Yay! My 14 y o son got back from the Youth for Freedom summer camp last night, exhausted and slightly sunburnt.Youth for Freedom is an inspiring summer camp for youth based on freedom-based education. See http://youthforfreedom.org. It’s been held every year the past three years at the Clear Creek Family Ranch between Zion National Park and Orderville. The whole area is so beautiful!

I so wanted to drive him down there, but my baby was not quite over the chicken pox and my potential hosts did not want to risk getting it from him, since they have summer plans that involve being well. So here I stayed and sent my son down on a shuttle bus, all arranged for while I was at the Seven Peaks water park. It was the day I had arranged to go to the park with my friend Shauna to use our free seven peaks reader passes before I knew my son would be going to Youth for Freedom and I didn’t want to disappoint the younger kids by postponing it. Talk about a crazy day! I must say, more and more girls wear bikinis at Seven Peaks these days. I have been going there off and on since I was young. I used to see only two or three bikini-cladsters, now it seems like they fill half the park! This is not the place to go if someone has a porn addiction!

It is hard to have fun and relax when working on arranging for a five hour car ride to Youth for Freedom and wondering about my chicken pox baby home with his brother tending him. My brain did not go from planning-mom-mode to having-fun-mom-mode quickly. So I ended up going into the Lazy River to be with my little girl and I forgot about my cell phone in my pocket. The one I had been just using to call different people about potential rides. This is what happens when I let my son wait until the Sunday before Youth for Freedom to decide he wants to go for sure. Needless to say, said phone is in a bowl of dry rice, hopefully resuscitating. Anyway, my son is back now and I am so happy that he got to go!

I have been asking him to tell me all about it. I feel sad I didn’t get to be there for the beginning and end like I did last year or get any pictures. I love watching the oral exams at the end for the Andau prize, a scholarship to George Wythe College. The above picture is of my older, firstborn son, competing for the prize that he ended up winning last year. This year he was a counselor there and had his smartphone but only took one picture!  Boo-hoo! He just doesn’t think like his blogging, former scrapbooking mother, who grew up idolizing Marielen Christensen, LDS mom and founder of the scrapbook movement. So I am going to post some recycled pictures from last year. My computer crashed last month. The crash took with it all my pics from last year but I do have some old pictures on this blog I can use.

It has been strange this past week to have all three of my youth/teenagers gone, my two oldest sons at the Youth for Freedom camp and my daughter at BYU’s modern dance camp. I have reverted back to the days when my oldest is 10!

Last night I got to finally go again to the Eternal Warriors meeting. An overnighter with my husband and chicken pox has interrupted my attendance. This is an addiction-recovery and prevention program that my friend Aneladee Milne is teaching. I am learning so much from reading the unofficial companion books for the course. Maurice Harker is Aneladee’s boss and he recommends the book Putting on the Armor of God by Steven A. Cramer. It is probably the most important book you could read outside of the scriptures. For the rest of this blog post I will call it the “green book,” because it has a forest green cover. You can read excerpts of it HERE.

Another companion book is the resource that Maurice wrote, himself, found here http://sonsofhelaman.org/?p=interactiveBook. It is written specifically for parents who have sons who struggle with pornography but anyone can apply it to understanding the brain chemistry behind any self-betrayal/addiction. I also got to listen to a recording Maurice did at a fireside recently and that added even more enlightening pieces to the riddle of overcoming self-betrayal.

So here is what I have learned from these three sources:

• it is imperative to learn the methods that satan uses to bring me down. As the book states, quoting Elder Melvin J. Ballard, “It is well to know the forces and the powers, that are arrayed against us, that we may close our ranks and fortify ourselves” 

• here’s another gem of a quote from the book: “A study of satan’s methods can alert us to his seductions.” from Elder Ezra Taft Benson

• from the author, Steven A. Cramer, (a pen name) “Even though satan has a well-planned agenda, many people think that if they ignore the reality of the devil, and avoid thinking of him, they will be protected from his influence. Precisely the opposite is true. It is difficult, if not possible, to conquer an enemy we do not recognize, understand, or respect. The less we believe in satan, and the cunning devices he uses, the more he will have power over us.”

