When I was younger, a lot younger, I had an older guy tell me "all women are crazy" as advice. At the time I thought he was an idiot (to be blunt), but now I think he just didn't phrase it right. From a guy's perspective, all women aren't guys and don't think like guys. That doesn't make them crazy, so much, as make them women.

Kind of like my wife stopping sometimes and saying "you are such a guy" when I've acted normally (but "wrong" from a woman's perspective). For example, ask a guy to do something and he does it. A woman almost always will think he hasn't because he hasn't done the related things. A guy doesn't seem them as part of the same thing (and if the woman asking him to do whatever the task is also asks him to do the other jobs, what she would call "the rest of the job" he will happily do that too).

Such as "please fold the clothes" means also to put them up after folding and put the fresh sheets on the bed after folding them. It is amazing how much happier you can make young couples by teaching the wives to ask their husbands to do the other related things and by teaching guys that their wife means "do a, b & c" -- once they understand it, they are much happier doing what what make things go well. Twenty years of their wife saying "you didn't do 'a'" won't work. Because they did do "a." Five minutes of saying, "your wife may say 'a' but she means 'a, b & c'" works like a charm.

Anyway, are all women crazy? No more than all men are crazy. But, with work and patience they can not only love each other, they can make each other happy.

Father's day has often been very hard for me. I felt such a sense of personal failure at the deaths of each of the three daughters we buried. I would ask myself the question: "What good am I if I failed to keep my children safe and well" and asked it every Father's day. I had made my children the function to measure myself against, and with their deaths the value of my life seemed voided.

As time passes, I take so much joy in the children Win and I have in our home now that I am regaining hope in life. This June 19th it was good to wake up and see my daughters and to be not a survivor of tragedy living with loss, but to be happy at being a father and their dad. Time returns me to the basics of being in love with my wife and loving my children.

Finding meanings that work is not only the heart of an individual's life, but is the core of a successful communal enterprise. There must always be meanings that matter.

I will return to utopias and life and hopes of Zion, but for now I am glad that my life has returned to meaning.

Some links:

Nate Oman's latest on Utopia

Sojourner's Net

Ozarque on the meaning of words

So often I read someone urging someone else to just "drop their baggage" -- with the baggage being their job, their religious quirks, their spouse or something else the urger doesn't see, feel or hear as important.

How important is the "baggage" -- the things that we are certain that God doesn't really care about?

Laying aside the idea of a child or a spouse or a parent or a job as "baggage" -- what about God and the rules in the Old Testament? Surely God didn't really care about them, did He?

But those rules are what preserved the Children of Israel as a people and prevented them from being swallowed and assimilated. Without those rules to preserve the Jews as a peculiar people, they would have ceased to be a people.

It is easy for us to take a census, eat shrimp, use butter on our potatoes while eating steak or have some bacon for breakfast, while wearing a cotton/nylon blend and to think that anything to the contrary is just “baggage.”

But all of those prohibitions were, at one time, important to God. It was obedience as a people that made it possible for Christ to be born of Mary.

So I look at our world, our times and wonder what of the things we have that we might consider “baggage” are important like having blue threads in our hems, observing a Sabbath on Friday nights or reserving the priesthood to a family line of less than 10% of the population.

How many of the things we work with and are asked to obey work together in ways we do not understand, for purposes that we just fail to grasp, but that have meanings as significant as those had by the Macabeans who resisted the urge to drop their baggage and be one with what was the modern world of their time, and led the resistance against the Hellenic forces that sought to destroy the culture and heritage prepared for the birth of Christ?

I do not know, and I do not know the meaning of all things, but I do know that God loves his children.

BTW, for an interesting perspective on this, Someday Saint has an essay on her site:
Part Two

Utopias are interesting things. To me, utopia is my kids not getting sick (or if they are sick, not saying "don't pray for me, wait until I get older, if I live that long, then you can pray for me" and "am I going to die too this time"). I'm waiting on my five year old, her strep throat and her cough. Grateful for tylenol and antibiotics.

