Raise up your Mourning: Thoughts from Job

 I enjoyed our Sunday School discussion on Job today, but I had way more thoughts than I could share. Here are a few scattered thoughts I wanted to write down.

1. First came from one of the hymns we sang today, "Bless Our Fast We Pray" (#138 Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1985). The second verse describes helping others, and then asks for a blessing in return. At first, this sounds almost entitled, or at least contrary to what we learn from Job, that we should expect something good for doing something good. But I'm reminded of a talk by President Bednar on tithing, where the blessings received are not always the same as the blessings expected:

"Some of the diverse blessings we obtain as we are obedient to this commandment are significant but subtle...We might want and expect a larger paycheck, but the blessing that comes to us through heavenly windows may be greater capacity to change our own circumstances."

Can we expect to receive something good for doing something good? Yes, but it might not be the blessing you think you're going to get. Isaiah reminds us that the Lord's thoughts are higher and sometimes incomprehensible compared to ours.

2. The next thought came from our discussions about trials that come to us through no fault of our own. When my baby son passed away, Elder John H. Groberg spoke at the funeral. One of the things he said was that "it doesn't matter what happens to us in this life. What matters is how we react to it."

3. During the same experience, I wrote a poem about grief. I had an image in my head of a bulldog clinging to a pole in its teeth. Storms of grief and doubt batter its body, but those teeth are locked and it will not let go. That's how I feel about hope. It's not (always) about warm fluffies or an ideal future. It's the act of holding on to Truth no matter what happens around you.

4. I ended up reading two more hymns while listening to the lesson. The first was a song we sang in the previous meeting, How Gentle God's Commands (#138 Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1985). 

"Beneath his watchful eye, His Saints securely dwell. That hand which bears all nature up shall guard His children well."

The hymn pairs well with the language of Job. However, as I prepared to make a comment about the hymn to the rest of the class, my eye caught on the hymn on the previous page, Be Still My Soul (#137 Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1985). The second verse struck me as being essential to our topic, both in content and in the imagery. How important to hold onto that hope that we will at last understand all that's now mysterious!

"Be still, my soul. Thy God doth undertake to guide the future as he has the past. Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake. All now mysterious shall be bright at last. Be still, my soul! The waves and winds still know his voice who ruled them while He dwelt below."

5. No one has a monopoly on suffering. Even those who seem to live a perfect life or have no difficulties will be facing some kind of trial. I remember once when my family was struggling financially, we helped a friend who was homeless. Immediately, I went from feeling poor to feeling immeasurably wealthy. Truly, poor is a state of mind. Perhaps compared to our friend, we had a perfect life without difficulties, yet from our point of view, we still struggled.

When we think of trials and suffering, we might think of big, story-worthy events like death or divorce or job loss. But I think that the small, daily difficulties can add up to being far greater. I know a strong, loving couple who stick together through all kinds of difficulties, but they had a big fight about opening a new bottle of ketchup before the old one was empty. 

Over a year ago, I slipped on a book and dislocated my kneecap. The sharp, instant pain was overwhelming and left me screaming and writhing on the floor, but it only lasted a few minutes. The constant daily pain and limitations of my out-of-alignment, arthritic kneecap is not nearly as dramatic and doesn't have a funny, ironic story to go with it (come on, you have to admit that a writer losing a fight with a book is at least a little funny), but that constant semi-permanent difficulty adds up to a much bigger trial. 

I once read a question that was supposed to spark a moral debate: "Would you give up one day of life to save a child?" My answer was: "Only one day? Where do I sign up? I'm a mom. I give up pieces of my life every single day."

6. In our Sunday School class, we discussed how to help those who are grieving or otherwise going through difficult trials. I could write a whole new blogpost on this subject, but I will try to be brief. I originally wrote the poem about grief so that I could empathize with others in a similar situation. It starts, "I don't know how you feel. I have no words that will fix everything, but I can tell you how I feel."

At the start of this topic, our teacher told us that after his wife speaks, he often asks if she wants advice or just wants him to listen. His natural inclination is to offer advice and try to fix her problems, but that isn't always the best response.

Another sister suggested that the first step is to be humble and ask yourself if you are answering for them, or for you. Often, giving advice has a root in pride, when you think you can solve everything with your superior thoughts and words. 

