The Blessings of Long Waits

Dallas Fort Worth Airport Terminal C

Greetings from Utah!  It is so nice to be home for a week and to be able to spend some time with my family and friends.  It has really only been three months since I was home, but it felt like it had been close to a year.  So it is wonderful to be back "in the place where I belong" again.  As I flew in over the city lights of the Utah, Salt Lake, and Davis valleys at 2:30 am on Friday morning, I couldn't help but feel like that was a taste of what it would be like to enter into the Celestial Kingdom.  It was familiar, inviting, and happy.  It was home.

How I got there on Friday morning was a much longer and more entertaining story.  When I had purchased my tickets to come home, I had things all planned out.  I needed to be at the class I TA on Thursday till 2:00 pm, following which I would rush home, grab something to eat, and then wait for the shuttle to come and pick me up where I would get to the airport and be on a plane headed for Denver at 6:30 pm, and then from Denver I would fly into Salt Lake, arriving at 10:30 pm where Julianne had kindly agreed to pick me up.

My plans started out well, despite a little bit of traffic on the freeways headed home from class.  I was at home and ready for the shuttle which came around 4 and made its way through traffic to the airport where I was able to check in and was waiting for the flight with about an hour to go.  That's when things started changing.  They informed us that our flight that had been delayed 8 minutes, was now delayed 2 hours because of weather in Denver, but luckily my flight to Utah was also delayed, so I would be able to catch that plane and just get into Utah a little later than expected.  Then the delay was pushed to four hours and I started to worry.  Then the news came that we would be able to get to Denver, but would have to wait until the next morning to get out of Denver because of the weather.  This was a problem because I found out that night that my Doctor's appointment that I thought had been scheduled for Monday morning, was actually for Friday morning at 10:45 am.

I talked with the attendants at the booth and they told me that they were in the process of working out tickets for passengers that had been connecting through Denver to get on other planes headed to their final destination.  They kindly provided me with a ticket on an American Airlines flight that was direct to Salt Lake City.  It was an answer to my prayers and I was grateful for their willingness to help me get where I needed to go.  I was given a print out with some information that would allow me to pick up my ticket in the new Terminal.  When I got to the American Airlines booth and handed them my ticket, it was about 8:30 pm and the flight was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half.  They looked at the information and told me that they had not been able to find evidence of Frontier having booked me a ticket on the flight, and I would need to go back to the other Terminal (on the other side of the airport) to get that information.  This had me panicked, and racing back across the airport where I was given the needed information.  I rushed back to the American airlines booth and received my boarding pass, thinking the night's adventures had finally come to an end and I could relax and wait for the flight to board in an hour.

Within minutes of beginning my relaxation, they announced that our flight had been delayed until 10:30, inconvenient, but par for the course on that night.  Around 10:00 pm I noticed that there was still no plane waiting to take us to Utah.  Again the staff came on the intercom and announced that our plane was still en route to the airport, and we could not leave without it (naturally).  When the plane finally arrived around 10:15, I thought, "Perfect, now we will be ready to go and maybe by 11:00 pm we will be in the air."  Then came another announcement over the intercom.  We finally had a plane, but no pilot or copilot--again, not optimal conditions for a flight to Utah.  The pilot and copilot were in Austin and had been delayed because of weather, but would be there by 11.  Then another announcement--I was really growing to hate these updates--the pilot and copilot would not be there until midnight and there were questions about whether they could still legally fly at that point.  At that point, all I could do was laugh, because the whole series of events just seemed so absolutely improbable.  In the midst of all this I reworked rides several times.

I am anything but patient when it comes to travel delays and changes.  In fact, I've been known to be quite angry about delays in the past.  This time, I was frustrated, but maintained my frustrations with a decent dose of humor, thinking that it was virtually impossible that this serious of unfortunate events could ever come together again in quite the same way.

On my unanticipated red-eye flight to Utah, as I was completely unable to sleep, I found myself conversing with the woman next to me for the majority of the flight.  We had a great conversation in which we discussed a number of different topics, including the gospel and the Church.  After about an hour and a half, she began asking me questions about the Church and its teachings, giving me a wonderful opportunity to share my testimony and perhaps clear up some misunderstandings about the Church.