In writing about utopias, what I am really writing about is stable communal societies or organizations, not perfect places. To succeed, such an entity needs:

1. A shared culture that will work for both adults and children (I've seen a lot of attempts at utopia that worked for the adults, but that failed for the children they had, and a few that worked for kids but fail for the adults).

2. Sufficient resources to:
a. Establish the society,
b. continue the society and export from it,
c. endure, create accumulations, support members who have lessened productivity due to age.

3. Must be self-sustaining

Interesting examples include the Hutterites (a religious group of sealed communities that just keeps expanding. They export goose down to the outside world that at one point was the gold standard for goose down), small steel mills (there is a "modern" small fab plant steel mill system that is generally worker run in a communal system) and several worker managed piecework factories.

Entities that seemed like they would succeed and failed share some hinge or collapse points.

1. intellectual property issues and a changing environment.
2. rent seeking behavior
3. free riders and feather bedders.
a. the piecework factories manage to break through the "magic number of 100 to 200 adults by having a payment system that prevents free riding.
b. the worker managed railroads have worked on staffing levels of specific tasks to solve the same problem.
c. several worker owned companies have suffered from control groups forming and using that control to loot the communal good for the benefit of the group.
4. giving in to the temptation to create a management class (vs. renting or hiring it from consultants or outsiders as some unions have done).

Examples that are closer to home are law firms and other partnerships (which, for the professionals, though not the staff, are communal organizations which are prone to grow into non-communal ones), Yugoslavia under Tito (the only marxist state with a free market society), agricultural cooperatives (for machines that are effectively shared and for shared marketing tasks.

A failure of a cooperative endeavor occurs when:

1. The administrative cost is too high (centralized economies anyone?).
2. The cultural needs of the members diverge too far (you may think living in Big Bend as an artist is heaven -- but will your children who haven't learned to read by age 12?).
3. The level of assets fails to sustain the group (note, retirement planning need not be a part of the cooperative endeavor. It is for Hutterites. It isn't for steel mills).
4. Stratification destroys the communal nature.
5. External attack (the group of pacifists that got eaten by New Zealanders in the 1800s are a good example of this).
6. Problems of scale swamp the society.
7. Stratification (sometiems combined with scale issues) destroys the communal or cooperative nature.

The false issue is waste, as all systems have it.

Quick notes.

The magic size for many communal groups is 100 to 200. More than 200 and the group generates too many slackers and free riders. Under 100 adult workers and there seems not to be enough "community."

Cooperative groups can work just fine in a market society, competing with other such groups and non-communal groups. I would note that worker managed firms tend to outperform other management types inside the magic number size limits so that they can be quite competitive. It is very possible to run a country where the government runs the banks, military and universities and cooperatives handle everything else.

Universities can be used to create mental capital and intellectual property and they seem to do it well.

One thing the Amish have mastered is the art of making people suspect by virtue of their being willing to be leaders. There are problems with such a model -- especially when attacked violently by outsiders or when it needs to respond quickly. Communal systems benefit by having a slow economy vs. a fast one. (Imagine in the stock market only ran once a week instead of every day? If property had to be held for five years before you could sell it again and people preferred to live in the house their parents lived in.).

Some things are possible, some are not, though for miracles, I just want children not to die.

VADE MECUM....


FROM W. W. PHELPS to JOSEPH SMITH, Jr. .....

Go with me, will you go to the Saints that have died—
To the next better world where the righteous reside?
Where the angels and spirits in harmony be,
In the joys of a paradise vast?—Go with me.

Go with me where the truth and the virtues prevail;
Where the union is one, and the years never fail;
Not a heart can conceive, nor a nat'ral eye see
What the Lord has prepar'd for the just.—Go with me.

Go with me where there's no destruction or war;
Neither tyrants, nor sland'rers, nor nations ajar;
Where the system is perfect, and happiness free,
And the life is eternal with God.—Go with me.

