Engagement Photos

This is just a short post to put up a couple of the engagement photos that my sister took of Ashley and me a couple of weeks ago.  Lynley did such a beautiful job with these pictures. Each one reminds me of just how blessed I am to have Ashley in my life, not only because of how beautiful she is, but because of how good she is.  Ashley is the kind of person that makes everyone around her smile because she lifts them through love.  She is one of the most Christlike individuals I've ever met, and is an absolute blessing in my life!  I look up to her and hope to one day be as good as she is!

Brett

We Must Live According to the Precepts of Our Holy Religion

George Q. Cannon (1827-1901)

The past little while I've realized that engaged life is quite busy, particularly when you add in Ashley's college class, a dissertation, two full time jobs, Church callings, etc. But being with Ashley is also the best experience I've ever had and I'm so grateful to be with her!  She builds me up each day and makes life wonderful with her smile and her constant positivity.  I am truly blessed!

Recently I've been spending quite a bit of time with the writings of George Q. Cannon.  For those who are unfamiliar with him, here's a short introduction.  George Q. Cannon was a native of Liverpool England came into the Church in 1840, when his uncle, John Taylor, preached the gospel to the Cannon family in England.  George Q. and his family emigrated to Nauvoo in 1842 and he became John Taylor's apprentice on The Times and Seasons and The Nauvoo Neighbor.  In later years, he printed another newspaper known as the Western Standard and then a periodical titled The Juvenile Instructor. He opened up the Church's first mission to Hawaii as a young elder.  While in that position, he and brother Jonathan Napela translated the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian and printed it. Then in 1860, he was called to be an apostle.  In 1872, he was elected to be Utah's territorial delegate to Congress, a position he held until 1882.  In 1873, Brigham Young called him to be an additional counselor in the First Presidency, and then in 1880 John Taylor called him to be his first counselor in the First Presidency, a calling that he would hold until his death in 1901.  To demonstrate his significance as a leader, in 1887, the government issued a wanted poster for Presidents Taylor and Cannon.  President Cannon had the higher bounty on his head.

Simply put, George Q. Cannon was one of the most influential leaders of the Lord's kingdom.  But President Cannon's significance was not due to the callings he held, or the newspapers he printed, or his time as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  George Q. Cannon's greatness lay in his faith and in his understanding of the gospel.

In December 1863, President Cannon was serving as the President of the European Mission.  On December 31, he held a conference with his elders and gave a beautiful discourse.  I just wanted to share a few of his comments from that discourse, which I found instructive as I read them this week.

"The price of such a [Celestial] glory is great, for the reward is great, and much is required at our hands before we can obtain it.  We must lay everything upon the altar, subdue every evil desire, and the propensities common to our nature, before we can dwell in the exalted presence of God.  When I see Elders disposed to sacrifice everything they possess, even to themselves, and place all upon the altar, my heart warms toward them and I love such men.  My brethren, I know there is nothing that I hold dear upon this earth that I should consider of greater importance than the progress of God's work.

". . . While we are laboring in this mission I trust we will do so contentedly and faithfully, and that the faith & desires we now have and the good resolves we may form, will live and abide with us, and be so indelibly impressed upon our minds that we will never cease to entertain them while we have existence on the earth.  All the instructions we may hear, and every new resolution of our minds that we may make while we are here assembled, we will be, I hope, able to put into practice to the fullest extent, not alone while we are upon these missions, but throughout our lives.  Let us from this period form determinations that we will discharge those responsibilities which rest upon us and labor for God while we live.  Let us retain in our remembrance, when we return to Zion, the precious blessings we have received while we have been fulfilling our Missions, & the happy times we have had in consequence; and, instead of being a load upon the shoulders of brother Brigham [Young], brother Heber [C. Kimball], brother Daniel [H. Wells] or the Twelve, let us assist them and labor with the same purpose in view.  Our missions are not ended when we return home, but we are constantly--so long as we are connected with the Church of God and bear the Priesthood we at present are called to--missionaries engaged in the development of his purposes.  Let every Elder be the same Elder when he returns to Zion that he is while laboring in these lands; and if there should be any change in him, let it be for the better, that he may be a man of God in the widest sense of the term, & be an example for them who surround to profitably imitate.  To prosper and have the blessing of God we must live according to the precepts of our holy religion and the whisperings of the Spirit, whether at home or abroad" (George Q. Cannon, journal, 31 December 1863).

This is good counsel for all of us.  We must seek to continue growing, to continue improving, to enjoy the blessings of the Lord's Spirit.

Brett

O Death, Where is Thy Sting? O Grave, Where is thy Victory?

Today is a beautiful Easter day!  Although this holiday has always meant a great deal to me, it means more today than it ever has before.

