This is an amazing presentation about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It’s not only about the Second Coming, as the presenter talks about ancient history, and the context of the plandemic. He shows lots of parallels and symbolism, drawing upon the history of Israel, Judah, Utah, and the U.S. presidents. It’s all soooo eye-opening and mind-blowing! He even interprets the name of Russell M. Nelson, the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in a fascinating way. Warning: If you are easily offended, don’t watch this video!
I know it’s not Christmastime, but this movie is still worth watching right now. I’ve long wished for a movie about married love. This is one of them! After finding a copy of this movie at my local public library, my husband and I watched it last weekend for our date night. It’s such a sweet story, and best of all it’s true! It’s based on the true story of mommy blogger Julie Locke and her son Dax. The movie is told as a story within a story. Candace Cameron plays the female lead of the frame story. In her story, she finds herself as a mom who is stretched to the limit, juggling her mothering and career responsibilities. Her children and husband aren’t happy with what she’s doing, but she doesn’t want to cut back on work. What happens to change her mind? That’s where the story of Julie and Dax comes in. I won’t give the rest away, just go watch it! It’s free in Amazon Prime. It’s wholesome and a tearjerker. After watching it, you will have a warm glow in your heart and a desire to spend more time with your loved ones.
The video below shows the real Julie and Dax Locke.
It’s that time of year when life can be a bit…slow, bleh, and boring. The holidays have long been over, and unless you are rich and can go skiing a lot, winter is not fun and can seem to drag on and on. That is, unless you are intentional about cultivating a meaningful life, regardless of the calendar or weather. May I present to you this lovely book that helps you help your family create a wondrous and beautiful life, no matter the time or season of the year. I stumbled upon this book in scribd.com. (Go here to learn about scribd.com.) It is so wonderful! It’s all about the why and how of making family traditions in your home.
This book is for every mom who:
-wants to bring more fun into her life without much more effort or money
-wants to make memories with her children
-wants to feel that there’s more to mothering than cleaning, cooking, shopping, and feeding
This book is so wonderful! The author has a down-to-earth approach. She gives you the “why” for making family traditions as well as the “how,” without spending much money or time. The first 200+ pages are full of the “why” and the “how.” She talks about the catalyst of what brought her to be super intentional about family traditions. Then she has whole chapters for each of these topics that relate to family traditions: the work involved, being spontaneously open to adventures, the beauty we can have for everyday, food, holidays, religion, service, relationships, fostering learning, and the Sabbath Day. Then after those first 200 pages or so, she has an appendix with a list of 200+ family traditions! She has them categorized by seasons and other topics, like work, marriage, school, and more. I love it all! If you are a Christian mom who is always looking for more ways to keep your family connected, you will love it too! I give this book 5 out of 5 stars!
Here are some videos with the author below.
If you want to read the book, you can get it in scribd.com in both audio and text format. I love listening to this book in the evening as I brush my teeth, etc. getting ready for bed. You can sign up for a free 60 day trial of scribd here. Put an alarm on your phone to remind you in 45 days to evaluate how well you like it, then cancel if you don’t value it. Stay on as a subscriber if you do. I think you will love it! I can almost always find any book that someone recommends or assigns for our homeschooling life in scribd. (Disclosure: I receive a small compensation if you sign up, with that link, but your cost is the same, whether you sign up in my link or without it.)
This is such a beautiful story of the power of falling in love with gardening. It’s a true story about Elliott Michener. He was a criminal charged with counterfeiting money. He was sent to Alcatraz, with every plan to somehow figure out how to escape. What happens instead is amazing! He gardened his way to freedom! For you LEMI project fans out there, I highly recommend this story to go along with the Georgics project. You can see more pages from the book over here at the site of the illustrator, Jenn Ely. Then if you go over here you can learn all about the real gardens of Alcatraz that he started.
We made it to March guys! Reaching March every year is always such a milestone for me, because winter is not my favorite time of year. I am loving it more, as I write here. It’s still winter, and boy does it ever definitely feel like it, as it snowed the past few days. But hey, it’s March! Yayyyy!