Go with me, will you go to the mansions above,
Where the bliss, and the knowledge, the light, and the love,
And the glory of God do eternally be?
Death, the wages of sin, is not there.—Go with me.
50 Nauvoo, January, 1843.

Some misc. comments, on a personal note, rather than essays.

Just switched to Sunrocket for our telephone service. Switching from a $45.00 a month basic service telephone (extended calling area and some other "options" are required here) to $29.00 a month cable internet and $199 a year Sunrocket resulted in unlimited calling, an extra telephone number in Portland (so my brother can call me as a local call)and more reliable service than the DSL line was giving us. Without the extra cost of a DSL line. So, for less than basic local telephone service I have x2 DSL internet and unlimited long distance calling and two lines. So far, so good, and the free telephones included work very nicely.

I like New Balance Express for atheletic shoes. My feet are hard to fit and it can be hard to find cross trainers I like. Up to size 20 and up to 4E in width. I've small feet, I have relatives with smaller feet and some with gigantic feet. This is a great site.

Another essay soon. Paris was wonderful, the French were friendly, hardly anyone smoked, few dogs, and spring time was perfect. Being there with Win was like dreaming.

One thing that always struck me about historical research was just how miserable the lives of those living in the past were by our standards while they were joyous to be living them.

Take the Sun King of France. His murals aren't to my taste, my air conditioning works better than his, my bed has fewer bedbugs and lice (seriously, in some parts of the United States bedbug powder was still selling strong in the 1950s) and the food I eat is more varied, fresh and healthy than the food he ate. My car goes faster than any thing he rode in, and more smoothly, my teeth are in far better shape. It is as if we live in different realities, not just different times, yet he rejoiced to be born, not to mention we have the writings of those in far more humble circumstances who relished life and the experiences they had.

It always amazed me that people rejoiced to be born, leaving the presence of God. But from the outside perspective, life in and of itself is a valuable thing, the duration is short, and the experience is like an extreme camping trip, even for the most privileged -- and not measurably different from an eternal perspective for the worst.

In my own pain, the one thing that struck me about the terrible things that happened as I buried child after child from different causes is that my loss was not unique or unusual, only out of context for the community I lived in. That in the historical context, I was luckier than most, if not all.

It also struck me that better men than I had faced pain and complained to God about it, but that living in a fallen world, as an experience, involves living in a fallen world. That means pain without consolation in this world.

Not that the pain is not real when experienced (that is one thing I like about both Paul and Joseph Smith, both acknowledge that pain is pain and suffering is grevious when it occurs), but it is also experience and that the promise of God is not that it will pay off in this life (that is just another riff on the theme that if we worship God he will give us Mammon) but that it will be swallowed up and balanced in the next.

But, that which does not kill me merely does not kill me. Not necessarily stronger or weaker, not necessarily more or less alive. Those are my choices in how I react, combined with time and effort. And life will eventually kill me, but that is not the point. The point is that Christ can welcome me home and heal me of all my wounds, not that I will not be wounded by life.

So I live for my wife and children and with the hope of Christ. May that hope be also with you.

A heart breaking post at Happy Birthday Betsey Pearl -- a story from Portland, Oregon where my brother lives and where I visit from time to time.

The Silence of the Lamb – What is happening when we can not hear Christ in our time of sorrow.

Introduction

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani" -- My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? -- is haunting whether it is sung in a Synagogue or read in Matthew 27: 46 or in the full context at Psalms 22:1-21ff.

Of all the miracles in life, the one that is both the softest and the strongest is the voice and presence of God in our lives. But at times, God is silent and the Spirit is withdrawn. Not only do we not receive the tangible miracles we expect or hope for or have seen, but God seems to be withdrawn as well.

Sometimes the Spirit of the Lord is grieved and withdraws from us because of sin, especially if we wrongfully oppress others. We are all familiar with stories and examples and similar things in our lives (e.g. if you lift weights and then quit, you will lose strength over time, if you quit praying and related activities, you will grow weaker in spirit). But the issues go far deeper than those shallow examples, and with more complexity.