I then suggested that the second step is to listen to both the person who is grieving, and the Spirit. I once approached a grieving sister, thinking about things that had helped me. My mother told me that sometimes the people who came to comfort her seemed to expect her to be constantly sorrowing, and my mother ended up laughing when they left. They seemed to be seeking comfort for themselves more than her. I was prepared to laugh about this story with my grieving friend, but as I interacted with her, I quickly realized that this was not the response she needed. She really was seeking comfort and needed quiet support and understanding, so I tried to provide that instead.

Listening to the Spirit is important because the person you are trying to help might not know what they need. After my son passed away, many family members hurried to our house. Some of them mourned with us, and we needed that. Others brought normalcy. They got me out of my grief and into the kitchen to help make lunch for everyone. It was not the comfort I expected, but it turned out to be what I needed. Sometimes we need to mourn with people, and sometimes we need to comfort them, and it takes good listening to tell the difference.

Most of the members of my church studied the book of Job last week. I would love to know what you took out of the lesson.

Let People Change

 Rahab is one of my favorite characters from the Bible. She saved two Israelite spies from certain death. She bore her testimony of a God and a religion she had never been taught. She saved her extended family from a war that wiped out the rest of her city. She married an Israelite prince, raised the Bible hero Boaz, and became an ancestor of Jesus Christ himself.

And yet, just about everywhere that she's mentioned, she's labeled Rahab the harlot.

Change is one of the defining characteristics of mortality. To change is the meaning of repentance, which means that change is a core doctrine of Christianity. Yet somehow, we struggle to accept that people can and do change constantly. 

If I say "Scrooge", you think "bah humbug", even though the man at the end of The Christmas Carol is a completely different person than the Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of the book. All of the Disney merch for Encanto shows the character Isabel as the controlled perfectionist from the beginning of the movie. I'd be the first one in line if they released merch of her in her dyed dress from the end, after she embraced her "imperfections". Several times in Harry Potter, Harry rebuffs the argument that his flawed former heroes were young by pointing out that they were his age. I always want to stop reading and tell him that it's not the age, it's that they've had a long time to change.

There's a lot that can be said about the importance of setting healthy boundaries and protecting yourself from other people. I don't want to diminish that. But I hope that we leave room in our hearts and our minds to allow others--and ourselves!--to change.

Labor diligently

In our family scriptures, we are reading Moroni chapter 9, easily the most disturbing chapter in the Book of Mormon. Nevertheless, this lesson jumped out at me. This is the prophet Mormon writing a letter to his son Moroni.

"I am laboring with them continually; and when I speak...with sharpness they tremble and anger against me; and when I use no sharpness they harden their hearts against it." (Moroni 9:4)

Does this sound familiar, moms? Wives? Anyone else with a stewardship over other people? I suspect we all find ourselves in that 'neither option works' situation from time to time. If I tell the kids to stop doing something in a nice way, they ignore me. If I put consequences behind it, they get mad and collapse in tears and still don't do it. If I try to hustle the family somewhere, I get grumpy and we're late. If I don't, I'm not as grumpy but we're still late.

What can we do about it?
The answer is in verse six. Labor diligently. Keep trying, because the responsibility is ours whether or not it has any effect. As Mother Theresa said, "It was never about them anyway". Mormon and Moroni had a tough job, called to be the last warning between the people and utter destruction, a warning that few people were likely to accept. As we keep reading I'm going to be looking for ways that they coped with it, but for now I know that it's important to keep laboring.

And the end result? Also in verse six, to conquer the enemy of righteousness and to rest our souls in the Kingdom of God. I don't know about you, but that last part sounds really good about now.

Grief

I don't know how you feel.

I have no words that will fix everything

but I can tell you how I feel.

Grief is a hole ripped out of your heart

and if you place your eye to the hole

you see yourself

staked to the center of an empty universe.

When life becomes normal it is still a minefield

of innocent words,

innocent moments

that trigger an ambush from your emotions.

They pull off scabs and leave wounds

raw, open, bleeding like brand new.

Which emotions? Good or bad?

I can't tell. I'm too busy

trying to wipe my nose unnoticed.

I used to think of Hope as a bright flame

that warms your soul and drives away the shadows.

Sometimes that is true,

but even when not, hope is a bulldog's teeth

that cling to Truth and do not let go.

In each ambush I feel storms rage

and I know I could be crushed,

torn apart by their fury,

but my teeth are still set

and I cannot be blown away.

