Music and Lyrics

Dear Reader, Family ties are great. They are hard to maintain sometimes, but they are well worth the effort. God gave us families for a reason. I have seen it time and time again that being part of a family can help you come back from any setback or go forward to accomplish any goal. It must be said that my family is perfect for me. Heavenly Father knew what He was doing when He helped Lauren and I come together to form our own family and bring together our extended families. My in-laws are very generous and my parents are very loving. My siblings (in-laws included) are all fun to be with and they each teaches me in little ways. This past year with new family and lots of grand experiences has shown me how it important it is to be part of a family. This time last year, Lauren and I were preparing for our wedding and thinking about where she would be applying to grad school. Last fall we worked hard to finish as much school as we could and we planned to wait on have kids until she...

Dear Reader, You most likely feel at times that there is so much to do and not enough time to do it. Is that right? It is ok to agree. I have often felt that there is a lot that I can't accomplish because my day is too short and lots of things depend on me. That is the reason you are receiving a challenge, should you choose to accept it: make a list of what roles/titles you have. Then, take those roles and put them in order from most important to least important. This may be difficult because it is rather revealing about oneself. If desired, you can take a step further and list out the responsibilities of each role in order. As a quick example, I have compiled a short list of my most important roles in the order I feel they best should be taken care of. The first of these roles are all crucial to each other and have to be care for simultaneously at times. I encourage you to think of your own list of roles while you read. 1. Child of God This is above all the most important ...

Dear Reader, Today I simply want to share a story that has strengthened my testimony of the Book of Mormon over the years. Professor Felix Mynhardt was fluent in many languages, including English, Afrikaans, Hebrew and Egyptian, as well as many others. He was employed as a language professor when he had been praying that the Lord would give him some divinely important task that would justify his having this gift of language from God. In 1970 he visited with a group of Mormon leaders, who sought to commission him to translate the Book of Mormon from English into Afrikaans. He said that he knew of the Book of Mormon from his religions studies, and his initial reaction was that he did not want to be involved in translating it. However, that evening, as he prayed upon his knees, as was his habit, he said the Spirit of the Lord convinced him. The message was something on the order of, "You asked me for a great, divinely inspired task of translation, I sent it to you in the form o...

Dear Reader, Normally I would apologize for a long absence, but the experience we had today just can't wait. I had an entirely new view on taking the sacrament because of a simple oversight by one of the boys passing the sacrament to us. Then the Bishop spoke and gave a little more perspective on spirituality. First, the sacrament. Today we attended our new ward in Kaysville and we were sitting on the front row of the overflow area in the chapel. As is customary with the sacrament meeting in the Church of Jesus Christ, the members of the Aaronic priesthood will bless the bread and water that represents Christ's flesh and blood before allowing the members of the congregation to partake of it. While they were passing around the bread on their trays, our row was somehow skipped. My wife, my in-laws and myself did not receive the bread while taking the sacrament. My father-in-law and I both did our best to attract the attention of those priesthood holders helping with the ...

Dear Reader, There is a story of man who had a dream about death. He had passed from life and now found himself in a room full of sky-high filing cabinets, the kind found in libraries with authors' names written on small index cards. The cabinets were lined up in every direction and there seemed to be no end. The man wandered through the shelves and noticed something peculiar: the drawers, instead of authors' names, had interesting parts of life written them such as 'Jobs I've had' or 'People I've helped.' Intrigued, the man continued looking at the names of drawers until he came to a realization that the drawers contained detailed descriptions of the different instances of his life. He opened a drawer with the title 'Times I've cried' and read, in detail, about every time he had cried in his life, the reason for his sadness and where he was when it happened. He then looked in drawer after drawer and found that every card came from his l...

Dear Reader, This semester I have been taking several program language classes. PHP, SQL, Python, HTML, CSS...they are all very useful when working with things on the internet. However, I have realized by taking them that it is EXTREMELY important to be careful with our technology. I referenced a song a few years ago, Online , which talks about how you can fake a lot of things on the internet or social media. It is even more apparent now that we need to be careful with everything we ever post in order to care for our physical, financial, social and emotional well-being. I'll give just a couple of examples of what I mean. In my python class, my teacher showed us how very easy it is to spider websites to find information. Granted, the examples he showed us were about finding all the sports statistics of a specific team or all the LDS General Conference articles with a particular theme, but the tricks he showed us could also be used for finding personal information about everyone...

Dear Reader, Photo Credit: Sydney Christofferson This morning the writer's block was hitting hard. However, while searching for ideas of a topic to write about (which usually pop up during the week), I realized my best reason for writing is right next to me: my supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wife Lauren. Now, those of you who know me in real life will know that Lauren is the most amazing woman. I talk about her a lot. She is athletic, funny and ridiculously talented. I have never met anyone who doesn't love her. Seriously, people are always saying how they love working/studying/whatever else with her because of her bright personality and genuine smile. Her intelligence is one to be reckoned with. Right now we are in the middle of applying to graduate schools. She applied to three schools in the top 100-ranked schools in the nation (#6, #14, and #44). She applied to these schools and has already been accepted to 2 (#6 and #14. We are still waiting to hear back ...