This is especially true since silence, especially in the face of suffering and loss, seems to draw the most anguish of all (and, the essence of a fallen world is suffering and loss – which is all death is). We know that God’s silence compelled Christ to voice. We are not greater than He and his silence to us causes us to give voice as well.

The Sounds of Silence

Before silence can be talked about with any intelligence, we need to talk about the various sounds, looks and feels of silence – a collection I refer to as the sounds of silence.

Chaim Potok’s book, The Chosen, (a good summary for the purposes of this discussion is at: summary) talks about a man who raises his son in silence, never talking to him. “He also explains why he raised his son in silence--it was to teach him to listen to silence, to learn compassion, to develop a soul to go with his magnificent mind.” If our purpose here in life is to grow, (vs. life as a replacement for amusement parks and television) then silence makes a good metaphor for the general distance between our state and God.

There are some God is silent with in order to teach them to hear.

A young child, who I will not identify by name, once banged her shin. To reduce the sensory load, she closed her eyes as she hopped about complaining about first the pain and then that she could not see. Some times we can not hear God, can not see his hand, can not feel his Spirit because we are so overloaded that we close down.

Of course, sometimes we are faced away from God, through our decisions to turn from him to our sins. While that is the reason many think of most often (read Job and consider the advice and comments of his “friends” – all they could do is insist he had some terrible hidden sin), that approach is scarcely useful for understanding God’s silence with the just (such as Job) and the humbled.

In addition, sometimes our spiritual senses have atrophied so much we have difficulty hearing God over any sort of background noise, including that of our own sorrow or pain. That same child who closed her eyes, also yelled pretty load and also complained that she couldn’t hear me. She had to quit shouting before my voice would come through. The more background noise or internal noise, the less atrophy we need before we can not hear anything over ourselves.

There are also other times of silence (such as when Oliver Cowdrey was praying to God for an answer and God finally spoke, saying “remember, I already answered this question, think on the answer I gave you before” [paraphrased]).

Thinking and listening

If we start with the beginning, which is that the world is fallen, telestial, and fails of the glory and joy of God, imperfection and sorrow become the side effects of mortality, not the purpose of them or their end. In a blog entry, I can not give this foundation the pages of text it deserves, but it provides a beginning place.

Of course sorrowful events do not make the world a better place because, by definition, the world is not a better place. As Paul said, if we live in this world only, those who know Christ would be of all the most miserable because they would know more than any others the depth of how unfair and fallen the world is. In the world is not where we expect consolation.

In addition, in the world is not where miracles, tangible or not (see my earlier post) dominate – they come only after faith, not before and not in place of faith.

Finally, God has warned us that he will try each of us, purifying our faith and giving us experience. This life ends in death, the question is when, not if. All that is required of us is to draw breath, the rest is a gift of experience and choice so valuable from an eternal perspective that those who await being born are willing to be born any time, any where and in any condition.

It is only from our perspective that God has failed us by giving us what we so much desired when we had a full perspective.

So why the Silence

God gives us silence for many reasons.

In some cases, we grasp silence and God allows us to hold to it until we release, open our eyes, and hear, all at once, like the unnamed child I’ve referred to above who closed her eyes and her ears as she coped with pain.

In some cases, God gives us silence to teach us or to allow us the fullness of experience that would otherwise not be complete without silence. Christ on the cross had silence that he spoke into, both for his experience and for our teaching (so that we could learn from his experiencing silence).

At other times, silence comes upon us as all other experiences do, because the world is imperfect or because we are.

I have faced silence. Once to teach me that I had learned a lesson and could do certain things without “training wheels” so to speak. At other times to aid me in learning charity, as a direct answer to prayers seeking to learn compassion and love. I’ve experienced silence that gave me perspective of how people live and think and cope in silence so that I could understand them better. And, I’m certain that I’ve also experienced not hearing the voice of God or seeing his hand or feeling his Spirit to know his will, at times, because of my own sins or failures of effort.