March means my missionary son, who is serving in TX, is coming home in less than one month! Hooray! The photos I’m showing here are from when we said goodbye to him outside the airport entrance, almost two years ago. He’s my third son to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is always a bittersweet time to say goodbye to a child about to serve a mission. These photos show our goodbyes, and in just a few weeks we get to reverse the process and say “Hello, Welcome Back!” If I had extra time, I would spend a lot of it hanging out at airports witnessing missionaries coming home after being gone for two years. I would talk to the families and the missionaries and hear their stories of change. I’d compile all the stories and pictures in a book. It is just such an amazing thing! That’s because it’s the end of a Hero’s Journey. (More on the Hero’s Journey here.) I wish I could bottle all that splendid feeling and open it anytime I want a lift. Now that I think about it, I can feel that same energy by reading the story of Christ in the scriptures, as He is the Ultimate Hero with the Original Hero Story. All other hero stories are mere reflections of His.
Over twenty years ago, I lived next door to some neighbors, the Ogdens, who served as mission president and wife in Santiago Chile. I remember distinctly when they came home and reported on their mission at one of our Sunday meetings. Sister Ogden said that the whole three years that they served on their mission, they felt like spiritual midwives. She wasn’t talking about the book Spiritual Midwifery, which I read a lot from during my child-bearing years, LOL. She was talking about assisting with the process of spiritual birth that happens with becoming born again in Christ. She said it was so exciting and fulfilling to see young people serve a mission for the Church, inviting people to come unto Christ and make the covenant of baptism. As they did so, they experienced a spiritual birth, just as they watched other people experience a spiritual birth. So that’s why she felt that she and her husband were spiritual midwives. Jesus has told us that “Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he can in nowise enter the kingdom of heaven.” (John 3:5)
This spiritual birth happens as we receive the gift of the Holy Ghost after baptism. The Holy Spirit refines a person and facilitates this birth. This birth involves water (baptism), spirit, (the Holy Spirit), and blood (the atoning blood of Christ), just as physical birth does. Water = amniotic fluid, blood= the blood of the mother, and spirit = the spirit of the child animating his or her body. This scripture from the Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ describes how a person is changed, or spiritually begotten by Christ:
“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19)
As missionaries, or anyone live this scripture, after baptism, they become a new creature in Christ, as it says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
I am just as excited to see my son as a new creature in Christ as I was when I was pregnant, so eager to hold him and see him as a tiny new mortal creature. It is so wonderful to see that he has felt the power of the Holy Ghost on his mission, guiding him, refining him, and sanctifying him, to become this new creature in Christ.
Here is one example of the power of the Holy Ghost guiding him. He sent an email saying he is on fire with the power of family history research and temple work. Yayy!!! As I’ve blogged many times, I am such a huge fan of all that.
He told a story of meeting with a man who I will call Jack. Jack was thinking about getting baptized. My son and his companion had an appointment with him. Here is the rest of the story in his own words:
“I had one of my most powerful moments as a missionary and a person today. We had a lesson with Jack scheduled and had planned to teach about family history and show him how FamilySearch works. We were going to bring Brother Smith and have him lead in this, but he wasn’t available to come so he told us to do it without him. We forgot this and planned a different lesson about the sacrament and enduring to the end. As we were driving to Jack’s lesson, I looked at our notes to review the lesson plan, and had the prompting that we should still go over family history. A look at Brother Smith’s text reminded us that he wanted us to do this, so we quickly planned for it as we went. Providentially, we had our laptops with us (we usually don’t when we’re out and about), so we planned to show him the website and how adding names works. As we went in and sat down, we got everything set up and he told us how he had had a grueling day at work. I was impatient to get into it, but I had another prompting to teach more of the doctrine of the temple before showing how the system works. I had the words ‘behold I will send you Elijah the prophet’ come into my head, so I looked up the verse (Malachi 4:5-6) and we began by having him read it. We explained how the Lord’s work is to unite families for eternity and how the sealing power is what was spoken of in the verse. His eyes got big as understanding set in. I felt the Holy Spirit so strongly. Next, I had the thought to show how Elijah came to Joseph Smith to fulfill that prophecy and was led to the D&C 110:13-16 by the footnotes in Malachi 4. Melvin read it and the Holy Spirit came again. I had the thought that he needed to understand two things from the verse. First, that the sealing power had indeed been restored to us in modern day, and, second, that the coming of the Lord is near. Moments later, without any of us being able to get a word in, he said those exact things and the Holy Spirit bore witness of their truth. Then, we turned to Family Search and showed how the process of creating records and such works. He started to understand the magnitude of it all and made comments like ‘Wow, I guess I have a lot to do after I get baptized’ and ‘I need to begin by having these ordinances done for my parents, my son, my brother, etc.’ Again, the Spirit was so strong. Lastly, we closed by talking about how God made a covenant with Abraham and how that became the covenant for all Israel. I found myself tearing up as I testified that God’s work is the gathering of Israel and that it is what he is doing right now as he makes a covenant and prepares the way for his ancestors to do the same. I felt the Holy Spirit more powerfully than I ever have before tonight as we taught him and as I said that the gathering of Israel is the most important thing going on in the world today.”
