This past year I have taught a Monday morning Adult Religion Class. It's been fun. I thought to begin with that if a dozen people came we could have a nice little class and maybe learn something together. But I guess it met a need and we started out with a pretty good crowd and it grew until we had about fifty come every week. We studied the Gospels together. We went through each of them systematically from beginning to end. Last week was our last class. Adults are more expressive than youth usually are and I received a couple of kind notes of thanks in the mail and one interesting comment after our last class. Brother Ulbricht, the dad of one of Dan's High School buddies, said he took a class once from Henry Eyring, the scientist, who suggested that they should consider writing a book sometime during their life to put to paper some of their important thoughts and ideas. Brother Ulbricht suggested that I should consider doing that myself. I thought afterwards, well that goes along with Joey's moniker that I was the best writer in the Church (said tongue in cheek in case you didn't get that part). But, interestingly enough it coincided with some thoughts and feelings I've had lately. And I hope this isn't misunderstood. I've become forgetful lately (more than normal -- see cell phone experience below). And I've begun to wonder if I'll exit life locked in the Alzheimer strait jacket that Dad had to deal with. So I've felt I should write and share some things that are close to my heart. I've felt for years that I didn't do a very good job of sharing gospel/scripture insights with my own children (although we were pretty regular with scripture reading). So I decided to start making new entries in the Insights and Discoveries link (see upper left of this blog)and to find time to be a more regular contributor to this "newsy" blog.
I've been a fairly regular journal writer but who's ever going to read those entries?? I've appreciated keeping up with my kids through their blogs. I hope they're also preserving that information with some kind of a written journal version. I was impressed with President Eyring's talk in the October 2007 Conference titled "O Remember, Remember." I'm just a little slow at responding to his suggestion.
So this Looonngg explanation is to invite you to look under Insights and Discoveries every now and then to see what the Old Man has to say. When Joey was on his mission I was inspired by something that was written in Elder Maxwell's biography -- that he had written his son Cory on his mission more than once a week so I wrote regular weekly epistles to Joey. Mostly they were what I was currently studying and thinking about. It was something kind of special we shared together. I thought I should do the same for all my children so here goes.
Dad
