21 Aug 2023, Monday

Prioritized Daily Task

Matthew and Melodie's 13 Wedding Anniversary

Chuck Higham, Joe L's father was buried today in Jamestown cementary, south of Idaho Falls

10:00 AM - Snow Canyon State Park, hiked Jenny's Canyon trail, Pioneer Names trail, and Tortoise Walk trail

2:00 PM - Check to get tickets to the Shakespeare Festival play, TIMON OF ATHENS, at the Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre in Cedar City Summary: Wealthy and popular, Timon of Athens helps his friends, gives many gifts, and holds a feast. The people flatter and praise him, all the while accepting his gifts. Timon is everyone’s best friend—until his wealth is suddenly gone. Destitute and disillusioned with so-called friends who have abandoned him, he turns his back on the world. After ignoring his true friends' warnings, Timon runs out of money, and none of his "friends" will help him. He runs away to a cave where he curses humanity, finds gold, funds someone to destroy Athens, and dies. A play for our times, Timon of Athens is clever, satiric, and deeply moving as it explores friendship, wealth, and the foibles of a materialistic society.

Note: “AND THUS WE SEE”: HELPING A STUDENT IN A MOMENT OF DOUBT Elder Henry B. Eyring Of the First Quorum of the Seventy Address to CES Religious Educators • 5 February 1993 • Temple Square Assembly Hall

My heart goes out to each of you in gratitude and in admiration for your service. We share a love of teaching, but I realize that I do not share in some of the sacrifice you make. In my travel across the Church, whenever one of you is introduced to me as “our early-morning seminary teacher” or “our seminary teacher for our students at the something-or-other junior high school,” I hear a note of gratitude and admiration that I hope you hear and remember. I hope you can feel it on some dark morning as you roll out of bed or at the end of

a long day when some of those junior high school students want to linger to ask a question that is new and vital to them but which you have heard more times than you can remember.

I suppose what keeps you going, even more than gratitude and admiration, is the glimpse you get of what a difference it can make when you do what you do well. You sometimes see it in the face of a former student reporting a successful mission or sitting in church with the person he or she married in the temple.

The fact that what you do matters both urges you on and, at times, can be a discouragement. It can discourage because while you see the great consequences of the judgments and choices your students are making, sometimes they do not see nearly as clearly. And that can tear at your heart.

………. Our entire exchange could not have lasted more than a minute or two in our interview. But what struck me then was a little thing. It was the tone in her voice. It was the sad sound of doubt—not just doubt that her patriarch had been inspired, but doubt that any ordinary human being, including me, might actually speak words for God. I do not remember what I said as I tried to help her that day. I remember the feeling I had of wanting to do something.

I remember better the interview I had with her less than a year later. She sobbed for a while, sitting in a chair

on the other side of my desk in the bishop’s office. And then she blurted out her tragedy and how it happened exactly as she had told me the patriarch so long before had described. In her little season of doubt that a patriarch could see with inspiration, she had made choices that led to years of sorrow.

The choices our students make, the ones that matter most, take faith. The right choice takes believing in things they cannot prove with logic nor with evidence they can see with their natural eyes. It is not easy to believe that your neighbor, unschooled and imperfect, could really be a patriarch called of God—that he could really see future choices and future consequences for you, someone he hardly knows, who will live in future conditions foreign to the patriarch’s experience.

Paul put the problem just right: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Debbie and I had prayer and I sent Matt and Melodie a text from me and 'Debbie wishing them a happy 13th Wedding Anniversary. I purchased tickets for us to see Shakespeare's play, Timon of Aathens that we will pick up at the Will-Call center near the Eileen and Allen Anes Theatre in Cedar City. We ate breakfast and ad drove to Snow Canyon State Park. We hiked a few of the short trails and took pictures. We left about 12:45 PM and drove to Anes Theater in Cedar City. Debbie picked up the tickets. We were about 5 minutes late and had to wait another 5 minutes before the usher could take us in. I had heard many good things about the Shakespeare plays here at Southern Utah University but this was the first time I had ever attended one. On the way home we stopped at Walmart and picked up 5 rain ponchos and a few groceries for dinner tonight. When we got home to the condo, Bojana cooked dinner. The internet does not work so we had to use the hot-spot on our cell phones to write in my journal. I read some of Elder Eyring's talk "And Thus We See". It is about helping students in moments of doubt. Elder Henry B. Eyring was a member Of the First Quorum of the Seventy at that time when he spoke to a group CES, Church Education Services Religious Educators in the Assembly Hall at Temple Square. Debbie and Ljubica washed and dried clothes. We all had prayer together and later Debbie and I had prayer. Her sister, Karlene's husband Joe L. buried his father Chuck Higham today in Jamestown Cementary.