Unexpected Gifts

On Sunday I listened to a talk on being grateful in the midst of trials. President Uchdorf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints explained that we should have an overall spirit of gratitude even when we have little to be thankful for. I have heard sisters express this before, that they were grateful for the experience gained from a trials, but that it would be too much to be grateful for a trial itself.

Well, perhaps sometimes, but the talk brought to mind one trial that I am sincerely grateful for. One of my greatest blessings was a day of illness. Perhaps I had ordered something off at the restaurant we visited, because I spent the night exploding out both ends. The next day I had a fever and spent the day in bed. Why was that one of my greatest blessings? Because I spent the whole day cuddling with my baby boy, who would unexpectedly pass away just a few weeks later. I have plenty of regrets from the night he passed away, but one pain I have not had to face was the regret that I didn't spend enough time with him. There is nothing in his little life that I would change, and that has been a huge comfort. I treasure that day, never mind the fever, never mind the unpleasant night before. I don't know how many of our trials are like that. Probably more than we realize. For most of our trials, it takes longer than a few weeks to realize how great a blessing they were, but I'm sure that day is coming. Perhaps it's the author in me that looks forward to that day so eagerly, for the time when the stories are made whole and we can look back and realize the meaning and order and wholeness that were there all along.

Just Around the Corner

Most people would look at my family and laugh if I told them I struggled with infertility. It lasted only a year, and had a quick and easy fix. Even at the time I felt guilty for feeling so bad about it because I had a child already and most people with this problem had none. But it was real all the same.

We had our daughter so quickly that we assumed that this would always be the case. I so wanted her to have a sibling. I had the name of my next child picked out (I was sure it’d be a boy), and I could picture exactly what he’d look like. Months went by and nothing happened. Was it my fault? Was I not a good enough mother for our daughter that I didn’t deserve another child? Somewhere in my heart I knew we’d have more children—my husband wasn’t worried for the same reason. I knew that other people had it worse than I did, but thinking that way only made me feel like I had no right to be unhappy about it, which of course made everything much worse. I didn’t get any hurtful comments, but I had one hard moment when another woman was talking about being able to visit Girl’s Camp despite having a baby, and saying she’d “better go now because [she] would probably be pregnant again next year.”

The lowest point was at a family reunion. I was trying to accept the Lord’s timing in my life and pondering how I could stop feeling so miserable. Then, at a church meeting, two cousins stood up one after the other and announced that they were both expecting. They laughed at the shock on their mother’s face, and I so much wanted to be one of them that I physically hurt. I couldn’t even allow myself to be jealous, as this would be a “rainbow baby” for one of my cousins. I had to walk away from the celebrations with my husband so I could calm down before facing people.

My two-year-old daughter loved going to her nursery class on Sunday. One morning, she hurried off through the wrong door to get there. I knew that the church hallway was a circle and that she would eventually make it to the right class, so I allowed her to go through the wrong door and followed after her. After a little while, she started getting upset. Soon, every time we passed a foyer or turned a corner, she would collapse in tears. “Nursery! Nursery!” she cried. I tried to explain. “We are going to nursery, I promise. Please trust me. We’ll get there if you just keep going. Come on, get up.” And she would get up and walk to the next corner, where we’d have to go through the whole thing over again. At last we arrived and she ran joyfully into her class.

Then I realized how much my daughter had been teaching me. My goal was taking longer than expected, and I too would stop and cry at every corner. I too had Someone with me, telling me the same things I told my little girl, but with even more patience and love. “You are going to get there, I promise. Please trust me. We’ll get there if you just keep going. Come on, get up.”

I too arrived at last. I visited a doctor, who discovered that my thyroid levels were off. I started medication and within a couple of months became pregnant with my son (who looks almost exactly like I imagined him). I learned some important lessons. I still have trials, and I still stop and cry at every corner when my goals don’t happen on my time table. But I’m starting to learn to listen to that voice of the Spirit which is always there, that tells me that everything will be all right if I just keep going. 

I Was Blind

This is a poem I wrote after attending a Sunday School lesson about Jesus healing the man who was blind.

Light.

So many types.
Light and dark, bright and dull.
I have no words for these things.
Which color is blue?
So this is a sky.

Motion.

So many movements.
People hurdling, hurdling, hurdling by.
Voices question, threaten, accuse.
I hear the anger, the fear, in the voices.
Now the feelings have faces.

A face stops.

