Tuesday, April 26, 2011

pretty


I have this bad habit of wanting to buy books for purely aesthetic reasons. Who says you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover?
Not me.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

My Weekend. In Order.

I saw these two crazy kids! Whom I love, and never EVER see.
It was so good to talk and catch up. Hopefully I will be seeing them again here soon-ish.
(oh, and don't worry. I DID facebook stalk to get this photo because I have NO recent photos.)


Ryder didn't like Easter Egg hunting at first.

Classic.


My Zion was free of entry fees this week! So what did I do?
I dragged my family along to take part of this beautiful blessing!












This is Gordon. I also got to visit with him. Which was also good!
(I had to facebook stalk to obtain this picture too. Because I suck at recent picture taking lately. But I think this displays Gordon at his best.)

Easter = candy, chapstick, gum, and a book.
All coming in our beautiful, traditional, really old baskets!

Hi. My name is Danni and I love Jelly Beans.
Oh! And this is my Nephew, Ry-face. He really loves Jelly Beans.

I love Easter. I love that it is based on Christ's eternal love for us. I love that it is simple - that I can spend time with my family and joke around with them at a dinner. I also love that it is an excuse to have dinner with them all. I'm so grateful that I can be with them forever. I'm grateful that Heavenly Father will compensate for all we have lost, if we just go to Him.
I love Him.

The book I recieved was Children's Letters to God. And I love it! It is too cute. I'll share some of my favourites:

Dear God,
If you don't take the baby back I will not clean up my room.
Joy

I SORRY I DID NOT WRITE BEFORE BUT I ONLY LEARNED HOW THIS WEEK
MARTHA
AGE 5

Dear God
Please send me pony. I never askd for anything before
You can look it up
Bruce

Remembr when the snow was so deep there was no school
Could we have it again
Guy

More to come in the future!

His Sacred Name - An Easter Declaration

Monday, April 18, 2011

via tif


This article was found here.

Why I won’t be seeing the Book of Mormon musical

Reviews of “The Book of Mormon” musical have been all over the entertainment media in the past few weeks. According to the reviews, the play sketches the journey of two Mormon missionaries from their sheltered life in Salt Lake City to Uganda, where their training and life experience proves wholly inadequate to the realities of a continent plagued by poverty, AIDS, genital mutilation and other horrors. While extolling the musical for its originality, most reviewers also make reference to the play’s over-the-top blasphemous and offensive language.
Dealing with parody and satire is always a tricky thing for churches. We can easily appear thin-skinned or defensive, and churches sometimes are. A few members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have seen this musical and blogged about it seem to have gone out of their way to show how they can take it. That’s their choice. There’s always room for different perspectives, and we can all decide what to do with our free time.
But I’m not buying what I’m reading in the reviews. Specifically, I’m not willing to spend $200 for a ticket to be sold the idea that religion moves along oblivious to real-world problems in a kind of blissful naiveté.
Somewhere I read that the show’s creators spent seven years writing and producing “The Book of Mormon” musical. As I reflected on all that time spent parodying this particular target, I also wondered what was really going on with Mormons in Africa during those same seven years.
So I checked.
•The World Health Organization estimates that 884 million people worldwide don’t have access to clean water. This is a huge problem in Africa, not only because of water-borne diseases but because kids who spend hours each day walking to and from the nearest well to fill old gasoline cans with water cannot attend school. According to church records, in the past seven years, more than four million Africans in 17 countries have gained access to clean drinking water through Mormon humanitarian efforts to sink or rehabilitate boreholes.
•More than 34,000 physically handicapped African kids now have wheelchairs through the same Mormon-sponsored humanitarian program. To see a legless child whose knuckles have become calloused through walking on his hands lifted into a wheelchair may be the best way to fully understand the liberation this brings.
•Millions of children, meanwhile, have now been vaccinated against killer diseases like measles as the church has sponsored or assisted with projects in 22 African countries.
•More than 126,000 Africans have had their sight restored or improved through Mormon partnership with African eye care professionals in providing training, equipment and supplies.
•Another 52,000 Africans have been trained to help newborns who otherwise would never take a first breath. Training in neonatal resuscitation has also been a big project for Mormons in Africa.
•Then, of course, there is the tragedy of AIDS. A couple of weeks ago I attended a dinner where the Utah AIDS Foundation honored James O. Mason, former United States Assistant Secretary of Health. When he was working for the Center for Disease Control in 1984, a project to research the epidemiology and treatment of AIDS was established at the Hospital Mama Yempo in Kinshasha, Zaire. After visiting the hospital and examining the children and adults with AIDS, Mason described the death rate and the associated infections from AIDS as “horrific.” Mason, a Mormon, knows quite a bit about AIDS and a great deal about Africa.
•None of this includes responses to multiple disasters, like the flooding in Niger, where the Church provided clothing, quits and hygiene items to 20,000 people in six inundated regions of the country.
Of course, parody isn’t reality, and it’s the very distortion that makes it appealing and often funny. The danger is not when people laugh but when they take it seriously – if they leave a theater believing that Mormons really do live in some kind of a surreal world of self-deception and illusion.
A couple of weeks ago a review about the musical appeared at the New York Times from a Jewish writer who simply listed himself as Levi. “As someone of Jewish faith,” he began, “I take personal offense at this show….I cannot believe that New York, MY New York, where I was born and raised, would ever do such a thing. Shame on you, New York Times, shame on Broadway, and shame on all of us who stand idly by and do nothing while the faith of others is mocked. Religious and cultural Jews need not support such bigotry.”
Levi’s point was echoed by some reviewers, but by surprisingly few. So why hasn’t there been a huge outcry from Mormons?
In my opinion, three reasons. The first is that in the great scheme of things, what Broadway does with “The Book of Mormon” musical is irrelevant to most of us. In the great sweep of history, parodies and TV dramas are blips on the radar screen that come and go. Popular culture will be whatever it will be.
The second reason is related. Jesus’s apostle Paul put it rather well when he said that Christians seek out the positive and virtuous things in life. His New Testament phraseology was adapted in the early years of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this formal Article of Faith:
“We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men…If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”
Finally, if we Mormons really do follow Jesus Christ in our lives and look to him as an example, then it’s hard for us to ignore the injunction to turn the other cheek. There were times, to be sure, when Jesus roundly criticized others, but it was almost always for hardened hypocrisy. He dismissed the criticism he received personally and told his followers: “Do good to them who despitefully use you and persecute you.”
It takes strength of character to do this, but it’s the Christian mandate. Sure, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pushes back when the record needs correcting or when legal rights need defending, but the world of popular entertainment is more likely to be met with a collective shrug than by placard-waving Mormon protesters.
Meanwhile, what of those thousands of remarkable and selfless Mormon missionaries who opted to pay their own expenses during the past seven years to serve in Africa while their peers were focused on careers or getting on with life? They have returned home, bringing with them a connection with the African people that will last a lifetime. Many will keep up their Swahili language or their Igbo dialect. They will keep in their bedrooms the flags of the nations where they served. They will look up every time they hear Africa mentioned on the evening news. Their associations with the people whose lives they touched will become lifetime friendships. And in a hundred ways they will become unofficial ambassadors for the nations they served.
written by Michael Otterson HEAD OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Temple! And Las Fiestas Agostinas (The August Festivals)!