At times in our lives, there will be moments when it seems like everything that can possibly go wrong is going wrong.  It may seem as though every announcement that comes over the intercom will be some new bit of bad news making a situation that seemed to be bad even worse.  Our plans will occasionally fall apart and our lives will be rerouted and filled with unanticipated delays causing us to wonder if we will ever reach our destination.  But these are the very times when the Lord is often closest to us.  If things had gone according to my plans, perhaps I would have missed out on the opportunity to share my testimony.  So when our lives are rerouted and unanticipated delays occur, we can stand assured in the knowledge that God is at the helm and that His plans are greater than ours.  In the meantime, perhaps we can find some humor in the unfortunate events that direct us toward the path that the Lord has laid out for us.

Brett

The School of the Prophets

I absolutely love the month of November!  If this isn't the most wonderful time of the year, I don't know what is!  In addition to being able to celebrate one of the coolest holidays ever invented with Thanksgiving (seriously, a holiday where the purpose is to express gratitude to the Lord for life's blessings, while at the same time enjoying some of the best tasting food ever devised by culinary minds with your family!  What more can you ask for?), radio stations have begun playing Christmas music and there are reminders everywhere you look that the Christmas season is upon us.  I know a lot of people get irked about listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving, but I'm not one of those people.  Christmas is fully of many of my life's happiest memories and I am more than happy to begin celebrating in early November.  For me, things don't get any better than this!

"The Sacrifice of Isaac," by Domencino Zampieri, 1627-1628

This past week finally started doing a little bit of research for my dissertation.  With the help of a friend, I was able to secure some of the minutes of the Salt Lake School of the Prophets for 1869-1874 and I started going through these minutes looking for things that would be useful for my dissertation.

Most Latter-day Saints probably don't know that there was a School of the Prophets in Salt Lake during these years, so perhaps a little bit of background will be useful.  The School of the Prophets was an institution that Joseph Smith had been commanded to establish in Kirtland in the 1830s.  Remember that the Church was still only a couple of years old in 1832 when the revelation to establish the school was given.  There was no Doctrine and Covenants, there was no Sunday School, and in many ways there really were not any organized quorum meetings for the Priesthood.  Further, most of these brethren had little to no formal schooling.  Yet these brethren were called to spend their summer months between planting and the harvest in preaching the gospel and building the Church.  The School of the Prophets was a way for the Lord to train these early missionaries, teaching them the doctrines of the gospel as well as the principles of grammar, geography, languages, mathematics, etc.  Further, the Lord was trying to train a group of new converts to be prepared for the ordinances of the Temple which He began to reveal at this time, beginning with the ordinance of the washing of feet.

The Prophet's School of the Prophets met during the winter months up through early 1836 and the Dedication of the Kirtland Temple.  By the Fall of 1836 when the School should have begun again, apostasy was beginning to undermine Kirtland and the School was never really reestablished.  In Nauvoo the Prophet relied more on his meetings with the Quorum of the Twelve and other select men and women to reveal the sacred principles of the gospel and the Temple ordinances.  Also, the Church established a university and schools (among other things) to increase the intellectual knowledge of the Saints.  But the School of the Prophets had been a vital organization in the early days of the Church, increasing the spiritual understanding and brotherhood among the early men of the Church.

In 1869, with the coming of the railroad, Brigham Young felt there was a need to reestablish the School of the Prophets.  Although it brought many blessings to Utah, the railroad posed a serious challenge to the Saints.  With it came outside products and outside ideas, many of which were directly aimed at challenging the underpinnings of the Church and the faith of the Saints.  If the Saints spent all of their money on Eastern goods, Utah would be bankrupted and put at the mercy of outside interests.  Even more dangerous was the fear that some of the Saints would abandon their faith for ideas and philosophies that ran contrary to the Gospel.  In order to address some of these concerns and also to increase the spiritual understanding of the Saints, Brigham Young reestablished the School of the Prophets, placing one in Salt Lake, another in Provo, and others in various small communities.

In going through the minutes for the Salt Lake School, I've found a number of things that will be valuable for my dissertation, but I've also found some comments that simply built my faith and I wanted to share a couple of these.  Because these were notes taken, they are unpolished and don't always read the way that they would in a polished talk.  But sometimes there is something nice, something real, about the short and choppy excerpts.

