My Wonderful Father

My dad passed away Sunday night at about 11pm. It was pretty unexpected. He had gone in last Tuesday for Gastric Bypass surgery which went really well according to his surgeon. He came home from the hospital on Thursday. We all knew going into that surgery that there was a chance he could die, but not a very big one--seeing as how his surgeon has done over a thousand of them and never made a mistake. When he came home we all assumed that that meant he would recover and he would be able to live a better life because of it. But on Saturday he started having extra pains and his wound began oozing green stuff. After the convincing of my mom, ex-bishop, and a nurse in my ward he finally agreed to let us take him to the hospital. By the time they got him to the ER he was completely unresponsive. The doctors at the ER were able to bring him around then and they said they had to get him into surgery right then or he would die and he nodded his consent. The repair surgery (to repair a hole in his intestines) went well, but the surgeon said that living through the surgery isn't the hard part. People usually die after this surgery because of pneumonia or heart failure. After the surgery he was given medication to paralyze and sedate him so that he wouldn't cough or anything that could mess up what they had done since they had to leave his wound open. Then it was just a balancing act--giving him different medications to help with blood pressure and other things and pushing fluids and trying to get the right amount of everything going in and out. At one point he was hooked up to twenty-three IVs with a whole lot of things also coming out of him. but eventually he slipped into a non-medication induced coma and then flat-lined. They worked to get his heart going again for twenty minutes but then we told them to stop. That was Sunday night.

But I know that it was the right time for him to go. I've felt really peaceful through this whole thing and through all the tears. He left on probably the greatest spiritual high of his life. In the past few weeks he has been through the temple with my two sisters who are going on missions, seen my brother married in the temple, and had the peace of knowing that my oldest sister is finally married to a very great guy. I don't think he'd ever been so happy. He was excited for the surgery too. He went into it knowing that if he was supposed to live, a drunk could do the surgery and it would be fine, or if he was supposed to die, he could have the best surgeon in the world do it and die. He wasn't able to do too much in his state of health prior to the surgery and he knew that if all went well he would be able to have a much better life and be a better father (not that he wasn't already awesome) and if it didn't he would be better in the spirit world where he could still help us--where he could go on the missions with my sisters and help all of the rest of us through life.

My classes rock. I get to read a lot of kids books, do little kid dances, and create a picture book based off of a kid's song. Basically, I like homework. Everyone should be jealous :)

Update on my family: Zach is married and on his honeymoon, Brooke is leaving on Oct. 7th on her way to her mission in Dallas, Texas, and Kami received her call to Montevideo, Uruguay and will be leaving on January 7th and going to the Argentina MTC! I am still doing nothing, but at least I am having fun in the process.

Tonight wasn't the best night ever since I went to the football game and we lost 58-24 to Florida State, but attending the game in and of itself was still fun. And it's bound to get better tonight since I get to go home in 35 minutes and watch Wednesday's episode of So You Think You Can Dance, which I am completely addicted to. Yes, it's that bad. It's just like Kayla and Kupono's Mia Michaels dance last season :)

1st Day of School

So here I am at school--sitting in the library on my computer. I always get really enthusiastic at the beginning of a new school year and this year has been no different. I got up on time, got ready, and left for school planning on being an hour early in order to get everything situated (such as my locker and creating pages to take notes on for each of my classes). I got to the library at about 8:00 and expected to have to hurry to get everything done before my 9:00 PE class only to find that I'm much quicker at getting things in order than I anticipated. To fill the extra time I decided to check my schedule online to make sure I have the right room number written down on my paper schedule and discover that my 9:00 PE class doesn't start until the second block--that is, it doesn't begin until October 21st and here I am at 9:00am on August 31st with nothing to do until I have to work at noon. I don't have any homework to work on since I haven't actually been to any classes yet and I can't even look at what I have coming up because I don't have a syllabus for any of my classes. Maybe I'll go watch Arrested Development in the LRC :)