That story just makes so happy on so many counts!
I love that the Holy Ghost inspired them to take their laptops, even though they don’t usually do that. I love that the Holy Ghost inspired my son with the words about sending Elijah. I love that the Holy Ghost was there in the room to testify that these words they read in the scriptures are true.
Here are four important points I draw from this story:
#1. Missionary work, that is, teaching about Jesus and His restored gospel, is more powerful when it’s tied to family history research and temple work.
#2. Jesus is real, He is the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, who has spoken to prophets as he did with Malachi, Some of his words have been fulfilled as with Elijah’s coming to Joseph Smith, some of his words are yet to be fulfilled.
#3. Jesus loves us and wants us to be united as families in the temple, on both sides of the veil.
#4. Jesus, as God, and His Father, our Heavenly Father, are all knowing. As such They know the words we can share that we come to know thru the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as the Holy Spirit put those words about Elijah in my son’s mind, to teach Jack, and the words he put in Jack’s mind to speak out loud, the Holy Spirit has put words in my mind to share with people, or in others’ minds to speak to and bless me. You too can probably think of times when you felt words put in your head by the Holy Spirit.
I have prayed many times for help. Then often that very day or the next day an email, text, phone call or someone shows up on my doorstep to bless me with words and ideas. I feel evidence that God is putting words in someone’s mind to help me.
For example, almost a year ago I had something happen in my life that broke my heart. After this traumatizing event, I knelt in prayer, sobbing and crying to God, asking God to show me that He loved me that day. I felt the lowest I have felt in years, bereft of love. Several hours later, my ministering brother, a man in my Church congregation, showed up on my doorstep, asking if he could help with anything. He commiserated with me. I felt very blessed and noticed by God. I knew He cared about me and heard my prayer.
I love knowing that we can tap into the knowledge of God when needed to get the words He wants us to give to bless us and those around us, through the Holy Spirit. It’s not something we can demand. It’s something that happens if we qualify for it and if God deems it needful to happen. It’s so exciting to think how our prayers will be answered each day as we see how His inspiration unfolds through all of us.
Pres. Nelson said in the October 2022 General Conference that we have yet to see the greatest manifestations of Christ’s power in the coming years. It’s such a wonderful thing to ponder how this power will be manifest at the micro level in our individual lives as we minister to each other and gather Israel on both sides of the veil, then at the macro level with how Christ will affect global events. Bring it on!
In a world where life and children are devalued, this new video below is such a precious gem! It features Gil and Kelly Jo Bates with their son Trace and his wife Lydia. I have followed the Bates Family story for over a decade. I actually watched something about them before I watched anything about the Duggars. I heard about the Duggars in a 20/20 TV show story involving the Bates Family. That’s what led me to follow the Duggars, who happen to be good friends of the Bateses. Anyway, as far as I know, what Gil and Kelly say in the video below is the most detailed story of why they came to have 19 biological children. I absolutely love it! Thanks to their son Trace and his wife Lydia for hosting and sharing this interview. Gil and Kelly Jo are full of such wisdom and love. I wish every person in the whole world would watch this!
The photo above is a screenshot of the video below. It features Oak Norton of scripturenotes.com talking with Ann Ferguson. She shares how to use seven laws to develop the rare faith that moves mountains of problems. The laws are the same laws that Leslie Householder of rarefaith.org teaches, as far as I can tell. It’s all very fascinating and exciting to learn about and apply. These are also the laws of creating abundance! I love that she uses so many scriptures from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
If you are a mom and need a mothering story to pick you up, listen to this! This video will help you feel motivated to just keep going in your ordinary mom life. Watch and/or listen below to this amazing interview that Pearl Barrett of Trim Healthy Mama fame did recently with Erin Harrison, on the THM Podcast (the “poddy”). Erin is an amazing mom who adopted a special needs child nobody wanted. You will love her story! Her website features a short bio about her, over here. In addition to her special needs son, she also has adopted a special needs daughter. I am so awed by Erin’s story! She shows the power of ordinary mothering. Her special needs son couldn’t walk, when Erin started fostering him. Now, this little boy can walk, even run, and is down from 20 medications to only 1 thyroid pill!
