"Boo!"

 
I’ve put off writing this week, I don’t know why.  Usually I have so much to share that I can’t wait to sit down.  My hands and my heart feel more at home at the computer than anywhere else.  In reality this is the time that I should have been overwhelmed with the need to express.  Luke is home.  Need I say more?  When he walked off that plane in his army fatigues, his hair high and tight, his Uncle Kevin waving to us to hold the banners up, my heart was racing.

                                                                       Uncle Kevin

                                              Sam in the army greens that Luke bought him.

 And now, already, he is off to work and to his full time job.  School started without him and he cannot enter the program partway through, but he is working for a dear friend Clint at CR Doors and Mouldings and he is tasting a bit of the real world.  Though I think that maybe he feels like he is in limbo until he can do something more.  Working toward a Mission next fall after some more Army training that he signed up for is done is perhaps not as easy as he would have assumed.  How do you open up to your child the testimony that is in your heart when you know that he has to gain one of his own?  I am proud of his work in the army and the son he is and I am proud of his decision to serve a Mission.  I only hope he can feel it more than just a duty but an honor and a blessing.

My father and my stepmother left yesterday to fulfill an eighteen month mission in the Phillipines.  I had the opportunity to go with my brother Bryan to take them to the MTC.  It didn’t feel real.  The missionaries came to our house when I was a little girl.  A year younger than my Sam.  My parents had been searching for something more and my father found a Mormon Ad in the Reader’s Digest.  He called the missionaries.  At first us children were not invited in.  My parents wanted to make sure it wasn’t some weird cult before letting us in on the lessons.  I remember that first night almost like a dream.  It was a warm night in the summer as I recall.  The pine trees next to our farm house were covered in fireflies and I remember catching them all night, not really concerned about what was going on inside, but my brothers and my sister were speculating about the two strange boys dressed in suits and carrying briefcases that went in to talk to my parents. 

I remember later sitting at their knees and watching filmstrips on the wall of our family room.   I remember the feeling of familiarity and asking my mother if this wasn’t what we already believed and my mom telling me that it wasn’t.  My little heart recognized the truth instantly.  Perhaps I was not too many years past from stepping through the veil.  I spent the next 31 years with truth around me.  I don’t have to wonder who I am, I know.  If there is a question that I need answered I have the scriptures to turn to and my knees to fall on.

And now, that father of mine that blessed all of our lives with the gospel is on a mission himself.  Most married missionaries, retired and with added time to serve, have already been on a mission once when in their youth.  Not so for my father.  Two young men brought that gospel to us, to him, and now finally he will feel the excitement, the fear, and the desire that they once felt teaching us.

 

Crazy hair day at the elementary school today for red ribbon week.  I put Stephanie’s red hair up in a gazillion little buns and when the neighbor girl who is just a year older than her showed up to walk to the bus with my kids her hair was done exactly the same.  Of course both were more than willing to pose for a picture.  Don’t you love childhood?

Sam Guillory came home from the hospital today after two months.  My sweet young women decorated her yard along with some of Sam’s friends from school and her sister and brother in law.  I had to take a picture, as camera happy as I am, because my young women didn’t get to see it all done.  They were in school when she came home, but Darlene, and Whitney, and I got to run over when we got the text that she was on her way and scatter their sweet notes all over the yard.  I cried reading them.  I wish all of you could experience my Young Women.  There is a light that shines from every one of them.  And guess what…I get to experience that glow all of the time.  That is a little taste of Heaven if anything is.

Well the neighbor girl just rang the doorbell with a plate full of pumpkin cookies in her hands, two of which without chocolate just for me. She has informed me that I have been “BOOed.” If she only knew just how much I have “boobed” this whole week for the gifts of this beautiful life that I have been given. She is just one more topping on that already super sweet sunday that I am eating. Time to get ready for young women’s, add another bit of caramel to that ice cream for me!