Do you think that I would be able to go to this? That possibly, just maybe, they would let me out of the Guatemala MTC for a day to go see it, and be there? Does the MTC allow such adventures?

I want to see the cultural celebration. I want to go through the Temple. I want to do ordinance work there and introduce investigators and members to this beautiful and sacred building they just gained.

do you think... that could possibly happen?



P.S. Call me selfish, but I also want to be there for this thing that I found:

The first week of August El Salvador has a national holiday that is complete with athletic events, religious celebration, art shows, beauty pagents, food, dancing, costumes, parades, theatre - a mass migration to the beaches and resorts. It's Las Fiestas Agostinas - The August Festivals. One whole week of partying in honor of the patron saint of El Salvador – Jesus Christ.
It’s a Salvadoran tradition dating back to the early 1500′s when the Spanish brought Roman Catholicism to Central America. Businesses and even large sections of the government all shut down. There’s a 4 a.m. parade with a marching band on the 1st – a wake-up call that it’s time to celebrate!
The holiday culminates on August 6th with el Día del Divino Salvador del Mundo (the Day of the Divine Savior of the World). There is a tradition called ”La Bajada” (which means “The Descent”) in which the people from the surrounding mountain villages “descend” into the capital city of San Salvador (which of course means “Holy Savior”). An image of Jesus is carried through the streets to the Metropolitan Cathedral. There, the image is lowered into a waiting globe and then brought back up out of it, dressed all in white. It commemorates the “Transfiguration of Christ” story in the Bible - where Jesus, Peter, James and John are on a mountain and Elijah and Moses appears with him, Jesus’ face "did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light"…then a voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.” (Matthew 17:1-13)
Costumes
Monument to the Savior

La Bajada
La Bajada
Metropolitan Cathedral
Transfiguration of Christ

I think once I get to this country... I may not want to come back.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

la iglesia de Jesucristo de los santos de los ultimos dias

Today I got my welcome letter from my Mission President
President Alejandro Lopez.

It was so great to be welcomed by him! And though - as rumor has it - he will be released before I actually get into the field, right now he is still my Mission President.
His letter was so encouraging. It also offered some needed advice and reassurance.

One day, you will get to read my recordings of this soon to be adventure.
In two months, two weeks, and one day will be about the time you'll get to hear of it.
You'll hear of my encounters will this people, their wonderful culture, their beautiful language, their alluring countries, and their glorious food.

I'm so soo grateful that the Lord has given me this beautiful calling to go teach His children in little el salvador and belize of His pure, true, wonderful, beautiful, glorious gospel! I pray for the strength and guidance to be able to do His will.

Two months.


Two weeks.


And one day.

:)

In other news: my family and I get to be photographed by this lovely lady. soo great!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

new phone not-love


Hello Miss Aria.
Why are you so strange?
And touch screen?
And flat?
And big, but little?

It makes me afraid to touch you.


But, I don't like touch screens.



So I don't really want to touch you anyway.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

my friend beau...


said to me one day,
"This site is splendid and if you don't love all of the pictures and quotes -
I'll eat my hat."

These are some of my favourites:



this one is going to be one of my walls one day

And Beau would totally say this one:

Tuesday, April 5, 2011