Musings on Life and Living

[As a member of my stake High Council, I am occasionally asked to visit another ward or branch in the stake and speak in Sacrament meeting. Today I visited the Urbana Young Single Adult Branch. What follows is the talk that I gave.] For several months now, our stake goal has focused on recognising and remembering times we have felt the love the Lord in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. As I was preparing for this talk, my first as a member of the High Council, I asked my brother-in-law, Jonas Reger. if there was any particular topic or insight he would like me to address when speaking on this topic. His response was, “Oh, you are talking about that again? We’ve been hearing about that every time someone from the High Council speaks!” This comment caught my attention because I had just been at a High Council meeting where someone said that nobody really remembers what we say when we speak in Sacrament meetings. (As an aside, I did some calculations and estimate th...

I have started writing this blog post half a dozen times. I keep struggling with knowing how to start it. I'm still not sure how I want to do it, but I am hoping that if I just keep typing then, somehow, something coherent will come out of it. I don't know. Maybe I will end up deleting all of this. Maybe I will end up deleting the entire blog post. Or maybe I won't. I guess I'll know in a few minutes when I finish writing this. I guess I should start with the beginning. Well, maybe not the very beginning, but at least the beginning of this story. It starts when I was nearly eight years old and I had a decision to make. The decision was whether or not I wanted to be baptised and confirmed as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After I made the decision to be baptised, I was then asked to make another decision: who would do the baptising. For many young Latter-day Saints, this is an easy decision; they ask their fathers to do it. I certai...

Those who know I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., I am a Mormon), may know that we seem to place a large emphasis on not our living families but also our family histories. The LDS church is known for its extensive Family History Libraries and Centers throughout the world, for its free online program, FamilySearch, and maybe even our partnering with the International Genealogical Index to digitise census, birth, marriage, and death records. Growing up in the church, I never really did much with family history. Sure, from time to time I would write out a four or five generation pedigree chart, but I didn't know my family's stories. (There were a lot of reasons for this that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that there were a lot of hard feelings when my parents left Pennsylvania and then left the church they had both been raised in.) As a young adult, I first began to dabble in family history when I was asked to lead and...

July is a special month for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the month we celebrate Pioneer Day: July 24, 1847. This was the day that the first party of Mormon refugees arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and Brigham Young, then President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, looked upon the desert and proclaimed, "This is the right place!" The Latter-day Saints had fled their city of Nauvoo, Illinois, in February 1846, about a year and a half after their prophet and leader, Joseph Smith, Jr., had been assassinated with his brother, Hyrum, in Carthage, Illinois. This was the latest of many migrations the Saints had made in their 16 years as an organised religion. They had moved from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and, after Joseph's death, sought to find a place where they could worship God "according to the dictates of their own conscience" in peace and freedom. (The Salt Lake Valley was, at the time, a part of Mexico...

We live in a college town. That means that many of our friends are college students; more particularly, many of them are graduate students. (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign being a Research I institution .) What this means for us is that many of these dear friends come into our lives for a period of approximately five to seven years and then leave as they accept jobs elsewhere. Gretch and I have now been married for nine years, one month, and three days. (And yes, I am always counting.) Each summer we have said goodbye to friends as they have graduated and moved all over the nation (or occasionally even overseas). But this summer seems to have been particularly jarring, likely because many of our friends who have moved were people we helped move in and welcomed to our community, especially our faith community. They have been the best of friends; in fact, many of them are like family. As I have dealt with the emotional roller coaster that has accompanied these...

[NOTE: This is an email I sent to my United States Representative, Rodney Davis, regarding President Donald Trump's budget proposal.] Dear Representative Davis: I've been reading through Pres. Trump's budget proposal and I am just getting angrier and angrier. I am a fiscal conservative who believes strongly in a smaller, smarter, more efficient federal government that returns power to local and state governments and clears a path for non-governmental organizations to make lasting, sustainable changes in our communities. The problem I have with this budget is simple: it doesn't do any of these things. It will not result in a more efficient government, it will result in just confusion. It will not empower state and local governments, it will harm them by removing resources and support. It won't clear a path for NGOs, it will make it more complicated. Here is one example that I directly impacts our community in the 13th Congressional District: the eli...

[NOTE: This is a letter I recently sent to my United States Representative, Rodney Davis, in regards to H.R. 610, a bill recently introduced in Congress. Much of the text was inspired by a Facebook post that I modified and then shared publicly. Feel free to use this text as a template for your own letters to your Representatives if you feel so inclined to contact them.] Dear Rep. Davis: I am writing to you in regards to H.R. 610, the so-called “Choices in Education Act of 2017.” It may sound like having a school voucher system is a good idea. As a fiscal conservative, I believe there are many instances in which competition and choice improves the overall quality of the organization, program, or system. However, public education should never be about pitting one class, one school, one district, or one state against another. Public education is about teaching all children in all settings. This is enshrouded in our Illinois State Constitution, which states in Article X Section 1: ...