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Tender Mercies....

6/26/2016

What do you call it when a little miracle makes life better?   I call it wonderful.   Elder David Bednar calls it a tender mercy.

“The Lord's tender mercies are the very personal and individualized blessings, strength, protection, assurances, guidance, loving-kindnesses, consolation, support, and spiritual gifts which we receive from and because of and through the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I guess I could call it a tender mercy too…. a wonderful tender mercy… though, by definition, all tender mercies are wonderful.    If they were not wonderful, they would not be tender mercies, right?    But I digress…..

Very personal…very individualized blessings….Yep! That’s been my experience lately.     Let me tell you about a couple…..

Sandy gave me a pair of earrings. They were small, subtle, and classy (like Sandy in many ways!).   I did not wear them often but they definitely had a distinct place in my earrings-coordinated-with-outfits wardrobe master plan.

On the evening of my last wearing of those earrings, I discovered that one was missing. Gone.   Though I’d carefully attached an earring back when donning it that morning, somewhere in the day’s travels it had fallen out.   I’d been hither and thither, the earring was dark (not like Sandy) and small and classy (like Sandy) and there was really no hope of finding it.   I wrote the pair off as a loss.   Bummer.

Weeks later, as I stepped from the tub onto the bathroom floor, I experienced a sharp pain in my right arch.   My feet were bare (as is usually the case when one exits a shower) and unprotected.   OUCH! I reached down to remove what I suspected was a “pokey” (sharp thorn) from the bottom of my foot and found that the suspected thorn was really a small, dark, classy earring….the very one that I’d written off as a loss weeks earlier.    It was a “very personal and individualized blessing”….certainly a wonderful tender mercy.

Our Miss Tanah will attend SUU (Southern Utah University) in the fall.   Until recently her most concrete plan for living accommodations was a tent. Tents and concrete do not have a lot in common and concrete plans for spending the semester in a tent do not have a lot of common sense.   So Thursday afternoon (late afternoon) Tanah and Lance spontaneously decided to go to Cedar City the next morning (early morning) to search for housing.

Good luck! Inquires at several real estate offices and conversations with several apartment complex office managers all yielded the same story.   Housing at SUU is scarce.   If you find something open, grab it quick.   “In fact,” one person told them, pointing to a complex that was clearly under construction, “those apartments are not even done yet and are already sold out.”

At the LDS Institute building a very nice man directed them to the SUU housing office where a very nice woman (who happened to be married to the very nice man at the LDS Institute building) told them about a very nice apartment that just opened up that morning.    “It is located one block from campus and you should check it out,” they were told.

Check it out indeed!   The apartment had openings not only for Tanah but also for her two friends.   It is only one block from the theater side of campus where five of Tanah’s six classes will be held.   It has vaulted ceilings, a loft in every room, wi-fi and utilities are included in the rent payment, and the rent is $100 less per month than is being charged for the apartments that are not yet completed. Definitely a tender mercy….a much bigger tender mercy than a found earring!

And the day’s tender mercies did not end there.    Tanah has been very much less than motivated to find a summer job.   Having seen both an apartment she loves (better than she hoped for) and the cost of renting said apartment (more than she planned on), she is suddenly much more open to the idea of working this summer.   On the very day she was galvanized to action, Chris (Lance’s brother) called and offered her a job.   If the offer had come 24 hours earlier, its reception may have been different.   Coming when it did, it was gratefully and graciously accepted.   Both the offer and its timing were a tender mercy.

Tender mercies….very personal and individualized blessings….are very real and, I suspect, very much more common than we realize.

May your week be filled with tender mercies and may you recognize both them and their Source!

Love you,
Teresa

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Because He Loved Me....

6/19/2016

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“I’m so glad when Daddy comes home!”

When I was a little girl (hard to imagine sometimes that I was ever little but I was—I have photos to prove it!) I loved it when my Daddy came home (unless, of course I had been mean to Mom, which is a whole different story).     Blonde curls bouncy and blue eyes beaming, I would run to meet him, fling myself into his arms and declare triumphantly, “I got first kiss!!!”