I remember hearing Erin’s voice from some podcasts that Pearl’s mother, Nancy Campbell, did with Erin over a year ago, about falling in love with our kitchens. That was on the Above Rubies sponsored podcast, called “Live Life to the Full.” I remember thinking that Erin sounded so wonderfully happy and content with the ordinary life of being a mom, celebrating each meal with the beauty of a wonderfully set table with a tablecloth, napkins, and music. It was just delightful to listen to her talk about all of it. You will love these additional interviews and resources about her:
–Here is Part 1 of “We Love Our Kitchens” with Nancy and Erin on the Above Rubies podcast.
-And then here is Part 3 of “We Love our Kitchens”
-Erin has her own podcast, called “Tea Time Talk Show,” about homemaking and mothering, found here.
–here is her blog with some IG reels of her and her adopted son
-in this funny blog post here she shares how the blessings of twins have affected her
-lastly, here is her book, which even garnered an endorsement from Michelle Duggar! Michelle says, “I highly recommend Erin Harrison’s new book, Living Virtuously. Erin is an energetic wife and mother who has a heart to encourage young mothers to train their children to love God and to have a ministry mindset.”
Here’s a fun game that involves word association, logic, clues, and deductive thinking. I picked this up for $2 at the thrift store. It was definitely worth the 2 bucks. It is like Charades with words.
You get a ton of tiles, each with a word printed on it. One is in English and the other side has the same word in French. Then you take the top card of the stack of cards. The goal is to get the other people to guess as many words listed on the card as you can get them to guess before the sand timer runs out by giving them clues. To do this, you put the word tiles on the easel. The easel has three sections: “Definitely,” “Kind Of,” and “Not.” So you use the word tiles as clues in each category to fit the word you are describing.
For example, say you have the word “cement.” This is the word my daughter had when we played this morning. So she put “manmade,” “tough,” “strong,” “hard,” and “smooth.” in the top row of what that word is. Then in the middle she put “black,” “white,” “stone,” and “straight,” for the “kind of” category. That’s for the in-between category. The time ran out before she could get any clues up for the “not” category. But she could have put words that show what cement isn’t, like: “soft,” “edible,” “yummy,” and “colorful.”
This is a great game to expand vocabulary, especially for children and people whose first language is not english. Or if you are studying French, since like I mentioned above, the reverse of each tile has the word in French.
It’s not as exciting as Dungeons or Dragons, or Dune, or as loooong, but it’s still wonderful. I personally think it is more fun than Scrabble, because it goes a lot faster. It’s quick like Bananagrams because you are racing. In Bananagrams you are racing each other and in this game you are racing against the timer. So, if you are a word lover, if you like word games like Charades, Scrabble or Boggle, you will probably love this game. If you want a fun game to review basic adjectives with your children who can read, this is a great game. (It does require the players to know how to read English or French.) One tip I have for playing it is that if a guess is correct, the clue giver gets to pause the sandtimer by flipping it over horizontally while he or she clears the old clues off the easel.
Keep your eye out for it at the thrift store, I bet you can pick it up there if you look for it. I’ve seen it there often. Here’s a video below that shows how to play it. This is a wonderful game to add to your gameschooling collection.
If you’d like a free PDF guide to gameschooling, please go here.
This is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen in a long time! Our new-to-us used car! After two months of being a one-car family, we are back to having two cars! Yay!!!!! Happy dance all around!!!!
Last December, the night before the funeral of my mother-in-law, I was minding my own business, driving to the grocery store. A random stranger rear-ended me at a stoplight. Wham!!! Just like that, my car was totaled. Fortunately, nobody was majorly hurt, similar to the accident I had back here in 2017. Because this collision happened close to Christmas, I didn’t jump on replacing it. I had Christmas to take care of. I do have my priorities, after all. For one month, I got to drive rental cars paid for by the stranger’s insurance. (A fun story involving the monster rental truck I had for my New Year’s Eve vacation is here, skip down to where it says, “I had my own little post-Christmas miracle just this past Monday..”)
