attend church on a weekly basis (and activities on, well, pretty much a daily basis) with hundreds of people my age who I consider good friends. People who want the best for me, are happy when I succeed, empathize with me when life is less than fabulous, and definitely have my back!

This background and subsequent life experience has taught and enforced for me many eternal truths, not the least of which is the fact that my life-everyone's life-has a purpose far greater than the 75-80 measly, problem-laden, disease-ridden, difficult years we will live. I hope this is sufficient preface for what happened Sunday evening:

After a nice night with family and celebrating some friends' birthday, I got a phone call from a family member notifying me that my great-uncle (dad's dad's brother, if you follow) Charles had passed away. It wasn't particularly difficult or distressing news for me as he had lived in the midwest my entire life and I only met him on a couple of occasions going to or from our family vacations on the east coast. But I started thinking about the man he was and the life he had lived.

Devoted son, brother, husband, uncle, great-uncle, cousin, friend. A pilot-he loved telling and enchanting everyone with his flying stories. He served honorably in WWII. Tuberculosis took one of his lungs and eventually caused his death when he refused to take medication that would strengthen the one remaining lung against pneumonia which he got last fall.


It all made me a little sad as I thought about it. He died at home, alone (his wife died last year), in the middle of the night, his home care nurse only finding him later; he had previously made the decisions to donate his body to medical science (so there would be no burial, no place for the people who cared about him to visit in his honor) and not to hold a funeral service. So essentially, all of his hard work and dedication, his entire life, would come down to a 50-75 word obituary in the local paper??

No, I quickly reminded myself...he had influenced many people over the course of his life: lovingly caring for family members, impacting young, impressionable nieces and nephews with his colorful, slightly offbeat humor and personality. Not only that, but he still lives, despite his mortal life having ended. I believe very firmly in a life after this one and that we will have the chance to be reunited with the people we care about that have already died.

Uncle Charles lived the life he needed to, inspired the people he was supposed to, and learned the things necessary for him to now progress on a much bigger, eternal scale. Similarly, millions of people have lived lives of obscurity, not leaving a mark noteworthy for the world's standard, but I am so thankful to know each person's life is valuable and important.

God BLESS You!

A while back, I was waiting for the bus one night, 20 feet from a man with a megaphone yelling, "God BLESS you, God BLESS you, GOD BLESS YOU...," you get the idea. He threw in a few "receive the Holy Ghosts" and other assorted phrases too. At one point, a man yelled out the window of a passing car, "Get a job!" God bless you man turned and walked towards him, pointed his megaphone at the man's head through the open window and said, "Get a job?! This IS my job. To tell people: GOD BLESS YOU!"

How I wish I could have megaphone man around all the time, or at least be reminded more often of God's existence, His love for EACH of us, and how much He really does bless us! So what the heck, 'tis still the thankfulness season; here are a few more things I am grateful for. A little recognition of how much God blesses me:

• The chipper metro train drivers that so happily advise me to watch my step as the doors are closing and make me aware that at Metro Center, the doors will open on the right.
• The pizza my office bought yesterday for a staff meeting=free lunch!
• The extended family that lives 2.3 miles from me, allowing me a safe, warm place to go when I feel alone in big, scary DC
• The neighbors which live two doors down from me who decided 15 minutes before I walked by one night that they were giving away their entire living room set of furniture=free couches!!
• Kids
• The kitten my Grandma got recently (I swear she's drugged up on some type of illegal substance but she's fun to watch!)
• SNOW!
• Christmas lights
• My really stupid fish
• Friends who know just what to say and just when to call
• Chocolate-covered bacon
• Really good books (like The Book of Mormon-check it out!)

I could go on and on...so what are you grateful for? How has God blessed you?

Once A Runner

My recent goals to get in better shape and run on a regular basis recently collided with a trip to Borders (which was going out of business). Me+cheap books=bad! I picked up a New York Times bestseller called Once A Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.

So far, I have liked it. This quote stood out to me as I was reading about "great runners:"


Over the course of several years at Southeastern, as Denton's reputation grew, a number of undergraduate runners decided they would train with him, thinking to pick up on the Secret. A new man would show up the first day expecting all manner of horrific exertion, and would be stunned and giddy to find he could so easily make it through one of Denton's calendar days. Showing up the second morning at 6:30 he would be of good cheer, perhaps trying to imagine how he would handle the pressure of his inevitable fame. That day would also go well enough, but he would begin to notice something peculiar. There was no letup. The tempo was always moderate but steady. If a new guy decided to pick up the pace, that's where it stayed, whether he finished with the group or not. You showed off at your peril.

On the third day (assuming the new man made it that far) his outlook would begin to darken. For one thing, he was getting very, very tired. No particular day wore him out, but the accumulation of steady mileage began to take its toll. He never quite recovered fully between workouts and soon found himself walking around in a more or less constant state of fatigue-depression, a phase Denton called "breaking down." The new runner would find it more tedious than he could bear. The awful truth would begin to dawn on him: there was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to think about, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close. It would simply be the most difficult, heartrending process he would endure in the course of his life.


At that point most of them would drift away. They would search within themselves somewhere along a dusty ten-mile trail or during the bad part of a really gut-churning 440 on the track, and find some key element missing. Sheepishly they would begin to miss workouts, then stop showing up altogether. They would convince themselves: there must be another way, there has to be. The attrition rate was nearly a hundred percent.

This definitely applies to physical training. Indeed, my own running has begun to, ahem, slip, as it is usually either conveniently raining or I find something much more "important" to do. However, what immediately came to mind was a quote from the former prophet and president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gordon B. Hinckley (who was, in fact, quoting Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Unitarian minister). He said,


“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old time rail journey ... delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”   


Yep, running can be monotonous, draining, and extremely difficult...and so can our lives. But God gave us this opportunity at life to experience, to grow and to learn. I believe as we patiently endure whatever it is we are going through, we learn and grow. I also believe a loving Heavenly Father would not ask us to endure without providing wonderful blessings both now and in the eternities. So as we are running around the dusty track once again or bouncing up and down on the bumpy, noisy train, let us notice the blessings that too often are drowned out by the difficulties we are facing.