A face I could not have seen,

A face I know.
I know His voice, the man called Jesus.
The man they say feeds, heals, makes whole.
The man who mended me.
He calls himself the Christ.

I was blind.
Now I see.

Population Control

I'm the oldest of a very large family, and I always wanted my own large family as well. I've also always been interested in learning about animals and conservation. As a child I never thought that the two might be considered at odds with each other. I read descriptions of habitat loss and ZooBooks' not-so-subtle hints that we have a human overpopulation problem without taking much notice. In high school my English teacher constantly liked to talk about our population problems and joked about programs to limit the number of children one can have. I felt that was wrong, and I knew my religion encouraged having children, but until college I didn't really have a solid position on the subject.

Lessons From Religion

The first concept I learned came from religion. The Doctrine and Covenants 104:17-18 states:

17 For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.

 18 Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment.

It made plenty of sense to me. The Lord created the earth and made sure there were plenty of resources to care for the people he created. The problem lies with people who hog all of the resources instead of allowing others to take care of themselves. It reminds me of the agricultural fields around the city where I live--gleaning was banned because people would hoard all of the food and then open vegetable stands to sell what was intended to help everyone.

Another concept I came upon while in college was the idea that Satan, the enemy of all mankind, was fighting to destroy the place where we live. His goal is to make men miserable and to hinder the work of the Lord, and it makes a lot of sense that one of his targets is to make the earth uninhabitable or at least less beautiful. But I think there's enough information out there on this subject, and our culture seems to be erring from caring too much about the earth instead of the other way around, so I'll move on.


History and Innovation

People have been worried about over population for a long time. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich stated:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

If you look at the information he had available, you might be tempted to agree with him. In fact, the technology and practices available at the time were not enough to feed the world's growing population.

Obviously, the world did not collapse in massive famine forty years ago. What happened? At the same time Ehrlich was prophesying , a global movement called the Green Revolution was beginning.People made new discoveries and inventions which allowed farming to be much more productive.For example, Norman Borlaug bred new types of wheat. While "corn... as high as an elephant's eye" is poetic, it's not really that helpful: we don't eat corn stalks. Borlaug began breeding wheat that grows the same amount of food on a smaller plant, resulting in less nutrient and space requirements. While some of the effects of this were negative (widespread pesticide use and the crippling of the family farm, for instance), it also allowed us to support a larger population. More people means more innovators, and innovators help us to live better.


Economics

In order for a population to stay static, each woman needs to have two children survive to adulthood (one to replace her and one for her husband). Currently in the United States the birth rate is about 1.93 children per woman. Most developed countries are below, sometimes far below, this rate. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article claiming that America's baby bust will be the greatest threat to our economic standing (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578270053387770718.html). The number of children being born cannot support the number of people retiring from the baby boom of the 50's.


The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Open a map on your computer, zoomed out so you can see the whole United States-- google maps works well. Close your eyes and point to a spot on the map. Now zoom in on your spot. When I did it, I pointed to a spot just east of the Gulf of California in Mexico. As far as I can tell, it's about forty miles from any human habitation. My second try hit the Halfbreed Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, about thirty miles from Billings. Chances are pretty good that you didn't hit any human habitations either.

National Geographic recently came out with an issue that highlighted the importance of cities. They explained that having people in a more centralized location lessens the effect on the earth overall. It uses less wildlife habitat, and less gas as people don't need to travel as far. My husband visited a place in Korea where the people living in the "country" live in high-rise buildings with their fields stretched out in all directions around them.

Beatrix Potter says in her retelling of The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, "One place suits one person, and another place suits another. As for me, I prefer to live in the country." I completely agree with her. I'd rather be in the country, but within a short drive of a larger city. In fact, when I was younger I suggested that the entire earth should be divided equally among all of the people, and each should manage and take care of the section they'd been given. I'm old enough to know this wouldn't work, but the principle holds true--no matter where we live, we need to care for what we have.

One way of solving problems on a personal level is the principle of homesteading, which is that each person should try to be as self-reliant as possible, especially in providing food and other goods for their family. On a city, this might mean a pot of herbs in the window. On fact, the best garden I've had yet was a tiny plot in front of our rented duplex, barely big enough for three tomatoes and a zucchini plant smashed between the owner's mandatory rose bush. In the country, this might mean goats, chickens, and a large garden (my eventual goal). The principle remains the same no matter where you live.


