Pioneer Day Weekend

Perhaps you heard, but we celebrated Pioneer Day weekend last week. The actual day fell on a Sunday this year, which meant that the neighbors basically shot off fireworks well past midnight for four straight nights.

Antelope Island caught fire Friday night, and it looked rather scary from my vantage point in Bountiful when I snapped this photo:

Anyhow, as a family we got together Saturday so the kids could go swimming, and that was followed by a barbecue at Grandma's and Grandpa's house.

Christian and McKenna had fun with an old favorite, Bristle Blocks:

And there was much rejoicing.

OCD and Indexing

How does obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) wreak havoc in my life? Let me count the ways.

Then, let me count them again. And again. And again . . . and once again.

Now that that's been taken care of, for now anyway, I've alluded to my struggle with OCD here on Paco Nation a few times before now but have never really devoted a full post to it until tonight. At this point, I really don't have anything to lose. So, here goes.

OCD is defined as "an anxiety disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations (obsessions), or behaviors that make them feel driven to do something (compulsions)." Now, if I ever have to give a church talk on the subject, I'll be prepared with that definition.

I stress the unwanted portion of that definition, mind you. OCD affects different people in different ways. Some people, like Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as It Gets, have physical rituals to get them through the day. Others obsess about hand washing and germs. Still, others deal with unwanted thought patterns that occur in repeated cycles.

I am among the third group, I think. There may be more groups/behaviors, but I don't really feel like researching that right now.

OCD first reared its ugly head when I was 13 years old. I remember the first time I encountered it very clearly. It was my first moment feeling truly panicked in life, and I didn't understand why I was feeling panicked about this particular moment. Understanding would not come for years, unfortunately.

Other anxiety-filled episodes recurred over the years, and I realized my OCD wasn't ever going to go away. In particular, it really made some jobs and life as a missionary extremely difficult for me at times. Bless their hearts, my bewildered companions wondered what I was going through almost as much as I did at certain moments, if they weren't making fun of me during those times of indecision. I do not know that I would have reacted any differently from them had I not gone through it all myself.

Recently, members of my ward took part in the Church's worldwide indexing event in the form of a "Family History Hangout," during which a few of us, myself included, learned to index names and information from census files and other forms of data for the first time.

In principle, this was a great idea. But OCD had another thing in store for me. It came out rather quickly on this night, making my brain figuratively explode rather early into the evening as it tried to figure things out when things didn't make a lick of sense.

I will have to give indexing a try again some other time. I see the benefit in it now. At least I didn't run from the room screaming.

It's still an ongoing battle for me, this OCD thing. Nevertheless, where there is knowledge, there is additional hope. Though I didn't understand much about OCD at the onset of my teenage years, I have learned so much about it over time and how I can deal with it in healthy ways. If I look at it from a glass-is-half-full perspective, I see how OCD actually helps me in such things as doing my editing/proofreading work and also in being aware of others' needs.

Now that I've shared all of that, date me all the girls.

Also, I need to now proofread this post a couple of dozen times.

Christian's Third Birthday Party

We gathered for monthly family dinner tonight and also to celebrate Christian's third birthday (which is actually tomorrow, so, close enough).

Instead of the traditional birthday cake, Christian blew out the candles on a Rice Krispie Treat cake made up of little Mickey Mouse heads. You kinda had to be there, but it was well done.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna posed for this photo with her three-month-old cousin Graham:

Ain't no party like a Plowman party.

Land of the Free

"Given this land
If they live
Righteously."

 -"Book of Mormon Stories" (emphasis added)

We're hearing that word a lot about the United States of America today, being Independence Day. And rightly we should! We should be very proud of her today, on her 240th birthday.

Nevertheless, I have observed that not everyone out there is exactly proud of this country. Have you found that the people who complain about things here in this country are, with few exceptions, largely those who have never traveled outside of its borders? I have. Thanks to social media expanding all of our scopes of view, we're often hearing that we're (collectively) racist, evil, and that people who don't have the rights they should are still lacking those rights.

Granted, we have a handful of people in our country who are making a bad name for the rest of us out there. There are also secret combinations, just as the Book of Mormon warned us about, in the government, the media, and other places. But honestly I shudder when we're called these horrible names as a whole.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world faces terrorism on a daily basis, isn't free to speak its mind or to worship according to the dictates of its own conscience, and faces real, dangerous, largely unchecked bigotry in the form of women who are not allowed to sneeze without a man present and homosexuals and Christians both who are jailed, thrown off of rooftops, or are put to death in other horrific ways.

It's a nutty world out there, and you only have to look on the daily newscast to see just how insane things are.

Having traveled to a number of foreign countries and having lived in another for years myself, I am very grateful for just how good we really do have things here. During my time in Peru, I was first shocked to observe people call out racially charged things in my direction as I walked down the street each day, and then I just got used to it. And like my previous statement about the few giving a bad name to the whole, this was certainly the case; though I don't know of a single place here in my home state of Utah where you will walk down the streets in fear of a similar thing happening.

Just look around you. Where some see prison cells, I see freedom and liberty.

But can freedom be too much freedom?

Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in a speech last week on religious freedom, taught:

"We are in the middle of a rights revolution. Sometimes the alleged new rights are important to correct injustices. But sometimes these supposed rights are little more than demands that government forces others to conform to society's new moral preferences."

To follow up on my previous post, another of the many reasons I preach the restored gospel of Christ, as revealed by living prophets and Apostles, is because possession of this land comes with a promise contingent on our behavior:

"This is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, who hath been manifested by the things which we have written" (Ether 2:12; emphasis added).

We can see what happened to the Jaredites and Nephites who broke this covenant. What will happen to us?

Let us never take our freedom for granted by always striving to choose the right. Ultimately, we cannot have our rights without righteousness.