Reset

I've decided that the reset button can fix almost anything: the computer, the internet, my cell phone, etc. Summer is like a reset button. I get completely stressed out and tired during the school year, but I'm ready to go again. Even with the stress of paying tuition and buying books I'm excited!! My classes for this upcoming semester sound like so much fun for the most part! They are: PE (where I actually get to go to an elementary school and teach PE), Children's Literature (which is the one I'm most excited for!!!!), Math (which I could do without, but it's okay because it's basically my only really academic class and it's even just teaching you how to teach math to elementary school kids), Rhythm and Dance, Art, Music, and Drama in the Elementary Classroom. Yep, I know, my schedule rocks. I'm also trying to add the advanced writing class for El Ed majors but so far I'm not having much luck. If I am able to add it, it will bring my credit hours up to 18. I'm a little nervous about that seeing as how the university won't even let you go above 18 credit hours. But I think I should be able to cope since my classes should at least be interesting. And if I'm not able to register for the writing class, I won't have any classes on Friday!!! Plus, I only work on Mon, Wed, Thurs, and Sat so I would have Fridays completely free!! The only problem I have with my work schedule is on the Saturdays when there are home football games. I bought my all-sports pass! and working on Saturdays makes it hard to go to the games. I'm crossing my fingers that someone I work with will be willing to cover for me so I can go!!!! It's going to be an amazing year! Or at least that's the way I'm thinking right now! We'll see how I feel in a month or so. :)

I find it really ironic that I almost change the background for my blog more often than I post on it. But, what ya gonna do? I'm not much of a writer and my life isn't all that exciting--so there's not much to write about anyway. The reason I'm actually writing something now is because of upcoming events in my family. None of which have to do with me. There are two upcoming weddings and two people going on missions. I hardly ever date so the weddings definitely aren't me and I'm still just 20 and therefore, not old enough for a mission. Shayla and Zach are the ones getting married and their fiances are, respectively, Dana and Danielle. I am sooo excited for both of them!! Zach and Danielle are getting married on September 18th and Shayla and Dana don't yet have a date. Kami and Brooke are the ones going on missions. Brooke already has her call--to the Dallas, Texas Spanish speaking mission!! and she leaves on October 7th. Kami hasn't turned in her papers yet but she is going to soon! She's just waiting on the rest of her dental work and her physical. I'm so excited for them!!!!!!!!!! I'm also a little sad because they are all going to be leaving me and I'll be stuck home with David and McKay--who I love, but sometimes I just need a girl around. Me and mom will just have to "cha-cha" without them!

In other news (this one actually has a little bit to do with me surprisingly), the two desks that I work at are splitting. I'm pretty frustrated with this development because it means that most of the people I have been working with I will no longer be able to work with. I really like my co-workers and a lot of my favorite people will be working at the LRC desk while I will be working at the Circulation desk. However, I will be able to get to know some new people! Since most of the people decided to work at the LRC desk, Circ has to hire all the new people. I like getting to know new people so it should at least be fun in that way--plus I still get to work with some of the old people too :) Speaking of the LRC, I recently discovered the existence of the LRC blog. It's called LRC: the blog and I was reading it the other day and one of the posts made me laugh uncontrollably. Cheryl, one of the people I work with, wrote it and she was talking about checking headphones out to people and how they follow you from the computer, to the drawer where the headphones are stored, and back to the computer again almost every time. She called it the headphones tango. It was really funny, although it might not be that funny to anyone who hasn't witnessed the spectacle approximately 500 times.

EFY

A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to EFY at the University of Utah as a counselor. It was AWESOME!!! I went to EFY twice when I was the age to go and was really sad when I couldn't go anymore because I was paying for my trip to Central America instead. But the EFY office called me up and asked me to be a counselor! It was really cool to actually be paid to go to EFY--sure, it's more work than just going as a regular person, but you still get the amazing experience! The theme this year is "Be Thou An Example" and the session director was Brad Wilcox. I believe he was actually the session director for one of the years I went as a participant, but I'll have to look that up to be sure. He is such an amazing speaker and SO funny!!! There were three teachers for the various classes (which I thought was a little weird because when I went to EFY we had twelve or something--although the BYU sessions are a lot bigger than the U of U sessions) Brother Diamond, Brother Smith, and Sister Welch. They were really good! I loved their classes when I was able to go. Plus, Brother Diamond was from England so he had a cool accent :). I had twelve girls in my group and there were two other groups in my company--one other group of ten girls and one group of 16 boys. My co-counselors were Matt and Amelia and they were so much fun! Amelia was actually a girl I went to high school with! One sad thing about Matt though was that on Tuesday (which also happened to be his birthday) he got sick and had to be sent home. Which is sad enough on its own but that also meant that me and Amelia had to control all three groups without too much help (although one of the building counselors took over the boys' devotionals so we didn't have to worry about that). But one major problem came on game night. Our group was meeting after dinner to walk down to the institute building but three boys weren't coming. And, being girls, me and Amelia couldn't go into their dorms to get them out. We had to track down a guy counselor to go in to get them and, begrudgingly, they came out. But then on the way down they started running away from the group to go back to their rooms and I had to chase them down and stop them. Then, when we were at the institute building, we discovered they were gone again. We had like half of the coordinators/building counsellors trying to find them and eventually they showed up. But aside from that we didn't really have any problems--even those boys were really good most of the time, not to mention funny. Also, one of my girls had a birthday while we were there--Baylee--that was fun. She's so cute! And I know this is random, but it's one of the things that sticks out the most to me--the dances were SO hot! It's really quite disgusting if you stop and think about it because not only was it hot, it was humid! And just where do you think that humidity was coming from? Answer: the massive amounts of sweat coming off everyone in the gym which consequently had no air circulation whatsoever. But it was still fun--although I was still glad when I had dance duty which meant that I got to go and guard the exits for the building and get out of the stifling, disgusting heat. I'll try to remember to upload a picture of my group, but I haven't put it on my computer yet