When I was a teen, the into-his-arms-flinging stopped but the admiration did not.   I remember thinking ofra friend who was struggling and saying to myself, “If she could just come and live with us for a while, my Dad would help her make things right.”    It was my Dad I sought for comfort when I tipped the loaded spud truck over into the barrow pit and my Dad I coerced into attending my graduation. To me, Dad was bigger than life and better than bread.

Now, as an adult, I still call on my Dad for help. “The neighbor’s goat has a kid stuck in the birth canal. What should I do?” “Grace needs a place to stay.”   “About this student in first period that I want to maim……..”

Dad has given me countless gifts, the most memorable of which are the intangible ones.   When I was in elementary, his gift of a mare gave me confidence and identity.   In a classroom of first grade horse lovers, I actually owned one!   His gift of a ewe, again in elementary, gave me priceless lessons in things like being responsibility, facing fears, working hard, and managing money. I had to feed, water, vaccinate, dock, castrate, and generally care for the critters even when it was dark and cold (really cold in Idaho!!) outside.   His constant optimism gave me an “I-can-do” attitude of accomplishment.   His constant faithfulness gave me an “I-will-do” attitude of obedience.    His constant stories (most of which were generally true) gave me a love of story-telling and adventure.

Many are the gifts my father has given me.   Unquestoinably the most important gift given me by my father was love.   My Daddy loved me.   I never questioned that.   He loved me. Even when he yelled at me for failing to close the gate, spanked me for playing instead of putting the sleeping bag away, or knuckled me on the head for being sassy to Mom, I knew he loved me.    I grew up in a confident cocoon, safe in the knowledge that my Daddy loved me.    I was his “stinky-poo”, his “little girl”, his beloved daughter.    And I always will be—I always will be his “little girl”, a daughter beloved as only a daughter can be.

And, because I knew my father’s love, it has easy for me to know my Father’s love.   Having grown up in a home where love from my father came naturally and without condition, it was natural for me to accept the reality of a Divine Father who loves me unconditionally.    Through my father’s love for me, I feel The Father’s love for me.    And that is the greatest Father’s gift of all.

Happy Father’s Day!

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Hell or Heaven?

6/12/2016

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Hot. So hot.   Temperatures over 100 degrees F.
Brutal sun. Brutal, baking sun. And relentless. And merciless.
Sand everywhere.   Shade nowhere.
Heat waves careening off the barren desert sand and crashing violently with all who venture thereon….
Hot. So, SO hot. Oppressively, even obsessively, hot.

Sounds like heaven, no?

I just returned from a five day trip to Southern Utah with a group of OPA (Ogden Preparatory Academy) students and it was a truly glorious experience. Though the heat may have been hellish (I cannot say that with certainly as I haven’t been there yet…), the experience was heavenly (or at least similar to what I imagine heaven will be).     WHAAAA-WHOOO!

Twenty-two students, one of whom was my own Mr. Miles.
Three teachers.
Two dads.
One amazing bus driver.
Countless (unless you can count higher than I can….) good times.

The good times started Monday morning when Doug (the aforementioned amazing bus driver) found a good sized rattlesnake occupying the spot he where he hoped to park the bus at the Diamond Fork Hot Springs Trailhead   (…..serpent….maybe there are more analogies to hell than I realized…..) and continued as we played in the hot springs (….boiling water, sulfur smell…another analogy?….) a little and the cold waterfall a lot.

The Diamond Fork Trail was seriously beautiful, a shaded, undulating path that followed a gentle, meandering stream.   I knew we’d see serious beauty again but I thought it would be our last experience with shade or water.   I was wrong. The steep sides of Little Wild Horse’s slot canyons and the subway-like tunnels of Crack Canyon were refreshingly shady, in addition to being stunningly beautiful.   And the Green River’s water, though not gentle or meandering, was certainly wet.

In addition to being heavenly, our Green River experience was slightly miraculous.    Hot (Did I mention it was HOT?) and dirty from our Little Wild Horse hiking adventure, we drove to Green River hoping for a dip.    Rejected at Green River State Park by our unwillingness to pay the $75 entrance fee, we were resigned to wading through the weeds to access the water at the bridge when Tony, Bev, and Brent (two dads and a teacher/mom) successfully Googled an “enjoyed by locals” swimming hole in the area.   Three 360 degree turns (in a school bus….I told you Doug is amazing!) and about 10 miles later we found ourselves at Swasey BLM campground.   Featuring a pit toilet, a nice stretch of sandy beach, and no entrance fee, it was the perfect place to cool off, clean up, and chill out.     While there the kids turn turns dunking each other (again and again and again repeatedly), played “Duck, Duck, Goose” and turned Martha into a mermaid.

