Black Lives Matter

     My newsfeed has been flooded with the story of a black man, George Floyd, who was recently killed by a white police officer who pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd's throat until it killed him. The pictures are alarming. The video is a PTSD inducing nightmare. But, the bigger problem is that there IS a bigger problem. This isn't the first time a white police officer has killed a black person senselessly. Black people are afraid of police officers because they are treated differently because they are black. They are suspected because of the color of their skin. I have never considered myself to be racist. I have said to myself, "I am not part of the problem." And I truly hope that my personal actions never have been part of the problem. But, I also realize that I have not ever been part of the solution. I've never witnessed police brutality in person. I live in place with very few black people and fairly low levels of violent crime. I've never publicly spoken or written anything about this. That changes today.

     I'm lucky enough to have pale skin.

     And I'm still scared of the police. In my small handful of police encounters I have almost always felt afraid of the officer. A person carrying a gun is scary to me. A person carrying a gun who has authority to boss me around is scary to me. A person carrying a gun who has authority to arrest me if I say the wrong thing or make the wrong move is scary to me. It's incredibly intimidating. The few times I have been pulled over, my body reacted whether my mind agreed or not. My heart rate sped up, I began to sweat, and I started to cry. It took me a long time to clam down. I have even felt nervous when I was the one to call the police because my car had been broken into or we had been in an accident.

     And I'm white.

     What if ALL police officers were black? I know this is not something that could/would actually happen, but just pretend for a moment with me. What if it could happen and it did happen? Would it solve the problem? Would black people finally feel safe around the police? Would white people? Would all the white people who claim to be "color-blind" be willing to solve the problem by embracing an all black police force?

     I know that isn't the solution because it isn't possible for so many reasons, but I also know that each and every person needs to become the solution. I can't even begin to imagine, knowing how I, as a white person, feel fear around police, what it feels like for black people. I will never be able to truly understand. But, I also realize that being silent makes me part of the problem.

     Black lives matter. It upsets me that this has to be a saying. All lives matter, right? We shouldn't have to say that black lives matter. We shouldn't sort people by skin color, right? It doesn't matter what SHOULD be. What matters is that "Black Lives Matter" does need to be said. It needs to be said over and over and over again until every black person feels safe around police, until every black person IS safe around the police. . . BLACK LIVES MATTER.

Come, Follow Me, Even if It Kills You

This is a talk I gave in a ward in my stake last week.


Today I am going to share my experiences implementing the concept of home-centered, Church supported gospel study and church with my family and for myself.

I would like to start by talking about resistance to change. Many times in life we are presented with an opportunity to change for the better. We are given instructions for how to do this. Often the instructions are step-by-step and easy in theory. And then we don’t follow them. And the positive change opportunity passes us by. We’ve probably all experienced this in our lives. When I was 14, I moved to Moscow, Russia. Shortly before going, I received my patriarchal blessing. In it, I was promised that I would learn quickly in the language of the area that I was going to and that I would have a great influence over the people there. I did have the capacity to learn quickly, but I did not have as great of an influence over those people as I should have had because I let a few things get in my way- fear, pride, and a resistance to changing myself. I was prideful and afraid of sounding stupid. Russian is a very difficult language. "The Russian language has six cases to show what function a noun has in a sentence: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. The endings of Russian words change depending on the case they are in.”www.thoughtco.com › Languages › Russian

I learned a lot of Russian, but I spoke very little. I was resistant to the change that was necessary in me to speak a foreign language well. Russian nouns have gender assigned to them and the ends of words would change depending on if you were speaking in present tense, past tense, future tense, and others tenses I can’t remember. The idea of a noun having gender was, well, foreign to me. You had to memorize the gender of everything and change the ends of the words accordingly in certain circumstances. Even though I took two years of Russian in college, with the passage of 20+ years, my brain has blocked most of my understanding of how this all worked. I'm not even sure if I remember it correctly. Suffice it to say, it was really hard. And I allowed my pride and my fear to hold me back from changing and becoming fluent. I did study and I did learn, but I mostly kept my mouth shut or spoke in English. I actually ended up helping a Russian boy become fluent in English because I rarely spoke to him in Russian. My prideful reaction to a hard change, and the lost blessings, are something that I will always regret.