As most all of you know, I am a devoted sports fan.  In fact, yesterday I managed to spend several hours watching what was essentially a BYU football practice for the simple fact that I love BYU football.  I love seeing my team win.  I hate seeing my team lose.  When they win, I am elated and talk about it for a long time.  When they lose, sometimes I want to disappear because of the frustration.  I have lost my voice numerous times in cheering during and after victories. Today, I celebrate the greatest and most complete victory this world has ever known, in the most important contest this world has ever witnessed.

Because the Savior's victory was so absolutely complete that it was assured before the world was, sometimes we forget just how much was at stake.  Lehi declared that "all mankind were in a lost and in a fallen state, and ever would be save they should rely on this Redeemer" (1 Nephi 10:6). Amulek explained that unless an atonement were made, "all mankind must unavoidably perish" (Alma 34:9).  And Jacob gave the most detailed description of our fate, explaining that had it not been for the atonement, "this corruption [meaning our mortal bodies] could not put on incorruption [immortal bodies].  Wherefore, the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration.  And if so, this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more. . . . For behold, if the flesh should rise no more our sports must become subject to that angel who feel from before the presence of the Eternal God, and became the devil to rise no more.  And our spirits must have become like unto him, and we become devils, angels to a devil, to be shut out from the presence of our God, and to remain with the father of lies, in misery like unto himself" (2 Nephi 9:7-9).

In short, everything was at stake.  It wasn't just a little disappointment that was on the line, where perhaps we didn't get to go home, but we could remain as good people.  No, our very ability to progress and to develop all of the virtues that make this life beautiful was on the line.  The Savior spoke an eternal truth when he declared, "for without me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5).

But on that first glorious Easter morning, He burst the bands of death forever and for all "men, women, and children who belong to the family of Adam" that "the resurrection might pass upon all men, [women, and children]" (2 Nephi 9:21-22).  I can only imagine how we shouted that morning!  I can only imagine how glorious that greatest of all victories felt as we looked on in faith and wonder when the sinless Son of God took up His perfect body with His perfect wounds!  What an honor it must have been for two of our fellow children of God to declare those perfect words, "He is not here; for he is risen, as he said" (Matthew 28:6)! It was the victory of victories; the championship of championships!

With so very much having been won, we celebrate again today.  With Paul, we ask in humble adoration, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory. . . . But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ?" (1 Corinthians 15:55, 57)

Today I celebrate the assurance that because our Savior was victorious over death, so too will we be, and so too will be each of our loved ones, and so too will be each member of the divine household of God.  At some future date, my beloved Dad will rise again.  In fact, I expect to take a picture similar to this one above.  We took that picture in May 2014 as we were driving home from Texas for the last time.  In previous years, we had made that drive for me to come home to visit for the summer, knowing that we would be going the opposite direction the following August.  In May 2014 we made the drive home with plans for me to stay.  We took this picture right before we drove across the Colorado border into Utah.  I was home.  Someday I will be home again, and my Dad will be there to greet me and make the journey together with me and with the rest of our family.  And that day will be glorious, made possible because the Perfect Son of a Perfect God "hat borne [my] griefs, and carried [my] sorrows. . . . He was wounded for [my] transgressions, he was bruised for [my] iniquities: [and] the chastisement of [my] peace was upon him; and with his stripes [I am] healed" (Isaiah 53:4-5).  It will be possible because that first Easter, "the Son of Righteousness [arose] with healing in his wings" (3 Nephi 25:2; Malachi 4:2).

And this is truly a victory for which we can and will rise and shout to all eternity.

Brett

Let us Choose to Be Humble

This has been an interesting week.  On Monday, we celebrated my Dad's 72nd birthday.  It was his first birthday on the other side of the veil.  We all hope that it was a wonderful day for him and we miss him very much.  That day was a reminder that there will, of necessity, be some sobering times when his absence is more apparent than usual.  And yet we all know that he is nearby.  Speaking to a congregation in June 1856, President Brigham Young asked, "When you lay down this tabernacle, where are you going?" and then answered "Into the spirit world."  He then asked, "Where is the spirit world?" and answered, "It is right here." (Brigham Young, Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, 2:1131).  And so we know that my Dad is close by and we are grateful for those sacred moments when we are blessed to brush up against the veil and feel his presence nearby us.

The following day I learned that I hadn't gotten a job that I had applied for.  The news was delivered in a kind and compassionate manner and the person who received it is very well qualified, but it was still difficult to hear.  Of course whenever you apply for a job, there is the chance that you might not get it.  Despite this understanding, this experience can bring with it a measure of personal shame and embarrassment.  And it did for me.  I forced a smile for a couple of days, but it was hard.  But hard as this was, the Lord showed great care for me.  My beautiful fiancé assured me of her love and that she was proud of me and that things would work out.  My Mom and siblings each did the same.  And throughout the remainder of that week, I was blessed to have good friends and colleagues offer words of comfort and encouragement at work.  Through each of these words of encouragement, my feelings of failure dissipated and my hope in the future grew.