Family

This weekend I have had the opportunity to really contemplate about the subject of family. On Saturday, April 11th my grandpa Don Walter Kleinman passed away. It was a blessing for him that he was able to go pretty quickly and without too much pain, and it has also proven to be a blessing for my family as well. We have all drawn closer together and been kinder to each other in the few days since his death. It has also been a happy time anticipating the arrival of my extended family from Phoenix--some of whom will be here later today with the rest following tomorrow. Also, my sister Brooke flew in last night from California and will be here until Saturday! I love having our family all together like this. My family is the most important thing to me in the world--I would rather do things with them at home than go out with friends. And that is one of the main reasons that I love having the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my life. Through Him we can all live eternally as a family. Having been sealed together in the temple for time and all eternity, there is not much that could stop us from being together forever. It's a very comforting thought during this time of Grandpa's death. When my family went to visit my grandma and tell her the news she seemed to take it very well and I know that is a product of the comfort of knowing that they can be together forever.

Temples, Temples, Temples...

It seems like every time I hear a lesson of a spiritual nature lately it has something to do with temples. Some of these are to be expected, since I'm in a family history class, and we've been studying the portions of the Doctrine and Covenants that have to do with revelations about the temples, but I hear about them from more than just those two classes. This past weekend was the Latter-day Saint General Conference and I was surprised at how many of the speakers talked about the temples. Maybe it's just because I've been learning so much about the temples lately that I noticed it more than before, but it was a recurring lesson-learned throughout General Conference for me. There was a time in my life when I went to the temple every week with my sisters and a few of my friends. We would wake up early before we had school and go to the temple before we had to get to school. Despite the early hour we had to go in order to be able to make it back for school on time, I really loved attending the temple regularly. I felt the blessings of attending the temple in my life as well--I just felt like my life was going more smoothly than it would have otherwise. I knew the benefits that would come to my life through regular temple attendance, but I didn't fully understand the extent of the blessings. While I've been learning about the temple this past little while I have realized more of the blessings that can come from going to the temple--not only personal blessings but more about the blessings that we can bring to those who have died and still need their temple ordinances performed for them. The blessings are literally endless. A couple of years ago I went to Central America with a seminary group for a Book of Mormon lands tour. While we were there we attended a ward conference in Guatemala. With what little Spanish I am able to understand this is what I got from their Sacrament Meeting: You should do everything in your power to be able to go to the temple (whether he was talking about for the first time or on a regular basis I didn't catch)--even if it means going without meals to be able to save up money for transportation to the temple. This ward is located only a few hours away from the temple in Guatemala City but it was still quite a sacrifice for them to be able to make the trip to Guatemala City in order to attend the temple. And here I am within fifteen or so minutes of two temples with many others nearby and I am no longer attending regularly. I get caught up in life and miss out on all of the wonderful blessings of the temple--when others would make great sacrifices to even be able to go once. I think that's one reason why the messages of the temple have been hitting me so strong lately--I need to make better use of them.

Protection

Over the past week and a half I have had many events occur in my life that were a little out of the ordinary for me. For one thing, I went with my sister and two of my neighbor friends to visit my other sister in California. We drove through the night on our way there and we drove through a blizzard on the way back. Then again, this past weekend I drove with some other people in my family and met my sister from California halfway between us to exchange cars, becuase I am buying her car from her. On the way there we had to deal with tremendous wind--wind which had blown over three semis that we passed. And on top of that I had a lot of end of the semester schoolwork to do. But somehow I made it through it all. Throughout these experiences it struck me again and again how important this life is. We're here for a purpose and when we keep that purpose in view (whether it be increasing in knowledge through schoolwork or building a testimony of the Gospel) the Lord will take care of us in whatever way we need. I saw that when we had troubles on the road. Those two drives were the two scariest drives I've ever been on, but I felt protected the whole time.

