Nancy's Musings

Our Home Teacher came by today. Wait, let me back up. Today our Stake President gave us some doctrinal insight into the scourge of Pornography about which the Prophet has warned us. We learned about the mind-taint which causes love to turn into apathy, and then slide further into hate. We learned about the poison that breaks marriages and prevents spirits from joining good families. I felt overwhelmingly that God would not leave us defenseless, and He has all the power to heal necessary. I'm not untroubled, but I am not anxious. Our Home Teacher gives great hugs, and has lovely false teeth. He sells furniture. His wife has some mobility issues. She's a larger woman (I've never met her, but this is how he tells it), and extremely self-conscious, but I listened today as he expressed his love for her. He dedicated more than half his life simply to be around her as often as he possibly could. He told us about treating your wife with kindness, and never speaking an unkind word a...

After Relief Society yesterday my mother was feeling very unsettled. I sat next to her and listened to the same lesson. I even contributed to the discussion (when finally called upon), but my mother (who is a gentle person and unused to, for instance, assertiveness) disagreed so violently with what the teacher was trying to say that she left the meeting buzzing with her own opinions (and the scripture references to back them up). I would describe the teacher as intelligent, educated, well put-together, and independent-spirited. She has either the self-control or the natural metabolism to stay quite thin, she maintains brilliant posture, and she clips her gray hair short. She wears well-cut and -woven clothes and speaks with perhaps two decades experience of teaching middle-school. I do admire her, as I would any successful woman. The teacher ended her comments with a catch-all cease fire, almost-but-not-quite apologizing for the feeling of disagreement her questions engendered. She kne...

I'm being over-emotional again, but I had a tough day yesterday. My day was nothing compared to a good friend's. An old friend and co-worker met me as I was walking up the ramp to work. Her husband has experienced some trauma at his job, and he has some anxiety about keeping it. His trauma triggered severe anxiety attacks in her for which she has recently been hospitalized for several days. She expresses herself honestly, and appears so sweet and vulnerable that it was instinctive for me to give her a hug. But as I told my mother about it, her first reaction was to tell me that there's nothing I can do. She is right, I cannot cure my friend of her anxiety, but that doesn't mean I should try to stop myself from feeling the pain of her experiences. When we let ourselves love someone so much that we feel what they feel we do a little of what Jesus did, and we carry each-other's burdens. I don't think that my empathy helps her at all. I can't imagine that she fe...