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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Application

Lame without application, I started a gratitude journal titled 'Rays of God's good mercy' because of this poem:

Some murmur when the sky is clear And wholly bright to view, If one small speck of dark appear In their great heaven of blue: And some with thankful love are filled, If but one streak of light, One ray of God’s good mercy, gild The darkness of their night. --- Richard Chenevix Trench

I'm taking the week to remember that if there is junk in my basket then I put it there myself and so I staged a coo-- after Eden, while getting her hair done, exclaimed loudly my favorite cuss words. After all, I obviously needed to learn the lesson too so I waited, plotted with dan and then... After waiting for some small misbehavior I exclaimed (in front of the family) "Eden, Oh ******!" To which, Dan shouted my name and called all his girls, ever so fiercely I'll add (props to Dan), into the living room for a stern lecture on clean speech. It went something like this:

  • Dan: "(looking at me) How could you say something like that?"
  • Loo: "Eden says it."
  • Dan: "Eden, where did you learn such bad language?" (Points at me-- while my shoulders shake from laughing into my hands)
  • Dan: "Both of you, go to the bedroom and choose the punishment you'll get if you ever do that again." (We get to the bedroom where we choose to have our mouths washed out with soap for repeat offenses and Eden says with wide eyes...)
  • Eden: "You shouldn't a said that mom." "We better never do that again so we don't have to do that soap in the mouth thing, huh?!"

This seemed to be especially effective coming from a dad who never loses his temper... unless he's pretending to. Let's hope we both learned our lesson.

3 comments:

Kimi said...

I love it. Ha ha. I hope she never does again

Kimi said...

Ok.

I still can't out how to post.

I have been thinking about how to do what God expects of us. I listened to Elder Eyring's talk in Preisthood, and his talk to everyone, combined with Elder Ballard's talk. My impression is that we need to be the best for our children's sake, and do what God expects of us. There is no check list, no exact way. Being good isn't a state you can reach, you can always be better, but you also need balance.

I want to know what you think of as good? What makes you feel like... "Wow. I made a good day out of this day."?

Unknown said...

Wow. That's a hard one because some of how I measure each day is as a checklist and I don't think that's a good way to do it.

I feel like I made a good day if I've:
-"refused to remain in the realm of negative thought" an idea I read at lds.org
-Done at least one unselfish thing with pure motives
-Put the house to bed, and I feel TOTALLY successful if the house was tidy when someone stopped by unexpectedly
-prayed at least once on my knees
-Dan and I laughed
-I was present with my kids in their heads and hearts even for just a moment
-I noticed something gratefully

I used to have exercise and eating habits on there too but since I wanted to stay positive, I had to let that go. So that's it for now and maybe as you get more spiritually mature that list lengthens and changes? What about you?