Celebrating Love!

For the month of February the gaggle and I decided that we were going to focus on Love.  We talked about the importance of showing love to one another during our Family Home Evenings and sung songs like "Love One Another" and "Love at Home" but we also emphasized that it was important to recognize the things that we love about each other and recognize how others have shown love to us.  This lead us to teaching our girls the primary song "My Heavenly Father Loves Me" that talks all about appreciating all the blessings the Lord has given us and that he gave them to us as an expression of His love for us.  On the first of February we had our first lesson and decided we were going to make a heart wall (door) that showed what we loved about each other.

 Each night we would rotate and everyone would take turns saying what they loved about each other.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Recently during one of our Sacrament Meetings at Church a neighbor shared a poem that immediately had tears filling my eyes and me self consciously trying to wipe them away without people seeing the grown man crying in church over a poem (I should realize that people know that I'm not the manly man by now and just give up trying to pretend that I am even a little bit).  Here is the poem:

The Children's Hour

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,

      When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day's occupations,

      That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me

      The patter of little feet,

The sound of a door that is opened,

      And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,

      Descending the broad hall stair,

Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,

      And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:

      Yet I know by their merry eyes

They are plotting and planning together

      To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,

      A sudden raid from the hall!

By three doors left unguarded

      They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret

      O'er the arms and back of my chair;

If I try to escape, they surround me;

      They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,

      Their arms about me entwine,

Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen

      In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,

      Because you have scaled the wall,

Such an old mustache as I am

      Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,

      And will not let you depart,

But put you down into the dungeon

      In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,

      Yes, forever and a day,

Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,

      And moulder in dust away! 

The reason the poem struck me was that it expressed in words my life right now and just how I feel about my little gaggle.  I had the overwhelming feeling that too soon for me to stop it, my girls will be moving on.  New men will take my place at the center of their lives and I will be there looking on remembering the times that they plotted to tackle me as I walked into the room and wrestled with me their arms to wrapped around me showering me with kisses and giggles.  

Fresh eyes on a new year

I secretly love this time of year.  I love the feeling you get when you reflect on your past year and all that you experienced.  The highs and even the lows.  The lessons learned and the battles fought. The triumphs of success and the moments that cement who you are as a person.  I love pausing long enough in the chaos of to-do lists and schedules to ask yourself 'who do I want to be and how am I going to get there?'  I love building on a strong foundation of my past and looking up, always up towards the light, as I grow and look forward to another year.  

As I began to write down my goals and impressions of who I wanted to be as a man, a husband and a father I found that in looking at my list it could be categorized into 3 real areas of focus; Family, Family History and Health of my mind, body and soul.  

Family

I have realized I am nowhere near being perfect...I know I know you are all shocked in reading that. but more than anything I want to improve for my family.  I want to be the husband that my Father in Heaven would be proud to see his daughter married too and the kind of husband I would want my girls to one day marry.  To that end I have decided to speak no guile of my spouse moving forward.  Now I'm not one to go and spread negativity about her or complain about her to all the ends of the earth because let's be honest she is pretty amazing.  BUT...there are those days when the little things build up and you complain to a friend or when you don't agree and you are sure your way is better.  There is even those days when others see things and ask you about them.  It is in these ways that I am changing.  I want Anna to know that I always have her back and will always speak up for her in public and in private because I do have her back and never want that questioned.    

Family History

In my patriarchal blessing it talks about how I will do work for my family.  This has always troubled me a little bit, if I'm honest, because not only is it a lot of pressure I also don't enjoy genealogical work (or haven't to this point) and always think that is for someone else to do or for me to do when I'm retired.  But as I mentioned above, as I wrote down my goals I have seen them take on a "Family History" angle that perhaps doesn't live in the family tree fan chart world we always place it. 

Anna and I recently attended a "Cottage Meeting" put on by our ward and one of the best speakers I have ever heard, Rob Farrell, while speaking about the scriptures mentioned that a lot of times resolutions fail because we focus on the negative.  We focus on what we are lacking.  He suggests focusing on what our strengths are and building on those.  In a way that is just what I am doing with my view of family history.  I'm going to do Family History my way.  In a recent lesson on using familysearch.org I learned that you can post photos and stories of your loved ones who have passed away.  I scanned my grandparents records and realized that no one had posted anything about them...how sad would it be that our lives become simple dates on a flow chart.  How sad that people wouldn't know that my Grandma Nielson would make us an endless stack of pancakes when we stayed at the farm or that she wrote poetry and loved fishing and card games.  How sad that no one would know that my Grandpa Nielson would grab your hand every time you tried to walk by his chair or that he had a connection with the other side of the veil.  I am making it my goal to rectify this to the small degree that I can.  I am going to post stories of my experience with my grandparents so that they won't just become names.  Who knows maybe this is how I get into geneology and that I will want to find others stories too and make sure they are remembered.