• satan is a very sneaky spirit who never rests. he does not play fair. he is constantly attacking us, day and night. As the book says, “We must realize with soberness that we are engaged in a war that will determine our eternal destinies, a war that deserves every caution and awareness we can muster. It is unfortunate that so many people are so preoccupied with the daily affairs and pleasures of this temporal world that they go through life as if it were a playground instead of the battleground it really is.”

• the biggest thing to learn about satan is that he attacks us by speaking to us, using our own voice! This is something that we’ve all experienced but rarely acknowledged. Maurice likens this to the Vietnam War, when sometimes the enemy would broadcast a voice over a loudspeaker. The Vietnamese trained the person to speak with a Texan drawl, so that the Americans would think that the speaker was one of them, an American, when really, he was the enemy. 

• I have been paying attention a lot more to when my thoughts, that sound as my own voice in my head, are negative, accusatory, whining, feeling like a victim, complaining, dwelling on other people’s faults, and reminding me of my past mistakes. I remember, oh yeah, that’s not really me talking to me, it’s satan, the enemy, using my voice! I then tell myself it’s just satan talk and tell him to scram.

• satan can have no power over us once we learn his methods. As Elder James E. Faust said, “We need not become paralyzed with fear of satan’s power. he can have no power over us unless we permit it.”

• we can permit this power by our lack of searching out his methods of attack and educating ourselves and our children of how he operates. Elder N. Eldon Tanner said, “They (children) must be taught that satan is real and that he will use all agencies at his disposal to tempt them to do wrong, to lead them astray, to make them captives, and keep them from the supreme happiness and exaltation they would otherwise enjoy.”

• Maurice likens satan to a deviant prankster. Maurice describes this scenario. Say a young man is on the beach. He sees a tide pool with a sign by it that says, “No swimming allowed.” So he follows the rules because he is a reasonable, obedient young man. Maurice then says suppose the young man lies down on his towel to rest on the beach. After a while he wakes up and sees that he has a syringe of heroine stuck into his arm. He didn’t do it, but all the evidence is gone as to who did, and since nobody is around, it seems like the young man did it to himself. But it was really satan. He is so sneaky that sometimes self-destructive awful things, that are beyond reason, that seem like we did it to ourselves, actually come from this deviant prankster. But in a sense we do do it to ourselves because of omitting to prepare to fight this deviant prankster, learning how he works as a subtle serpent.

• This deviant prankster has learned to attack our brains and cause a chemical spill inside the brain. He doesn’t know how to read our minds, for “There is none else save God that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart.” (D&C 6:16.) However, satan has been around for eons and knows what images or thoughts will cause chemical reactions on our bodies that will cause pain, and weaken us so that we will be vulnerable to self-destructive behavior that provides instant pleasure with a flood of chemicals in the body that are as addictive as heroine.

• satan chiefly operates by attacking us with a satanic spin. This is a cycle in our minds. It starts with a “flash.” That is thought or image from satan to get us to do something bad. It can be so subtle that we don’t even know it. Maurice, in his PDF book, tells the story of how decades ago, the Coca-cola company found that it could insert one image of a Coke in one frame of a movie. The image flashed by so quickly that people did not consciously know they had seen it. But sales of Coke skyrocketed because the subconscious mind had seen it. This is how satan works. After the flash comes the chemical spill. This is a small spill that causes a slight uncomfortable shift in our bodies. He wants to increase the feelings of boredom, anxiety, and depression, to weaken us. There is more to the satanic spin that I won’t share here because I am still trying to understand it all. Basically the spin happens in less than a second, and it leaves you feeling stoned because of the chemicals in your mind. I can see how it happens to me, with my self-destructive behaviors. Unless you are Mother Teresa, you have them too, so I highly recommend these resources to you.