Eternal Symbols

This past week I studied varous religious paintings in the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University. The details and the symbols used in these paintings blew me away when the educator from the museum taught my class about some of them. I've seen these paintings many times before, but every time I see them I get some new meaning from them. It's easy to miss significant details in paintings (at least for me) and when those details are overlooked, you miss part of the message the artist was trying to portray. One of my favorite paintings I studied (which I actually only really studied on a previous visit to the museum) is the one above. The main details I got right away: the chairs (one standing upright the other tipped over) and the red and white cloths. It represents Christ's atonement and our final judgement. Christ is represented by the upright chair and the white cloth because he is pure. We are the other chair and the red cloth. But as said in Isaiah 53, "Though your sins be like scarlet they shall be as white as snow." Through Christ our cloth can become white--we can become purified when we submit ourselves to His will. I needed some prompting for some other details though. At first I didn't even notice the faint circle encompassing the whole scene. The circle can represent many things, from eternity to inclusion. Simply put: Christ's atonement is for everyone and is eternal. One final detail I will talk about is the dark rectangle behind the chairs. At first glance it appeared to be just that to me, but after looking a little closer it looked like a tunnel which you had to pass by the chair to enter. This suggests that our final judgment once this life is over is not the end. We can live forever through Christ--for eternity. I love this painting and I'm sure there are so many things I can still glean from its symbols.

Personal Histories

On Saturday (Feb. 27th) I attended the Church History Symposium at BYU for my Doctrine and Covenants class. A lot of what the speakers at the symposium talked on was more technical than I really understood, but when Elder Marlin Jenson spoke at the end it struck me that a large part of the history of the church is the history of its members. I feel like I need to write my personal history--as much as I dislike writing, I feel like it's something I should do. I've begun the process a little bit because of my family history class, but there is still so much that I need to do. We are required to write about five episodes of our lives for my family history class, but that's not quite enough. A daily journal is the ideal way for me to do this, but I've never been good at writing regularly. The closest I have to it is this blog and I don't say too much about my life in here...so I have a lot of work to do. One line from Elder Jenson's talk really stood out to me. He said, "If God has commanded it, do it." It's as simple as that. We have been commanded to keep a journal/create a personal history and we just have to do it. It's going to be hard for me, but I'm going to try!!

The Publishing of the Scriptures

We didn't have Doctrine and Covenants this past week because 1)there was a holiday and 2)he gave us a day to visit the Crandall Printing Museum. I didn't visit the museum because I already had for his class last year. It is extremely interesting and I encourage anyone who can to go and check it out. They take you through the history of the printing press, beginning with the Gutenberg press, up until the present time. I had never realized how detailed a process it was to create the printing press in the begining--what with the casting of the letters and getting them to face the correct direction, the consistency of the ink, and the organization of the letters into pages, etc. Having grown up with printers hooked into computers I never appreciated the process of printing before. Aside from the invention of the printing press in all its complexity, it also never occured to me how perfectly everything worked out for the printing of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of Covenants. The church was lucky to have access to a printing press in the the places where it was needed in order to bring forth the scriptures. Because of the invention of the printing press, people all over the world have been able to read the words of the prophets, old and new. It made access to the scriptures affordable to the common person. Without it, the gospel would not have spread as it has and there would be people all over the world who would not have the joys associated with reading the scriptures.

Enduring Life's Trials

This past week we studied the sections of the Doctrine and Covenants where Joseph is in Liberty Jail. Unfortunately I wasn't actually able to make it to either of the class periods when we talked about it, and I feel like I really needed it. However, I did read the sections and I gleaned one great comfort: No matter how hard my life is, there are those who have endured much worse. Before sitting down to write this I had been extremely stressed out from forgetting to take a test for one of my classes and not knowing if I could make it up--even partially. I came to the realization that I had forgotten it in the middle of a BYU basketball game and immediately started feeling sick and had to leave the game so I could try to deal with it. I came home crying from all the stress. But when I sat down to write this it all came into perspective. I've never had to deal with any trials that even compare to what Joseph Smith and others have had to deal with. They've been torn away from everything they value and they still lived their lives diligently. I can find comfort in my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ just as they did.

The Pattern of Cleanliness

As I talked about in a previous blog, we have to become clean--and continue in that cleanliness in order to receive our divine inheritance. In our class this week we talked about the temple and some of the ordinances done in the temple. Having never been through the temple I haven't witnessed or received any of the ordinances which take place there, but from what I have learned about them I can see that many of them are representative of Christ's ministry to the people in his time. He baptized people, washed their feet, and pronounced them clean--along with many other things during His time. Many of the accounts describe people being made clean and/or whole through their faith in Him. The great thing about the temple, at least in my opinion, is that we can still have the same cleansing relationship with Him even though He is not currently here in a bodily form. We can still follow Him and receive the blessings He gave during His lifetime.