Effects of Overpopulation Fears

One of the biggest problems of fearing overpopulation is that almost every solution to the "problem" involve violating the rights of others. Some people do decide not to have children in order to keep from "adding to the problem", but others see fit to force their opinions on others. This includes the murdering of unborn children, forced sterilization, one-child policies, and eugenics. Eugenetics means that someone in authority will decide for the rest of the population who is fit and who is not, and remove those who are not from the population. Hitler's extermination methods are a very extreme, well-known example. Abortion clinics targeting minority races and doctors suggesting abortion for "disabled" babies are less-known examples.



Quality and Quantity

My favorite story came from a college friend. She was attending an event in high school and was assigned a roommate with very different views from her own. The roommate explained that she did not want to have children because of overpopulation. Then she paused and said to my friend, "I'm glad you want to have children, though. The world needs more people like you."

Raise the change you want to see in the world. This is what makes the most sense to me. I for one believe that there are a lot of problems in our culture. I can't change everything, but I can teach my children right from wrong. I can teach my children how to live a good life. And they will go out into the world and interact with others. I will do my bit, and they can do theirs, and goodness will spread, little by little, person by person. Lasting change for the better is never successful when crammed down people's throats. It happens on an individual level, one by one, person by person. And that's how I hope to make a difference.

The Science of Religion: Truth and Fact

While reading comments online and talking to people, I have found that many seem to think that science and religion are incompatible. This feels rather strange to me, as a science graduate from a religious university. Science and religion are completely different things with completely different objectives, and a blanket assumption about their relationship (or lack thereof) is often overly simplified and inherently untrue.

Some people will reject anything called science in favor of their religion, while others will disregard anything religious yet accept anything as long as it's called science. One major cause of this apparent incompatibility is that people do not understand the difference between truth and fact.


1: Truth

Truth is.

In the book 1984, a government leader explains how his organization views truth. He tells the main character that if he believes that he has flown around the room, and the only other person in the room also believes that he has flown around the room, then he has indeed flown around the room. If a trusted leader says that he is holding up four fingers, then he is holding up four fingers, no matter what he is really doing. If a piece of evidence is forgotten, it does not exist.

Obviously, this is not true. The reader knows perfectly well that this man has not flown around the room, that he is holding up only three fingers, and that the piece of evidence does exist.

What is truth? To be brief, truth is.

I think all of us have the capability to understand this. We all accept that some things are. Truth is unalterable, and it exists independent of belief. If everyone in the entire world believed that the earth is flat, it would not change the truth.

Religion is an institution of truth. Of course, not all religions are true--this is impossible, since most of them consider themselves the one and only truth. However, the purpose of religion is to teach truth. Whether correctly or not, religion teaches what is and what is not. Perhaps some individual religions are fact based--perhaps some will claim "we have made many observations, and as far as we are able to understand, this is how things are", but I do not know of any. Sometimes individual teachings will come into conflict with well-established or widely-believed fact, which does create a separation between that particular religion and science, but it does not mean that all religions and all science are incompatible.

How do you know what truth is? This is a very personal, and a very religious, matter.What you accept as truth and what you do not is up to you, but it is important to realize that your acceptance does not make it true. You will have to find things out for yourself. And how do you find out what the truth is? The process most often used for discovering truth is science.


2: Fact
       
When you go to a science class, chances are you will be given a long list of facts that you are required to know. Especially in the early grades, these facts are presented as truth. Students will accept these as truth, and many people still think this way. If science says it, it must be true. As long as some piece of information has the big label with "science" stamped on it, than it's truth. But defining truth isn't science. That's religion. People who think this way will often find that their "religion of science" clashes with other religions. And really, that's not surprising. Religions are rarely compatible with one another.

In science classes, we learn facts, not truths. Caterpillars turn into butterflies. Cells divide to make new cells. Electrons surround atoms. These are all facts.

Most of us accept these as truth. But, as I've already explained, truth is not based on acceptance.

But everyone knows that caterpillars do turn into butterflies, you insist. I've seen them do it.
No. You have seen one caterpillar turn into a butterfly. You may have seen many caterpillars turn into many butterflies. But in order to say that every single caterpillar will turn into a butterfly, or even that every single caterpillar would turn into a butterfly under ideal conditions, you need to make an assumption. You must assume that because this has happened many many times, it will happen in other situations as well.