On December 11, 1869, President Young spoke to the School and made a comment that I loved.  He said, "Even a man holding the office of a Deacon may magnify that calling so that he would be more worthy and have a higher exaltation than many High Priests.  It is not so much the office a man holds, as it is the magnifying of that portion of the office he does hold."  When I read this comment, I was struck by its simplicity and the reminder that the Lord rewards us according to our own performance in the callings that we are given with the abilities we have, not according to the performance of some other Saint in the callings he or she is given with the abilities that he or she possesses.  It would be wonderful if we could all be like President Monson or Sister Burton.  And we absolutely should look at and strive to emulate the examples of these wonderful leaders.  But we should not be discouraged if we are unable to care for all of the 84 widows in our ward on our own, for the Lord will judge us and reward us according to the time and circumstances and abilities that we had, rather than against the scale of President Monson's stunning example.

On January 8, 1870, Daniel H. Wells (second counselor to Brigham Young) spoke at the school.  The Brethren had been discussing the principle of sacrifice and President Wells said, "As for Sacrificing, he said, that he expected, for him to obtain eternal salvation, it would cost him not only all that he had, but all that he will ever have, though he did not deem it a sacrifice, for it was simply an exchange for the better...He expected it would be a rough passage when he entered the road to eternal life, and any saint having an idol between him and his God, it will certainly have to be torn from him, before he can enter into the Celestial Kingdom of our God."  Wilford Woodruff added, that "we all stood in need of Faith, especially at the present time, we have had good peace for many years, and he had no doubt but every one would sooner or later be tried to the very core - We should be prepared for every thing that may come along."

Sometimes it is easy to forget that the Gospel comes with an attached price.  It is easy to love the Gospel when everything is going well and when we are not being asked to give very much.  But in order to receive "all that the Father hath" (D&C 84:38), we must sooner or later be willing to place all that we have upon the altar.  And the older I grow, the more I realize that our possessions and our money are the easiest things to let go of.  Far more difficult and far more meaningful is the sacrifice of our heart and our will.  When Abraham and Isaac went to Moriah, they were being asked to give more than perhaps any other mortals (excepting the Savior) have been asked to give.  In a very real sense, they were being asked to sacrifice everything they had and everything they had desired for the future.  Some will say that they were being asked to give far too much.  What a terrible, lonely, and heart breaking journey that must have been.  But what must have been their thoughts as they returned home  and contemplated the ram in the thicket and their vastly expanded faith and understanding of the gift of God's Son?

Yes, the Gospel has a price; it is everything.  And we must be prepared to pay that hefty price.  But as our Hymn reminds us, "The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose, [God] will not, [He] cannot, desert to his foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, [God] will never, no never, no never forsake."  Somehow, someway, when we have thoroughly proved our faith and willingness to give all for the Lord, in time or in eternity there will always be a ram in the thicket preserving those hopes, dreams, and blessings that we desire so deeply.  But before those blessings can come, we must first learn to obey the first great commandment, loving God with all our heart, might, mind, and strength.

Brett

Expecting Miracles and Receiving Them

It has been several years since I took my first college exams during the Summer Term of 1999.  Friday, I took and passed my last.  When I woke up yesterday morning and realized that I had no tests to study for, no classes to read for, "just" a dissertation--I'll start stressing about that in a few days--to write, it was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.  I still don't know quite what to do with myself, but I'm trying to enjoy a few moments of relaxation before making a significant push onto my dissertation.

Frans Franken II, The Israelites After Crossing the Red Sea

Beyond the bizarre feeling of being "finished" with a major portion of my collegiate experience, this week had a number of other unique experiences that will make these exams stand out as an important experience in my life.  For a week and a half before my exams, both of my roommates were coughing and it was obvious that one of them was really quite sick.  I did my best to limit my contact and remain in my own room where perhaps I could delay getting the same illness.  But having not been sick yet this Fall, I knew it was coming and I just hoped that it would hold off until after my exams were finished.  To make matters worse, the stress from my exams had really thrown off my sleep schedule.  In the weeks leading up to the exams, I often got little more than 4-5 hours of sleep per night as my mind simply wouldn't shut down at night.  So I knew that when the illness hit me, it was going to hit me hard.

Mercifully, the illness held off through Friday of last week, allowing me to finish the first two written portions of the exam without any trouble.  But by the end of my test that Friday in a small room that for some unknown reason had its air conditioner working overtime, I knew that I was sick and it was going to be rocky.  As seems to be the pattern for me these days, my sickness caused my asthma to flare up and created a miserable week for me.  I went to the doctor on Monday and got some medicine and some help, but I knew that I was going to need a miracle for my final written exam on Wednesday and then again for my oral exam on Friday.