Change is hard, especially change that places most of the responsibility on us. We have had many changes in church policies in the last few years. When I heard we were going to change to two hour church, I was thrilled. When the church announced “Come Follow, Me” for our personal and family study, I was all on board. It’s a fantastic change. As I started to live it, I quickly realized something- if I didn’t study the “Come, Follow Me” for the week, I might leave church feeling like I hadn’t had enough “church”. My spiritual reservoir wasn’t full. I think the biggest change that I have felt over the last 14 months, as I have studied Come, Follow Me by myself and with my family is that I truly feel the switch to a home-centered, church-supported gospel. I feel the responsibility that if I don’t study on my own and I don’t teach my children and teach them to study on their own, going to church will never be enough to protect us from the influence of the adversary in our daily lives. The bar is raised. Like oil in the lamps of the virgins, it must be filled drop by drop, day by day. And when I do that, I feel so much peace. I feel the Savior’s influence in my life every day. I feel protected. I feel the spiritual gift of discernment is activated and available to me at all times. And I feel a sense of togetherness with everyone else who is studying the same thing every week. While waiting in the temple, I often notice other patrons reading in the scriptures from the assigned reading for that week. I chat with friends and family about what we’re reading. Losing an hour of church has somehow made me feel MORE connected to my family and ward members than I felt before, but only if I do my part and study.

I don’t want to give a false impression of fake perfection at my household. The honest truth is that most of the time at least one of my kids chooses to misbehave during gospel study time in such a way that it’s basically ruined for everyone else. But, we keep doing it. I haven’t been keeping a perfect statistical chart, but I’d guess that roughly 5-20% of the time, we have a moment, or even a few minutes, if we are lucky, where everyone is listening and the Holy Ghost is present, we all feel it, and a little magic happens. I envy the families with better behavior percentages than mine, but at our house, a great study session might happen one to four times a month and the other 24-30 times, if we don’t miss any days, feel more like the impromptu wrestling matches in my college dorm during freshman year.

I would like to describe our most recent Come, Follow Me based scripture study session. Yesterday was a busy day and we ended up having our study at 9 p.m. in the car on the way home from my sister’s house in Orem. The car can be a great place to have scripture study if you have kids who struggle with staying put. We often have decent discussions in the car on a Saturday or Sunday, but last night was more average for us. To protect the innocent and the guilty, I will refer to my daughters by numbers. I told the girls we were going to read 8 verses, which is all of 2nd Nephi 11, and handed my phone to #1. She read a verse. I had to stop her because #3 and #4 had turned off the sound on their kindle, but were still playing it. “We didn’t know you wanted us to stop playing”. #1 said to #3, please get your feet off my head. Then she read her verse. #2 read her verse and passed the phone back to #3, who actually was doing a great job reading, but in the middle of her turn my husband randomly made a comment about the lighting changes he would like to see on the new structure in front of the aquarium. Luckily, everyone ignored him. Usually #3 mumbles whatever she reads, so I didn’t want anything to mess this up. #4 had actually been invited to read verse 4 but threw a fit because she said it was too long. As #3 was reading it I was thinking, “Wow, that is really long!” Eventually, when #4 started to wail and complain, we all realized that verse 4 was not that long and that #3 had read 4 verses. She does that sometimes. She knows it upsets #4 who has very strong opinions about which verse and how many verses she gets to read. So, I made them hand me back the phone. #4 cried some more. She does that a lot. I had #1 re-read verse 2. #2 re-read 3. I took the phone for verse 4 and started reading and it made no sense at all. That’s when we realized we were reading in the wrong chapter. The phone had swiped to the next chapter as it was passed up to me. That often happens when #3 gets her hands on the ipad or phone we are using for scriptures. She says it’s an accident. She also told us last week that she has no idea who the Lamanites are. We’ve been studying the Book of Mormon fairly regularly as a family for her entire life. Anyway, back to our scripture study. When I realized we were on the wrong chapter, I switched back and we started over on verse 2. Eventually everyone got to read and we got to have a discussion. Most of the girls didn’t want to talk. #2 had some good questions and thoughts and we had 5 minutes of relative peace and good conversation. So, I’m going to count that one as a good one, because we eventually got to a place where a gospel principle was pondered. You might think I’m exaggerating how our scripture study went, but the truth is that it was much crazier than I described. Those were just highlights of a very typical experience in our household.