Science is what makes that assumption. Science says that the more times an individual thing has happened, the more likely it is to be true. When one thing has been proven enough times and under enough different circumstances, it is called fact. Fact is not truth. Fact does not say that something is. It says that something probably is, or that it is as far as we are able to observe, or that it certainly seems that way. But it does not claim to be truth.

Science is a process used to help people decide what is truth. Remember those science projects in elementary school? Those come closest to explaining the true nature of science. You have a statement that you want to prove, so you design an experiment. You control as many factors as you can, and you run your experiment. You get a result. Is that result truth? Maybe. Is that result fact? Well, it's on it's way. You've learned that your caterpillars did turn into butterflies. But what about other kinds of butterflies? What if your caterpillars were unusual? So you run some more experiments, and other people run similar experiments, and after a whole lot of experimenting  you decide that the evidence shows that your statement is true (or false), and that many other people agree with you.

Congratulations. You have a fact.

Is your fact true?

Probably.

The process of science helps us decide what is true. We decide how many experiments it takes for a statement to become fact. We decide what facts we accept as truth, and which we do not.

This process is not limited to caterpillars and cells and electrons. It can be used for anything. In fact, this process is often used in religion. We tell people to "experiment on the word". Pray about it, we say. Ask, and listen for an answer. Try living the commandments and see if they are the correct way to live. These are all scientific experiments. Conduct your own experiments, do your own research, and decide for yourself what it takes for you to accept something as truth. Then you can stand by it and be sure for yourself.

The Meaning of Food

Once when I was a teenager, my family decided to look after a pregnant goat, to decide if we wanted a goat for ourselves or not. Unfortunately, she died while giving birth, but one of her kids, a cute little boy, survived. We raised him by hand and named him Frost. Unfortunately, male goats are not very useful--they don't give milk, they cost a lot to take care of, and if they aren't fixed they become smelly and aggressive. When our baby grew up, he was sold to a family acquaintance who resold him to a family who had him for dinner. I was devastated.  I even replaced my hamburger patty with french fries in protest (my vegetarian stint lasted a single meal).

In college, my plant physiology professor enjoyed making allusions to people while explaining how plants work. "When you're eating a peanut or a pea, you're eating a tiny baby plant that never had a chance to live," he said. The students chuckled and went home to eat their peanut butter and canned peas without a second thought. While not as dramatic or emotional as butchering an animal, I have felt a quick sense of sadness when harvesting spinach or carrots. We nurtured that plant, and it beat the odds of surviving in our infertile backyard, only to be killed now.

The facts of life are simple: in order for us to live, something must die. Some people try to skate around this by assuming that certain species are more important than others. Most don't even think about it. But the fact remains. We cannot create our own energy--we must take it from something else. This is where the homesteader philosophy comes in--the idea that our culture has lost something vital by separating itself from its food source. If your meat shows up wrapped in plastic, or your dinner shows up in a cardboard box, you forget where it comes from. You don't have to think. You don't have to feel.

If you do think about it, you might find that eating is a very religious thing to do. Doesn't it bring to mind Someone else who sacrificed His life so that we could live? My religious teachers taught that the earth is a school and the Atonement is the subject. They would say that every time you eat a meal, you are being taught about sacrifice.

Whether or not you are religious, when you accept that other living things have died so that you can live, it brings to mind one very important question: what am I doing with my (and their) life? I remember as a teenager thinking about the sacrifices that parents make for their children. I knew that repaying them was impossible, but I was not bothered by this. I thought that the way to repay them is to make that sacrifice myself someday and pass on the gifts I had been given. As we continue eating and continue living, the solution becomes as simple as its cause: If something must die for us to live, let us live in the best way we can. Let us make their sacrifices worth it.

Every once and awhile, people may stop to wonder about the purpose of life and what they are doing with their own. Perhaps we are offered the chance to reflect at every single meal. What are we doing with the life that so many have sacrificed to create?

In addition, we have a holiday to reflect on the previous year and to be grateful for our blessings. Harvest celebrations are an important part of cultures all over the world, but ours has been degraded to a day of gluttony. Thanksgiving is not Turkey day any more than Christmas is x-mas. Thanksgiving is a day to reflect on the lives that have touched ours, including the bounty that nature and nature's God have given us. It is a day to remember our own dependency. It is a day to connect with family and friends, who are after all in the same boat. Repayment for our blessings is impossible. This Thanksgiving, I challenge us to ask ourselves what we are doing with our life, and to determine what we need to do to make our lives worthy of the sacrifices they have been given.