The challenging experiences of earlier this week were a wonderful reminder to me of God's love.  Sometimes we wonder how could show his love to us through hard experiences.  But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that often these experiences are some of the most profound manifestations of God's love.  They are reminders of God's love because they help us to be humble and to remember just how much we need to turn to the Lord.  And then as we come to Him, we are able to experience the full majesty of His divine work in our lives.

In each of life's experiences, we have a choice as to how we will respond.  Writing about the end of a long period of Nephite wars, Mormon wrote, "But behold, because of the exceedingly great length of the war between the Nephites and the Laminates many had become hardened, because of the exceedingly great length of the war; and many were softened because of their afflictions, insomuch that they did humble themselves before God, even in the depth of humility" (Alma 62:41).  These people had experienced exactly the same experiences, but where some were led to humility, repentance, and divine healing, others hardened their hearts in pride and found their lives made more difficult.  If we are humble, life's setbacks can and will become the "training ground for better and happier days."

As President Ezra Taft Benson admonished, "Let us choose to be humble. . . . We can choose to humble ourselves by loving God, submitting our will to His, and putting Him first in our lives.  Let us choose to be humble.  We can do it.  I know we can" (Ezra Taft Benson, Beware of Pride)

No matter what challenges life holds for us, let us choose to be humble, and in our humility may we then find the great power of God's love for us.

Brett

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?

This has been a wonderful week!  On Monday afternoon, I asked Ashley A. Camargo to marry me and she said yes!  It would be impossible for me to describe just how much this beautiful woman has and does mean to me.  And I can only glimpse the smallest portion of what she will mean to me for the rest of my life and for all eternity.  But she is a kind and tender and wonderful woman whose goodness inspires me each day of my life and urges me to become better!

As Shakespeare once wrote, for me she is "more lovely and more temperate" than even the warmest and brightest summer day.  And whereas "summer's lease hath all too short a date" her "eternal summer shall not fade" (Sonnet 18).  And as Shakespeare's Henry V said of Katherine, I expect that as I spend more time with Ashley, she will "wear me, better and better."

As I contemplated my proposal, I really struggled to find the proper place.  I wanted it to be at a place that would be special and that would be something that was connected to our relationship.  For our second date, Ashley and I had gone up to Snowbird where we had ridden the Alpine Slide, so I thought that perhaps that would be the most romantic place that we could go.  But then I remembered that the Granite Quarry where the Saints had gotten the stone for the Salt Lake Temple was right at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon--where Snowbird is.  Suddenly, I had found "the right place."

I told Ashley that we were going to go to Snowbird and recreate our second date, but then stopped off at the Quarry site and told her that I wanted to show her something.  We walked down the path to where there are some large blocks of granite and I started telling her some of the history of the site.  I told her that Brigham had wanted to build the temple out of granite because he wanted it to last through the millennium and granite is big and strong and lasts forever.  I then told her that this was the kind of marriage that I wanted us to have, one that would be big, strong, and last forever, with the temple and its covenants at its core.  And then I knelt down and proposed to her in the snow.  (I was grateful to Rob for role playing the situation the night before.  He made a fantastic Ashley).

After that we went up to Snowbird and took the tram to the top of the mountain, which is where we took the picture shown above.  We visited Ashley's friend Hannah and her beautiful little boy Alvin and then we went to Sandy's amazing restaurant "Tuscany."  We capped off a perfect day by video chatting with Ashley's parents and grandparents and visiting my Mom.

It's been a wonderful week and I'm excited for a lifetime and an eternity of love and happiness with Ashley!

Brett

When One Door Closes Another Opens

It's been a busy week!  I spent most of the week preparing a presentation for a job interview.  Then on Wednesday I had an all-day job interview (results pending).  Work has been extra busy, but it's a good busy, as I find myself getting to spend time on more and more time on documents that are new and exciting.  I genuinely love what I do.  Getting up at 5:15 every morning isn't easy for me, but I find that I absolutely love each day that I get to spend at work.

Perhaps best of all, most days I get to spend time with the beautiful Ashley Camargo.  I find myself smiling and happy whenever I'm around her--except for the times when I'm preoccupied with other concerns or am nervous and she lovingly puts up with me!  She loves the Lord and she is constantly helping me to become a better person.  So it is a true blessing to be with her!

About a year ago I wrote a post about the opening and closing of doors, where I drew upon President Howard W. Hunter's fantastic talk "The Opening and Closing of Doors".  At the time, I was beginning to see the possibilities of a few doors opening after a year that had seemed to be filled with nothing but closed doors and closed opportunities.  I reflected on a phrase in President Hunter's talk where he said, "Doors close regularly in our lives, and some of those closings cause genuine pain and heartache.  But I do believe that where one such door closes, another opens (and perhaps more than one), with hope and blessings in other areas of our lives that we might not have discovered otherwise."