I also have started interviewing my parents to find out more about their lives.  Getting to know about their feelings, their childhoods and their experiences.  Becoming a parent yourself you begin to realize how for granted we took our parents.  As children you are dealing with what you consider 'big' issues and don't realize that your parents have their own insecurities, their own doubts and fears and weaknesses.  They were there to take care of you, not the other way around.  I want to push rewind and ask those questions I was too naive to ask as a child so my children will know the two people who shaped me and made me who I am.  The two people who became not only my parents but my mentors and best friends.


Lastly I want to continue writing my life and the goings on around me on a more consistent basis.  I recently heard someone say "What good is joy if it goes unrecorded and what good is love if it goes unshared".  That sums up how I feel about writing my 'journal' of sorts.  I want to make sure that I am capturing the little miracles, the joy's and the wonderful triumphs of being here on earth in my journey.

Overall Health (mind/body/soul)

Okay so here is more what you typically see in people's resolutions...the whole "i'm going to only eat strawberries and ice water and workout 7 days a week (even though I haven't been on a treadmill in a decade) type of thing" Well if that is what you are expecting stop reading now.  I am focusing more on my mind and spirit this year (maybe because I haven't been on a treadmill in a decade).  My goals are centered around who I want to be and the habits I want to create.  I want to continue my goal from last year to read at least a book a month (I'm already on my third book) and one of those books needs to be The Book of Mormon.  Not only are we studying it at church I need to reacquaint myself with the power behind those words and examples.  I am starting a journal that is focused on where I see people taking active roles in their lives and in fulfilling their destiny's.  I recently read in the book A Monster Calls a passage that struck me to my core.  It reads, "You do not write down your life story with words...you write it with actions.  What you think is not important.  What IS important is what you DO."  I want to take a more active role in my life and I think through reading and living the Book of Mormon I will see it translate in ways I can't wait to find out.  

As part of this, I want to start having a daily prayer with my Father in Heaven.  I have always felt that I have a close relationship with my Heavenly Father and have felt that I have a current of the spirit underlying my life but I have always struggled with daily prayer.  My mind wanders, I find myself repeating words and phrases, it becomes a routine rather than a meaningful conversation.  Something to get thru or a checklist of sorts.  In my patriarchal blessing, (i'm referencing that a lot today) it says I should kneel and speak with my Heavenly Father as if he kneels by my side.  Can you imagine...I wonder if I would even talk I would be so awestruck or maybe the opposite would be true and I would be amazed with how familiar it was, how comfortable it could be.  So I am going to try and have some time, maybe not in your typical bow your head and kneel way, with my Heavenly Father where I can talk and listen to what he has in store for me.

Speaking of my 'mormon shortcomings' since I have already revealed I haven't been doing daily scripture study or prayers...it is amazing I still have the spirit at all right...I also am horrible at fasting each month.  Anna doesn't fast because she has been nursing or pregnant for most of our marriage.  I don't fast because, well I love to eat and I forget and maybe just maybe I don't quite have a testimony of fasting and it often feels like going hungry for a day for no real reason.  I mean I pay fast offerings so I'm still giving back right?  There is a funny saying that says "I love you more than soda...just don't make me prove it"  Well, I think the Lord is asking me to prove it.   I have been feeling that knocking feeling that so often comes when you need to step up in life and I felt strongly that I need to start fasting each month and that I will see a difference in my health.  Who knows I may actually gain a testimony of it.

I haven't forgotten about my body for all of you who ignored my request to stop reading now.  I want to start to be more active.  Not to lose a certain number of pounds or fit into a pair of pants.  I want to be more active that I feel better and can wrestle with my girls and be the dad I need to be.  I'm still working on the logistics of what this means to me.  

There you have it.  There are my goals for 2016 and frankly I can't wait to see how my life is impacted as I DO and as I take a role to be the leader in my own story.