Finally, I’ve experienced silence because it wasn’t time for an answer or I had gotten an answer and wasn’t listening to it.

Conclusion

Silence is a deep subject, of which this is only an introduction to start a conversation, not the end of the answers. But there is a rhythm and meaning, a touch, sound and look to silence that is too often too easy to miss, and that leaves us feeling in the silence of the Lamb of God that we have been sacrificed rather than sacrificed for. It is my testimony that while we may not understand, the one truth is that God loves his children and that no silence, no depth or height or loss or sorrow, power or dominion can separate us from that love if we only allow that love into our hearts and bear patiently until the silence is quiet and the voice of God speaks again.

Stephen

The kids were well. The grandparents had a delightful time and everyone was very happy. I'm still jet lagged, but I dropped my mom and dad off at the airport, had a great family home evening, and am about to go to sleep.

Our hotel was grand. Right next to a metro station (on the M4 line), hot water and great water pressure on the top floor, quiet (very well insulated against sound) and clean.

Paris was a delight. We met one (1) rude frenchman (he was also short, stout, bald and drunk -- while the other short, stout and bald frenchman we met was gallant in the extreme).

I so love my wife, it is hard to express. I have to confess that sometimes I talk to her in her sleep about how wonderful she is. And we are both so glad to be home with our kids.

I'll blog more latter. Too much to write about.

Win and I are going to Paris to celebrate our 20th. Why Paris in springtime? Aside from the fact I've wanted to go to Paris since the 1970s and for a romantic place to take one's love in the springtime I can't think of any better? Of course it cost a lot less to go to Paris and stay in the 30th best ranked hotel than it costs to go to San Francisco?

Ok, I'm stretching. I just really wanted to take my wife to Paris.

Am I nervous? Yes, I've never been away from my children this long before. My parents are coming up to watch them, and they are good kids, but I've just never been away.

I'll be back in May. The office will survive without me (in fact, I'm amazingly caught up, just got another zero today -- that makes eleven or twelve on the year, when twelve to fourteen is usually what I do in a year), as Felicia Sorenson says "worse case scenario, the world just keeps on turning, best case scenario, pretty much the same."

But I miss my kids so much already and all they are doing right now is sleeping in the rooms next to me.

Miracles are one of the most problematic experiences in my life.

I could find a world without tangible miracles acceptable. I have friends who believe that God is aware, but does not intervene in this world. In their view, bad things happen, the sparrow falls, but God is mindful, even if his activity is limited to mindfulness and love.

I could live in a world with reliable miracles. As a friend put it, “God as a black box” (a black box is a computer concept – you put in inputs, you get out the same outputs, you don’t need to know what is going on inside) – which really reduces God to a natural force and faith as a sort of engineering. But, as the Calvinists found, it does make the concept of God reliable.

Instead I live in a world where I have experienced real, tangible miracles and known first hand others who have had the same experiences. But I have no way to predict the mind of God, when he will act, when he will withhold his hand, and find myself reading in sympathy when those in the Bible testify that God is real, even if he doesn’t save them in their time of need – an expression of the faith that Job had rather than the faith of Elijah who called down fire from heaven.

We have in scripture stories of God withholding miracles, allowing the innocent to suffer that the guilty may be more fully condemned, with the consolation that God receives the innocent unto himself.

But it makes life harder, in some ways, to know that there are miracles and that God speaks, but that at times the miracle is that there is not one, and the way God speaks is through silence. It makes life so problematic.

On my new policy of deleting links and no longer visiting sites that have deleted links to my blog, I received the following e-mail, which I'm posting together with my response

Stephen:

I noticed a couple of your comments around the nacle that seem to be closing some doors. I just wanted to make sure things are all right. I certainly understand that we all sometimes need to make some interesting changes. Again, I hope all is well.

My response (with editing):

Thank you for your kind thoughts and concern. It is appreciated.