Looking back, not all of the doors that I was referring to actually proved to be ajar or even unlocked.  And yet, at the time, it was enough just for me to believe in the possibility of other open doors.  Nearly a year later, as I survey the past several months, I can see just how true President Hunter's promise was.  There were indeed open doors, but they were a little further down the hallway.  I just had to keep believing, keep walking, and keep trying.

I trust that the future will yield new closed doors and that those closings will cause some "genuine pain and heartache."  But along with the surety of that fact, I now know with a surety that along with those closed doors, the future will also offer additional corridors, unexpected blessings of incalculable worth, and opportunities that far exceed my own plans and designs.  All I must do is keep believing, keep walking, and keep trying.  Doors will open for me as I do these things.  And doors will open for you as you do these things.

Brett

Finding Healing

Happy Valentine's Day all!  This past week, my cousin Monica sent an email to my family explaining that she would be teaching her young women's class about dealing with the challenge of death this Sunday.  She asked if we could provide her with any insights about how we had dealt with my Dad's sudden death, and how we had found comfort through the gospel.  I thought I would post my response as my post today, some of which I've likely said before.

For me personally, one of the keys to finding comfort after Dad's death went back to some earlier experiences that I had had.  Over the span of my adult life, I have had a few experiences that caused me to turn to the Lord in search of healing.  Struggles getting married, struggles finding employment, the stress of school, etc., all provided me with opportunities to seek for His healing touch in my life.

In trying to understand these experiences, I have spent a lot of time trying to heal.  I have spent several hours meeting with my bishops.  Additionally, I spent a lot of time in the scriptures and in the temple.  And finally, I became very, very engaged in my callings in the ward.  I had been doing all of these things before this happened (though my temple attendance hadn't been as consistent as it should have been), but I'm not sure that my heart was fully there.

Little by little, He completely healed me in these experiences.  More than that, He made me happier than I had ever been before.  In actuality, I was better off because of these experiences than I had ever been before.  I could have given all of the right answers to the questions and I really believe that I had a close relationship with the Savior, but it wasn't close enough.  These experiences made me cultivate that relationship with Him to the point that my testimony changed.  It was no longer just an idea that I knew and had felt confirmation of, I had experienced what it meant to be healed.  It turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me because it helped me to come unto Christ.


Flash forward to December 19, 2015.  Dad's death was the most shocking and unexpected thing I have ever experienced.  When Rob and I rushed to the house at 2 am, we thought that he had fallen or something and we were rushing to give him a blessing.  We expected to find an ambulance there or to find that Dad had been taken to the hospital.  But when we got there, there was only a police car and the door to the house was open.  Mom and Jeni were sitting on the couch crying and I could see Dad with a blanket over him.  None of it registered and I even asked the police officer what was wrong with him and what we could do, at which point he explained to me that Dad had passed.  I literally had not been able to piece together what had happened (which is essentially my job) even though it should have been so obvious.  It was unthinkable.  


It hurt and continues to hurt.  In one instant, so many things that I had always expected changed.  Dad was not going to physically be present to see me get married; he was not going to get to hold the children I will have; he wasn't going to be there in person to see me receive my doctorate; and on, and on, and on.  All of those things hurt then and are occasionally hurt me now.  Just the other day when I scheduled the Temple, for a moment it stung so deeply.


But, during the previous year, I had learned how perfectly and completely the Savior heals wounds and rectifies life's losses.  Because I had already experienced His healing touch in that powerful way, I knew that I would experience it again.  I knew that if my Dad couldn't be mortally present as a witness at my sealing, that he could be there as one of the onlooking angels.  I had learned that the Lord has a purpose in everything that He does, including and perhaps especially in asking us to undergo the hardest experiences of our lives.  And I knew as the Prophet Joseph had said, "All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection provided you hold out faithful to the end.  By the vision of the Almighty, I have seen it!"  I knew that somehow the Lord would make this up to me and my family because He's done it before.  I knew that comfort would only be as far away as a heartfelt prayer, a verse of scripture, a trip to the temple, or an act of selfless service.  And not even 2 months after that difficult day, I find myself smiling and I find that the Lord has indeed sent many great compensating blessings in the midst of my grief.  And I'm grateful.


So I guess in response to the question of how do we prepare? We gracefully and even gratefully accept the tragedies in our lives and utilize those experiences the way that the Lord intends us to utilize them: by allowing them to bring us to Him so that we can experience His atonement.  We prepare by learning to trust Him and by learning to let Him heal us from all of our afflictions.  We prepare by allowing the atonement to become real in our lives.

Brett