Tithing and My Broken Down Car...

When I turned twenty one I was just starting school at BYU (Brigham Young University). My plan was to live at home and spare the expense of living away. This, I thought, would allow me to put the money I would have spent on rent toward a car. To me this sounded logical and reasonable, but this way of thinking went contrary to the way my dad thought about things. He was very old-school and counseled me to stay out of debt for anything other than a home. I considered what he said and then decided to buy the car anyway.

A Letter To My Daughter Upon Starting Her First Year of College...

Dear Daughter,

I know you have heard this before, but here is a link to the story about my first week away from home when I went to Rick's College (now known as BYU Idaho). Read it some time, if you want, when you are absolutely bored (My First Week of College).

I won't lie to you. What you are doing is really hard and will test both your resolve and your abilities. May I share with you some of the things I learned as I blundered my way through college?

I Am a Child of God...

The fact that we are children of God is so fundamental to our religion and has been so often repeated to us since the time when we were just small children that I believe in many instances we take this fact for granted and rarely think about what this amazing doctrine implies. To really understand even the simple things of  god takes a little effort on our part, but that effort soon leads those who try god’s word to an understanding that simply believing and rehearsing His doctrines fails to reveal.

Choluteca and the Threat of War...

I've already talked about the contentious geopolitical climate of Honduras at the time of my mission in another post (see The Military Roundups of San Miguel...), so I won't belabor this subject too greatly here. But I do want to elaborate a bit more on the time I spent in Choluteca which is a Honduran city which lies just a few miles north of the Nicaraguan border.

The Military and the Roundups of San Miguel...

When I arrived in Honduras, it was a time of great upheavals and political strife. Honduras was literally surrounded by countries on all sides which were entangled in civil wars and rebellions. The armed conflicts were raging on all fronts when I arrived there in the early 1980s.

Fist Fights In Paradise, and God's Strange Ways...

One of the areas I served in during my mission was a very small island named Utila just off the northern coast of Honduras. Although small, it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. When I was there it was picture post card perfect. We used to walk out on the pier which went out into the ocean for hundreds of feet and would dangle our feet in the ocean as we ate our lunch. And there was this bridge which crossed a little finger of water that stretched inward into the interior of the island where we could watch sharks and rays as they glided past under foot. We even saw a school of flying fish which must have made a wrong turn somewhere because they no sooner entered the bay than they turned themselves about and headed back out into open waters.

The Day I killed My Grandpa...

My father married, for his day, very late in life. It's not that he didn't believe in the institution of marriage, he wanted to get married and start a family and believed that families were divinely instituted of God. Unlike our own times, the belief that marriage was good and brought with it happiness was not a belief that was uncommon in his day and my father's desire to get married was very much like those of most other men at that time...and yet, he waited despite his deep desires to get married.

An Uninvited Guest...

I guess Utila was the area in my mission that was most abundant in the creepy crawly sorts of things most people instinctively avoid. There were the sand flies which were a sort of biting fly which became a constant nuisance at the beach whenever the winds ceased and there was a calm on the island, but I'm not talking about this type of creature. The types of critters I'm talking about now are the stuff of nightmares for most people.

The Path To Hell Is Paved In Cement...

When missionaries from our church first arrived in Utila they found five churches, five different denominations, all of them Christian. There were also five bars on the island and the bars were always filled with people every day. The churches only had people come on Sundays and even then not so much as the bars. So, there was some fierce competition for converts between the denominations.

Ah, Parasites...

Parasites are a fact of life. We all entertain them hosting their existence mostly without any knowledge of that fact. The reason for our ignorant bliss relies on the fact that our bodies have become accustomed to hosting the parasites common to the areas in which we live. This all changes whenever a person travels to a foreign country because the parasites indigenous to these new areas make themselves forcefully apparent to whomever is unlucky enough to ingest them. So, while we were in Honduras, we were schooled in the ways of these parasites and learned how to avoid the unfortunate consequences that they could impose on our health and our work.

Air Plane Rides Into Utila...

Utila is an island about 30 miles off the northern coast of Honduras just north of a city called La Ceiba. When traveling between this island and mainland Honduras, we would always travel by air. At the time, as far as I knew, there was only one charter company operating a service between La Ceiba and Utila and so, over time, we got to know one of the pilots very well. So well, in fact, that he would let us take turns flying in the seat next to him so we could watch him fly the airplane and get a pilot's eye view of the trip. It was a lot of fun.

Please, Don't Take My Bike...

Choluteca was the first area I served in that was big enough to need a bike. Getting a bike really opened things up for us and allowed us to reach a much larger audience than would have otherwise been possible. A person can cover three to four times as much ground on a bicycle than they can on foot so we were able to both schedule more appointments because we would spend less time in between getting to them and to expand the range of our visits to places too far away to be considered without a bike. We loved our bicycles because they made our work easier and more productive. And, let's face it, they're fun to ride and filled with the memories and nostalgia of youth.

Take Care When Choosing On Which Side of the Road You Walk...

The third area in which I served in the mission field was a place called Choluteca. It was in southern Honduras and was so hot that it was called El Horno, or, The Oven in English. It was just a few miles north of Nicaragua. And, as it turned out, I was transferred there during the hottest time of the year. I remember it being so hot at night that even turning on a fan was uncomfortable and it felt like someone was holding a hair dryer in front of me as I tried to get some sleep. Air conditioning? There was none.

My Second Companion and the Dog at the Fence...

Four months after arriving in Honduras my first companion was transferred to a new area and I was given someone new to work with. Transfers in the mission field were always a bit awkward at first because by the time they occurred, if things had gone well, you would have been with your previous companion long enough to either learn to really like him or, at the very least, to know him well enough that you could make any accommodations required by whatever peculiarities he may possess to make the day go by smoothly and amicably. He, of course, all the while is doing the same for you.

Christmas With My Cousin Mary...

Mary, although she was my cousin, was always very old to me. When I was a small child, she was already part way into her sixties because we were separated by several generations. My father had developed a passion for genealogy and was, therefore, able to inform me that Mary was my double first cousin three times removed.

My First Week of College...

When I was eighteen, and had just graduated from High School, as most people do at that time in their life, I began thinking seriously about what came next. It's not that I had never considered such things before that time, but milestones like graduation seem to imprint a sense of urgency on thoughts like these which previously, at least for me at that young age, had seemed to exist only somewhere in the far distant future.

First Impressions...

I remember the first day of my mission vividly. In hindsight, there was nothing about that day which could not have been predicted by any average thoughtful person who anticipated what someone in similar circumstances might experience. But for someone like myself, who was totally without any experiences even remotely like those thrust upon me and into which I was totally immersed, and therefore, without any reference from the past to fall back on or from which I might get my bearings, find some context, or from which I might glean a little insight, it was truly a shocking experience.