Zion

In Doctrine and Covenants last week we covered the concept of Zion or the New Jerusalem. Joseph Smith and the early saints began to establish this New Jerusalem in Missouri, but they were driven out. Why? There is no single answer, but a great part of it is simply that they were not living a Zion-like life. Zion is a place where the people are united in their hearts and minds and don't sin. Members began pouring into Jackson County--contrary to the directions of the Prophet--and instead of putting all their efforts into building up the house of the Lord once they themselves had been settled enough, they worked towards their own personal (and unnecessary) gain. They were not united, in heart and mind, with the wishes and directions of God and so God allowed them to be persecuted and driven out of the land. Zion is meant to be a place where everyone can live in happiness, but we are the ones who are going to have to make it that way. It won't happen over night, but it will come if we unite ourselves with the will of our Heavenly Father. When we worry about pleasing Him first, he will take care of us and help us reach this state.

Divine Inheritance

This past week in my Doctrine and Covenants class we talked a lot about exaltation and what it means to receive it. Exaltation is different than salvation and eternal life. While everyone can receive salvation from their sins and be resurrected to an eternal being, exaltation takes you even further. Everyone in this life makes mistakes--with the exception of Jesus Christ--and with those mistakes we lost our divine inheritance. Jesus, being the firstborn and only begotten son of our Heavenly Father, is really the only one who ever had full rights to exaltation. When we become members of the church and remain faithful and persevere, striving to become perfect, we can become like adopted sons and daughters of Christ and enter into the "Church of the Firstborn" where we become "partakers of the glory of the same that I have" and essentially are the firstborn. Through Christ's atonement we can actually receive a higher degree of glory than we would have before the fall of Adam. Without the atonement Christ alone would hold the role of the firstborn and we would be excluded from the blessings of exaltation. God the Father couldn't die for us and give us this gift on his own because he is an immortal exalted being already. Christ took on the role of our savior and for that His father says of him, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." A Greek translation of this sentiment is "This is my Son, my Son whom I lovest." He loves His son and is so well pleased in Him because of the love He shows for us in doing what His father couldn't--of course, on top of the great love He already had for His Son. With this divine action, we can all receive exaltation and our divine inheritance.

Another Blog Assignment

I am taking another religion class this semester from the professor I took New Testament from last semester. This time it's Doctrine and Covenants but we still have the blogging assignment so I will once again be writing blogs for a religion class. I gained a lot from this experience last semester and, while I do not like writing in general, am looking forward to writing them again.

But other than that piece of information, here's a few updates on my boring life: This past week we celebrated four family birthdays--Kami, Shayla, David, and Alexis' birthdays. It was great! For Kami's birthday we did a little bit of pampering and I got my first pedicure!! It was wonderful!!!! It comes highly recommended. We finalized our dates for our annual St. George parade of homes trip! We are going on Febuary 12th-16th and I am sooo excited!!! The only problem we didn't realize was going to be a problem is that it's the same weekend as our Stake Conference. Hopefully my mom can find someone to take notes for her so she doesn't miss the messages! Me and Kami also found out that we have some major kid-proofing to do in our bedroom. We had one of the kids she nannies take a nap in our room and he ripped the covers of some of my favorite books and threw the contents of my jewelery box all over the room--along with some other things that got messed up. Anyone who knows me knows that my books are some of my favorite things. My brothers David and McKay especially know this because they have returned books to me with the covers worn out a little or with some of the pages a little dirty and they know how mad I got at them. I was so mad I almost cried when I walked in and saw the ruined books. I began the task yesterday of taping them back together as seamlessly as possible since I can't replace them but they still are not looking too great. (You can tell I have a strong opinion on something if I keep going on and on about it--especially if it's something that most people wouldn't consider that big of deal.)

On a happier note I love my new job!!! Given my love of books it's not surprising. I work at the circulation desk and the LRC desk. The circulation desk is where people check out books and the LRC desk is where people go if they need to check out a movie or CD or something--they're kept behind the desk so we have to get them for the people who need them. I love it!!! I just finished the library new employee training so I've already got a 10 cent raise!! The pay wasn't that great to begin with and it still is less than I was getting doing early-morning custodial last year but the other benefits of the job definitely make up for that in my opinion!! At least this job has something to do with what I want to do for my future career.