Wednesday morning, when I took my written exam on the United States prior to 1877, I felt good for most of the day and I saw the hand of the Lord.  Never in all my academic career have I come even remotely close to what I accomplished Wednesday.  I am generally a slow writer.  4-5 pages is a very, very good day of writing for me.  But these answers required substantially more thought and effort.  Between 8 and 3:30 when I finished, I managed to write 28 pages in answering the three questions (a ten page answer for the first question, and then two nine page answers for the second and third questions).  And it wasn't just the general output of page production.  I knew when I walked out of that exam that I had passed each one of those questions and that I had written thoughtful and good responses to each question (not a characteristic feeling for me on my exams).  I knew that I had received the miracle and blessings that I had asked for.

That afternoon when I got home, my asthma and cold became worse than they had been all week.  When I went in for a doctor's appointment the next day, things actually happened to be critical.  During my life I have had two asthma attacks that were bad enough to warrant a breathing treatment.  That Thursday, the doctor gave me two breathing treatments there at the clinic and then gave me strict instructions about the circumstances that would necessitate me going to the hospital or calling 911.  Listening to her talk, it hit me that things had been even more severe than I had realized.  At the same time, it hit me that the miracles I had experienced were even greater than I had realized, compensating for the severity of the circumstances.

On Friday, having recovered somewhat from the attack, I was able to pass my oral examination, leading to some kind praise and encouragement from my professors, each of whom were surprised at my performance given the circumstances.  Nobody was more surprised than myself.  I consider myself a fairly able student, but this experience gave me a profound opportunity to witness the hand of the Lord in the midst of difficult circumstances.  I had needed a miracle and it had come.

Perhaps even more importantly, I had expected the miracle that came.  Never in all of this experience did I find myself doubting that the Lord would bless me.  I don't know why it was so easy for me to believe in these circumstances for there have surely been other circumstances where faith and hope seemed all but impossible for me to muster.  But this was a time for me in which I knew that my Red Sea would part and a way would be opened to the other side leading to new challenges and new tests of faith in the future.

I'm grateful to everyone who has prayed for me and encouraged me during this process.  Surely it was your faith and prayers that enabled me to believe and to receive the Lord's blessings at this time!

Brett

The Tender Mercies of the Lord

I am over half way finished with my comprehensive exams!  I passed the first one with high marks and am still waiting to hear back on the second exam on Modern Latin America.  Combined between my exams on Tuesday and Friday, I wrote nineteen pages and had to have referenced more than sixty books and authors.  And so at the moment, I have to admit that I can't think of much more than a few lines to write here.

The only things I could think of were a couple of experiences during the exams.  The first experience happened early Tuesday morning.  I woke up around five and after getting ready I thought that I could either study my notes again or study the Book of Mormon.  I quickly reached for the Book of Mormon realizing that there was no other book I needed more that particular day.  My notes might have helped me to remember one more book or one more date, but nothing else was going to provide me with peace and calm like the Book of Mormon and my morning prayers.  When I got into the exam, I took that peace and calm with me and when I opened the envelope with the questions I found the question listed that I was best suited for from the professor I worried the most about.

The second experience happened on Friday as I was writing my answer for my question on the Mexican Revolution.  As I was writing, I realized that I had forgotten the name of a very important figure in the Revolution.  For these exams you are alone in a room with no windows and nobody watching you.  I had my notes in my bag because I had brought them to study over during the hour before the test.  It hit me that I could easily retrieve those notes and find the name I needed.  It was just "one name," and "I had had to memorize a lot of names for these exams."  But my parents did not raise me that way and I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ.  I said a prayer and asked for help in remembering the name.  The answer did not come immediately.  I moved on and wrote another couple of pages.  But after about thirty or forty minutes, the name came into my mind.  It was a testimony to me that the Lord was watching over me.  But even if the name had not come, I'm grateful that I made the decision not to look at my notes.

I don't mean to use these experiences to brag.  They meant far more to me than they will probably mean to anyone else.  They served as reminders to me that the Lord does indeed bless His children with His "tender mercies" according to our faith.  When it became obvious Friday night that I had come down with my traditional November chest cold, these experiences served as reminders that the Lord will bless me if I will continue to strive to do His will.

Brett