I can make light of my kid’s behavior and it’s pretty funny when you aren’t in the middle of it, but, in all seriousness, we are in a battle for our souls and for the souls of our children. Most of us are not being asked to don protective military gear and to go out and engage a mortal enemy. We are being asked to put on the whole armor of God and to battle evil.

I was talking to a couple of friends about this talk last week and they both expressed feelings of inadequacy with their efforts to implement Come, Follow Me to this point. One friend said her family isn’t doing it at all and that she feels so awful because she knows her family needs the protection that comes from gospel study. Some of you might have similar feelings. Some of you might be fully implementing Come, Follow Me into your lives and can share ideas and support for those who are still struggling. For those who are struggling, first I want to tell you that I know it’s hard and that it’s never too late to start. Creating a home centered gospel isn’t quite like my missed window of opportunity when I lived in Russia. I did influence the people there, but not as much as I should have, and the time passed. I can’t go back and change it. I’ve let it go and moved on. None of us can go back and change what we have or haven’t done, but we all have today and every tomorrow. It’s never too late to start personal or family study. Start today. It took me 9 months to develop the habit of personally studying Come, Follow Me regularly and to find a way that works for me. What helped me was to treat my study time with equal importance as my work. It is scheduled on my calendar. If I need to change it, I need to reschedule it, or it can’t be changed. Our family scripture time is similarly scheduled, and you do not want to know what time my family gets up to have scripture study during the school week.

It is hard, but we do it. And every now and then, a few times a month, we harvest the fruit of our labor. At the beginning of this year, on one of those scarce but wonderful days, my 9 year old listened intently to the lesson and the plea I made to study and read the entire Book of Mormon this year. She asked me to help her. Nearly every day since then she has come to my room and we read together. “By small and simple things, great things are brought to pass.” This small habit, started at 9 years old, has set her life on a course that leads to eternal life. She is putting on the armor of God each day. She is nurturing a habit that will protect her, that will give her the ability to understand the scriptures, to recognize the Holy Ghost, to hear the words of scriptures come to her mind when she needs them because she has planted them in her heart. 

 

When I was a kid there was a really popular saying attributed to Jesus. “I never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.” Jesus never said that, but if he had, I think he might have been talking about family scripture study. If you haven’t done it already, develop the habit of personal and family scripture study. It is hard. And it is worth it. The bar is raised and rising up to meet it has brought me increased peace in my life. I feel protected. I feel closer to the Savior. And my least favorite church class, Sunday School, has become my favorite. It’s funny, but the problem was me all along.


When we have morning scripture study, and the kids listen, even a little bit, I feel like they leave our house with the full armor of God to protect them. They are armed with the sword of truth and protected with the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, girdled with truth, their feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, their shields of faith stand ready to deflect the fiery darts of the adversary. I bear testimony that even though it can be very hard, there is power and protection in putting on the whole armor of God every day, in making our homes the center of our gospel study so that we and our children will be prepared and protected.