The hike to the Grand Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon was neither shady nor wet and it was certainly brutal.   It was also most certainly worth it.   The 800 foot drop down sandstone slabs into the canyon in the cool morning air was only somewhat easy and the climb up those same sandstone slabs in the unmitigated afternoon sun was super hard.    Red-faced and wobbly legged, the students made it without complaint but not without effort.     Whew!

And WOW! The canyon—“ which contains some of the most significant rock art in North American”—was wonder-full, as in full of wonders.    The three panels of life-size rock art were truly stunning and the deer carcass was truly amazing.   Nancy was convinced the rock art had African origins—a theory Ranger Jen kindly entertained—and Lance was convinced the deer was a cougar kill—a theory Ranger Jen verified.

The carcass was covered with debris and surrounded by scratch marks in the sand. Cougars typically make their kills, eat 10 lbs or so, and then loosely cover the remains before retreating a short distance to sleep and digest.   The deer’s head twisted up over its back. Cougars pounce from trees onto underpassing deer and kill them quickly by breaking their necks.   Lance also found paw prints in the surrounding sand which Ranger Jen verified were cat tracks.    It was fun to watch the Rangers “geek out” about Lance’s find while trying to maintain professional composure.

Though nature’s beauties were truly inspiring (and I haven’t even mentioned Goblin Valley or the Dragon’s Lair yet), the best part of the trip was the people.    From Doug the Driver (did I mention that we had an amazing bus driver?) to Beth, the delightful new OPA science teacher to little (literally) Yvonne (whose leg gash would have benefited from duct tape) to crazy Katie (whose amazing strength was belied by the gentleness with which she washed Yvonne’s wound)---all of them were wonderful. WONDERFUL!!   Cute James, with his untamable hair and his very docile demeanor, Robin whose enthusiasm and conversation were endless, Timothy whose voice was almost as loud as his endurance was long, tender Tennille whose feet were raw and whose attitude never turned raunchy, Karen who hiked hard and cleaned up cute, Denise who pretended to object when I sat on her chest, Darin who beleaguered me until I let him start a fire, beautiful Bev, my teacher friend whose support and insights were priceless, her cute husband Tony whose humor was almost as dry as the desert, Brent, a dad whose good attitude was as endless as Timothy’s voice was loud—I loved them all.    LOVED THEM. ALL!!!    And I will always love them.

I love them all for who they are and for what I heard (and did not hear) and saw while I was with them.   I heard “Thank you Mrs. Hislop” dozens of times over the course of the week.   I did not hear complaints about hiking and I did not heard noise at night after I sent them to bed.   I saw them follow instructions. I saw them share precious food and more precious (in the desert at the end of a hike) water and, even more precious for teens, friendship.   There was so much goodness in the group, so much respect.   Everyone was included, even the socially awkward ones. They were certainly diverse and, just as certainly, united. What a blessing to be able to associate with them.

I love them generally for who they are and specifically for what they did for my precious son.   Miles, an avid hater-of-hiking, came on the trip solely to support his mom. “I’m doing this for you,” he told me.   At journey’s end, he was a hiking convert.   “I’m definitely going on the next trip with you,” he declared. The catalyst for the change?   My OPA family. They fully enveloped him as a peer. By doing things like inviting him to play Spoons in camp, engaging him in a game of Mastermind on the bus, and tossing him in the water at the river, they edified him in ways I cannot replicate and touched my heart in ways I cannot describe.

Thank you, THANK YOU, my wonderful Southern Utah trip family, for embracing my son. Thank you for letting me into your hearts and thank you for filling mine.

Glorious scenery.
Mutual respect.   Unity of mind and purpose.
Learning and growing.
Joy.
Hearts filled with love.

Sound like heaven, yes?

It was.

Disclaimer: All students pictured have granted written and/or verbal permission to have their photos posted.