Last time my life was going this well was 1992, right before everything went south. I used to think of the long Indian Summer of 1992 as the best time in my life, and Christmas of 1992 to New Year's Eve of 1993 as the worst time of my life.

So, there are probably some emotional overlays to the way I'm feeling/acting, especially since when things are going well it now fills me with dread, but the real story is that I realized that people who had linked to me had cut the links out and intended to keep the links cut, others were never going to link back and (most importantly) that I was spending too much time on-line reading blogs.

I decided I needed to close off some time sinks to spend more time where it needed to be spent, and also wanted to be clear why and how I was making the decisions I was making. In a way, everything is arbitrary, but I wanted to at least have some basis for the decisions I made.

So I've cut off from links and posting everyone who cut off their links to me or who said they were going to link and then decided not to. But I did it only after following up and discussing the matter with the people I decided to cut-off from contacts and links.

I have to admit that the link issue is one that has rankled for a while, especially when bcc added a link to "Angry Mormon" and not me, I felt completely and thoroughly snubbed at that point. I link to him because he is in grief and a good example of someone finding a safe place to express natural grief and rage, which some people I know need. Those who have buried children need places to express their emotions.

But I'm not sure how his rage fits in with the theme of bcc and LDS links in general. When I realized they found it more edifying and typical of LDS thought and mores than my site, I realized that I needed to just drop bcc from my ambit.

Anyway, yes, I'm a little emotionally off, but I don't think too badly, given the inputs.

I recently spent a lot of time with my 16 year old as she suddenly regained a lot of missing memories and had severe self-doubt issues about whether she was screwed up beyond repair or not, that sort of thing, but those are just more steps in the process. Especially since she is not screwed up and is the most wonderful child I know.

As for work, and leaving for Paris for better than a week to celibrate our 20th wedding anniversary, yes I feel some stress, but I think everything will go ok at work while I'm gone and I think I've already covered the home issues. At work, everything looks cleared up, passed my file review with flying colors, with any luck they'll have my boss (who I got along with very well) replaced by when I get back (he quit on short notice).

Other than that, I have, for a while at least, given up on the book I was going to write and have realized I've aged out of the chance of teaching. Turning it down when I did, to come back later, pretty much shipwrecked a major goal in life, but life goes on and there were other things that were more important at the time, so it was a decision well made.

There are more important things than personal goals, always.

Appreciate your kindness and concern.

Regards,

Stephen

One surprising thing in my life is the amount of pure animosity my sixteen year old daughter has had to suffer through. Much of it was merely deflected spite, especially from the days people would get nasty with us about having only one child, they would get spiteful with her as well or instead of directly with us (I'm a litigator after all).

She would just turn away, though when I found out or faced the adults, I eventually took to explaining that we had been through seven pregnancies, three funerals and three miscarriages ...

Now with a sixteen year-old and a five year-old we often get comments about the gap, but only from strangers. (I'm no longer as pained or as angry as when I wrote Only One). We gently clear up their concerns and criticisms, though it takes work.

Through all of this, since 1992, the sixteen year-old has gotten a lot of grief, not only from the adults too nasty to be snide directly to her parents, but from other children who think of her as lucky and privileged and safe to beat up on since she is one of the most patient and kind children I know.

Yes, on the one hand she has parents who spend time with her, some wide ranging experiences and is beautiful. Teachers love her. People do things for her.

For example, a friend of ours just gave her a horse and she is now enrolled in an invitation only barn. The the horse is getting a month of intensive training before she starts riding it from a trainer with a year+ long waiting list (the friend is very, er, focused). When I was a kid I'd have been jealous of someone who just got to pet a horse. I was grateful for some used shoes someone gave me. Things like that happen to her and her life does look charmed.

But she has had some terribly tough times, as have we all. She is still recovering memories that she lost after the last of the deaths in our family. She has been through a lot of pain and shared a lot of hardship. But the people who have hated her on sight don't see that. (A number of them have told her they just hated her when they first saw her and decided then and there to just beat her face in).