After that, I shared our remaining car with my husband. On days I needed the car to run errands I took him to the commuter train station. Then our washer broke down, and I was feeling soooo low. It was cold, it was winter (still is), it was gray, we only had one car, and the washer was broken. Ugh. Long story short, after months of wrangling with the insurance company, we finally got the insurance money to replace the car. Last Saturday, we finally got to go shopping and found another iteration of my absolute favorite family car, the Toyota Sienna. See photo above. This is my fourth. I’ve had one white one, two blue, and now a gray one. Yes, we have owned three Siennas that have been totaled! One was my fault, the other two times it was my teen driver’s fault (who shall remain anonymous) or another driver’s fault (the random stranger mentioned above).
I just love Siennas because they last a loooong time (if not involved in car collisions), have amazing engines, and feel so rugged yet smooth when I drive them. The Sienna model is a beautiful car, yet so comfortable and functional. It’s the ultimate mom car. It has over a dozen cupholders, a little table between the front two seats, where I park my purse, a compartment to store sunglasses over the driver’s seat, and a little mirror that comes down so I can see what’s going on in the backseat. I love that I can take out all the seats behind the driver’s and front passenger seat if I ever want to haul cargo instead of kiddos. Like when we picked grapefruit in Phoenix to sell at a Farmer’s Market.
I am feeling so blessed because this one we found is better than the one that was totaled, overall. It is older, but it’s in better shape. Both sliding doors are automatic, whereas in my previous one just one was automatic and it was broken. Same thing with the liftgate. It was broken in the previous one, works in the new one. I’m so grateful we could pay cash for the replacement. We are continuing with our Dave Ramsey commitment of paying all cash for cars for the total price with no monthly car payments.
I see this new-to-me yet used car as a complete blessing and tender mercy from the Lord. He knew that I wanted my old car replaced. It had all the problems listed above, plus more I don’t want to mention. (Like maybe something involving an Instant Pot of tomato lentil soup by one of my children acting carelessly, spilling it in the back storage area.) This is the way the Lord provided for me to replace my old car with a nicer one.
So, I have this car to add to my ever-growing list of tender mercies of the Lord. In the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Nephi testifies that, “I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance” (1 Nephi 1:20, italics added). I have been delivered so many times by the Lord from first world problem bondages of frustration and inconveniences, with the tender mercies of the Lord.
Today in my church meeting a woman in my congregation shared that scripture I just quoted. She served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Finland. She shared that in Finnish, the word for word translation of “tender mercies of the Lord” is “tender graces of God.” She then shared that many years ago she took upon herself the challenge to read the Book of Mormon with spiritual eyes looking for tender mercies. The challenge was to then find a tender mercy of the Lord in each and every chapter and mark it for future reference. Continuing with the second part of the challenge, she then wrote in the back of the Book of Mormon every day about a tender mercy from the Lord Jesus Christ that she had seen that day.
She testified that she has seen at least one tender mercy every day, and she has continued with this challenge. She has been overwhelmed with the love she feels from our Savior Jesus Christ. She feels so blessed. She has been teaching in the public school system for 32 years now, and these tender mercies have kept her going through the “third toughest year” she’s ever had. She shared several examples which I won’t share but they were really sweet.
Instead, I’ll share a few of mine:
-For years, I really wanted to give birth to a baby on a Sabbath Day. I can’t even remember if I ever voiced this request in prayer. God knew I wanted it and blessed me with the tender mercy of giving birth to my last three babies on a Sabbath Day. The last one was even born within a few hours of me attending a temple dedication, so that was extra special.
-I really wanted to move to AZ in 2015, and God arranged for that to happen by blessing me with the tender mercy of inspiring a person my husband respects to suggest to my husband that he look for a job in AZ, when dear husband wasn’t listening to that suggestion from me.
-I really wanted to move back to UT in 2020, when I could see that my older children weren’t staying in AZ with us to go for college, but going to college in ID and UT and would most likely marry someone with UT roots. They would never live close to us, if we stayed in AZ, I could just see it. So, I prayed deeply that God would work it out for us to move back to UT, and He blessed us with that tender mercy.
-After we moved back to UT, I realized God blessed me with three little tender mercies. These were things I’d never voiced in prayer but desired. Here they are: 1. That I would someday live in the neighborhood I ended up in. 2. That I would have a kitchen with white cabinets. 3. That I would have a living room with yellow walls. I had tucked away these three desires in my heart long ago, and God blessed me with them when we moved back to UT.
I know God desires to bless us with tender mercies when we show that we love to honor Him with obedience and service. I’d love to hear yours!
Tree of Life Mothering 