I Survived January Jambalaya Party: A Story and a Recipe

I know I'm not alone in thinking that Januweary is the hardest month of the year.  I kept myself very busy this last month, but, for the first time in my life, I admitted to myself, out loud, that January is hard for me. This one was especially hard because, in addition to all of my normal hard stuff, I can't see. My second pair of new glasses aren't working and I don't know if the issue is the prescription, the lens material, or the fact that I might need bifocals. The answer might be all three.  I'm weary. My eyes hurt. My head hurts. January was just really rough. But it ended late night- Halle-Freaking-Lujah! Seriously. I'm so happy. And it wasn't freezing cold today. My 12 year old thought we should put up the trampoline. I had to put the kibosh on that idea, but it really was that warm. So, last night I cooked an amazing dinner. Then later I had a complete melt down about how hard this month has been, but mostly about how I'm tired of hurting. I made the stupid choice of crying for a while before I went to bed and I woke up with a swollen eyelid. But, let's not focus on that. Let's focus on the goodness -Jambalaya. So, a while ago I shared a recipe for Chicken Jambalaya, but it's time for an update. This recipe was given to my grandmother by a chef, and it's nothing like the traditional Jambalaya. I've been playing with the recipe with my daughter Amy and I think we've perfected it, so I want to share the updated version for anybody looking for a healthy, even keto-friendly(just don't cook rice), recipe to warm your belly.  I'm going to share this the way I actually cook, so, if measuring by pouring, guessing, or whatever makes your heart happy annoys you, you should just go watch something on Netflix instead of reading any more of this.

CHICKEN JAMBALAYA

1 chicken

6 yellow onions

1 head of celery

1 bunch of green onions

6-8 cloves garlic

4+ Tbsp. tomato paste

1/2 cup olive oil

salt and pepper

cayenne pepper

dried parsley

chicken broth

1. I'm going to describe two options for the chicken. Both work well. The first option is to use a regular old, not actually old, chicken. The second is to use a Costco rotisserie chicken with the breasts removed(do whatever you want with those). Take your chicken of choice and put it in a pressure cooker. Add as much water as you want. You can either cover the chicken or just put about 4 cups of water in there. When I know I'm making Jambalaya I like to put less water so the broth will be more intense.  If you don't have/don't a pressure cooker, stop being scared. It will change your life if you let it. Cook on high pressure for 2 hours.  When it's done, take out the chicken and refrigerate. Leave the broth in the pot on warm until ready to use. It's a lot easier to bone the chicken if you refrigerate it for a while, but if you have no feeling in your fingertips, or if you enjoy pain, you can do it right out of the pan. I used a Costco chicken last night and got about 4 cups of meat. That really excited me because most people will throw away the chicken after eating the breasts and there is SOOOO much goodness left if you prepare it properly. Embrace the pressure cooker. 

1.5. Start some rice if you want to eat this over rice. It's great with brown or white. It would probably be good with quinoa too. I think it would taste nasty with oatmeal though.  I cook about 3 cups of rice. We like rice.

2. Chop up the onions, celery, green onions, and garlic. I like to make them about the size I would put in chicken noodle soup, so smallish.  The size is not important. Do what makes your heart happy. I  mince the garlic. You should have a lot of veggies. You will need a large frying pan. You can also just use a large pot. 

3. Turn on the stove and preheat 1/2 cup of olive oil in the pan on medium high heat. Add the veggies along with the tomato paste. You want to have enough tomato paste that it makes everything a little pink. This is really important. It adds a tremendous amount to the flavor. Cook until the veggies are starting to soften. This might be about ten minutes. I stir them, throw the lid on and come back and stir every few minutes.  

4. When veggies are about halfway cooked, add as much chicken broth as makes you happy. I am talking about the liquid you cooked your chicken in.  I like to add a lot, probably 4 cups at least. 

5. At some point you are going to have to take the meat off the chicken carcass. It's nice to do while the veggies start to cook. You can add that now, or stir it in at the end.  Cook the stuff in the pot until the like the consistency.  When you are happy, add the chicken if you haven't done so, sprinkle in as much parsley as you want, maybe 1-2 tsp, and add salt and pepper to taste. 

6. Place the cayenne pepper on the table and let people add that to their own servings according to their taste/desire to melt their faces off. 

7. Serve. Enjoy. This makes about 6-8 servings for hungry people. 

The Costco chicken after two hours in the pressure cooker.

4 cups of chicken.