Eventually she has turned around each of the people she has dealt with who hated her on sight. By patience and communication she has stopped the violence, both verbal and physical over and over again, and been a good friend to her friends. But she would rather not go back to everyone knowing her past (she still remembers being younger and having people point at her as the freak whose older sister just died). That isn't the sort of thing that one wants as a first impression.

I wish she didn't have to experience random jealous hatred in addition to everything else. At least there is a way to turn it, for the most part, but it would be nice if it just did not happen at all. Guess there are a lot of things I wish.

When Jessica was in her final illness, we transferred from Fort Worth Children's Hospital to Dallas Children's Hospital. Dallas had her on the hopeless list and was talking with us about an experimental program that the doctor didn't think had any value. As soon as she had a lung biopsy they were going to talk the final details with us.

He then left us for the chaplain.

"The Chaplain" was doing a residency. He had his undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology and had discovered that his theology did not have an adequate way of dealing with the suffering that exists in the world and he was very bitter about that. So, as we waited to be told that our daughter was about to die and we could engage in one of two sorts of hopeless treatment, I did my best to console the chaplain sent to us.

After about fifteen minutes of discussion, he asked if we would mind letting him sit in as we were told our daughter was going to die, so he could see how we dealt with it. I apologized for saying no, but I did have it in me to further teach and aid him at that time.

Of course he was uninterested in any further contact with us that did not aid his needs and he did not return (nor did he respond to the letter I dropped him) when he discovered that the biopsy showed lung tissue in surprisingly good shape so that they immediately moved Jessica to ECMO where she remained until her death.

I should say that his supervisor was about as useful as the person she assigned to help us. But that was my close experience with graduate and post graduate education for ministers.

I've been down. First, my PC needed an upgrade, which meant that WindowsXP no longer functioned. That took a week in the shop and a couple days at home to restore everything.

Next, --- disconnected my DSL a week earlier than I requested -- and told me that "sorry, but we can't fix that for two weeks." It then came back up so I'm working on that post.

So, I'm stuck off-line (no access at work) until the 8th of April.

Sorry for all the blank time. I've a post I'm working on that I'll log on with as soon as I'm back. While you wait, read http://cpms.byu.edu/wiki.php?wid=36

Also, I am going to start deleting links to sites that have deleted their links to me.

I donated blood yesterday.

Before Jessica died, I had donated enough that they gave me my four gallon pin. When she was on ECMO is also the first time I found myself outside of the Red Cross system and donated through Carter Bloodcare. Since then, I've donated a time or two at Church and work, but mostly I get called and don't feel like making an appointment. In return, they've lost all records of my donating since 1993.

But I need to donate blood more often and I'm committed to becoming a regular again. I realized I had memories and issues left over, but I'm going to deal with them better by facing a normal donation center and getting through them than just avoiding the chance to donate.

In case you don't realize it, this blog is a continuation, in many ways of http://adrr.com/living/journal.htm -- on-line journal entries I used to post to create some distance. By posting those entries I kept people from direct contact at at time when it was just too painful to talk. Sometimes it is still too painful.

Alessia
by Wilfried Decoo

Alessia, I hope you will read this post, now, or rather some day in the future when you will be an independent adult, free to choose, and strong enough to look back. I want you to know that the Church never abandoned you, that the thoughts of dozens of Church members have been with you these past few years. And, through this post, the thoughts of many will be added. This block of text links to the story of Adelbert Denaux and Alessia

It is a heartbreaking story. One that should fill Adelbert Denaux and the Belgian IACHSO with such a sense of shame that they can not face God and not weep. May they stand between heaven and earth.

Please pray for a friend's son, who is in such dire straits.

I know, there is so much sorrow in the world, but I hope for grace and mercy from God and I hope Geoff Johnston finds deliverance. If you are reading, please take a moment and pray for his son Quinn.

Thank you.