To Kevin, Love Lexi

My Uncle Kevin is the definition of high standards in my book.

From his family, to his career, to his service to god,

Kevin is always setting the bar high for himself and inviting others to become more like Christ. 

When I found out I had Kevin to serve this year, at first I felt a little intimidated.

"What could I possibly do that would be anywhere near a Kevin level of excellence?" 

At first the obvious answer came. 

Kevin worked several years as a bishop in his family ward, 

and you better believe that I had done TOOOOOONS of service for varies bishops in Costa Rica, 

but as I brain stormed with his wife, we realized that there is so much more to Kevin then "he was a bishop".

We both tried to come up with ideas of things that would honor other aspects of Kevins life.

One thing that my Uncle Kevin and I have in common was that we have both served as full time missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints speaking the Spanish language.

I remember the first time I realized that my Uncle Kevin spoke Spanish. 

I was impressed when we first met our "fresh from Mexico" Cristina, who didn't speak a lick of English, 

and Kevin sat down and had (what appeared to be) and very loving and caring conversation, 

100% in Spanish. 

No miming, no speaking slow English, just a quality talk about her and her life.

My Uncle Kevin understood how hard it was to be somewhere where the language felt difficult, and how easy it was to feel alone and frustrated. 

This memory made me think of a time when I felt frustrated with my language abilities, and time I prayed and worked so hard, but felt like I was always disappointing myself. A place where I would have loved to have had someone extend an "Uncle Kevin" arm of friendship on my own language territory to get to know the "real me" not just the "nit wit who doesn't understand what we are saying in front of her".

Of coarse, the beginning of my mission.

Luckily for me, I live about 2 blocks away from the Missionary Training Center. A place where new fresh missionaries enter with and excited gleam in their eye, only to have that gleam turn into tears in about 24 hours as they wonder if they will ever "get this language down". A place where loving encouragement is ALWAYS needed. 

(The day I personally entered the MTC as a full-time missionary)

I decided that my service to Kevin would be to Volunteer at the Teaching Resource Center. A place where members of the church can be taught short, spiritual messages from missionaries in the language that the missionary is trying to learn.  As I decided on the idea I became very excited. A good way to still be involved in the missionary spirit and atmosphere, and to serve someone for my Uncle Kevin.

Unfortunately the process has become a little more difficult than when I was a missionary. An application was required to be processed before I could enter, and it has taken longer than I had hoped to get a couple of weeks of TRC time in before the Christmas holiday. With the delay in my application, I am on track to begin my volunteer time with the Lord's Army at the beginning on the new 2015 year. I am personally committed to visiting TRC at least once a month to uplift and be spiritually edified by the new missionaries before they head to "el campo misional". 

I am grateful for Kevin, and his example to me. Love you Uncle Kev! 

Christmas Service 2014 To Ben-- Love, Dad

Christmas Service 2014

Boy did I get it easy OR hard depending on how you look at it.

When I received my assigned name for the year - wahoo!!!  

I've got this one covered. Quite literally - covered in paint!

My person was Ben --- how could I serve another in his stead?

I know one of Ben's frustrations at living so far from family is that he isn't around to help in our family's repair and remodel projects as they come around.

So when Alex & Cindy got their new little home and I knew I would be heavily involved in that, I thought I could count it as my gift of service for my son, Ben.

It was a lot of hard work and it took us about six months of working afternoons, evenings and Saturdays. Lots and lots of people pitched in with their individual expertise to help make the house at 9151 Sandy Creek Circle a true home for Alex's  little family. Love you, Ben - I'm sure proud of you and your  family - Dad

(Doing a home remodel project with Ben, Christmas 2012)

Cool Beans! To Lauren from Kevan

Cool Beans!

Last year, I was introduced to one of Emma’s favorite books, Wonder.  It tells a fictional story of a boy named August, who was born with a severely deformed face.  He finally works up the courage to attend grade school for the first time in the fifth grade.  As would be expected, this experience was met with significant challenges from kids making fun of him, to being horrified by him, to simply ignoring him.

As a reader, we can all relate to poor August and his desire to fit in.  In one small chapter enters my hero.  Her name is Summer.  But for those of you who know her, you can call her Lauren.  She notices August left to sit by himself as he eats his lunch.

“Hey, is this seat taken?”

I looked up, and a girl I never saw before was standing across from my table with a lunch tray full of food.  She had long wavy brown hair, and wore a brown T-shirt with a purple peace sign on it.

“Uh, no,” I said.

She put her lunch tray on the table, plopped her backpack on the floor, and sat down across from me.  She started to eat the mac and cheese on her plate.

“Ugh,” she said after swallowing the first bite.  “I should have brought a sandwich like you did.”

“Yeah,” I said nodding.

“My name is Summer, by the way.  What’s yours?”

“August.”

“Cool,” she said.

“Summer!” Another girl came over to the table carrying a tray.  “Why are you sitting here? Come back to the table.”

“It was too crowded,” Summer answered her.  “Come sit here. There’s more room.”

The other girl looked confused for a second.  I realized she had been one of the girls I had caught looking at me just a few minutes earlier: hand cupped over her mouth, whispering.  I guess Summer had been one of the girls at that table, too.

“Never mind,” said the girl, leaving.

Summer looked at me, shrugged-smiled, and took another bite of her mac and cheese.

“Hey, our names kind of match,” she said as she chewed. 

I guess she could tell I didn’t know what she meant.

“Summer?  August?” she said, smiling, her eyes open wide, as she waited for me to get it.

“Oh yeah,” I said after a second.

“We can make this the ‘summer only’ lunch table,” she said.  “Only kids with summer names can sit here.

……

By the end of lunch, we had come up with a whole list of names of kids and teachers who could sit at our table if they wanted.  Most of the names weren’t actually summer names, but they were names that had some kind of connection to summer.

“But if someone doesn’t have a summer name and wants to sit with us,” she said very seriously, “we’ll still let them if they’re nice, okay?”

“Okay.”  I nodded. “Even if it’s a winter name.”

“Cool beans,” she answered, giving me a thumbs-up.

So, does anyone remember who showed up with the loaded jar of jelly bellies (aka cool beans) to share with everyone at the Kenney Family Reunion?  Yep, that’s right.  It was Lauren.

As my service to Lauren Schow for Christmas this year, I decided to have our family imitate her ability to serve others in countless small, yet significant ways.  For family home evening, we read the chapter about Summer and how she looked for the one person sitting alone at the lunch table.  Despite what her friends thought or said, she made that one person the most important in her world at that moment.  Which, in turn, really did mean the world to the person she was helping.

Our kids were challenged to find similar “cool beans” moments at school, at church, with neighborhood kids, and all around them.  Whenever they came home with a cool beans moment, they could choose ten jelly bellies (beans) to eat from our Lauren inspired jelly belly jar.  They could also take ten real beans and put them in our collective service jar.  Once that jar was full, there would be a special family activity to celebrate having filled it (still to be determined).

The very first week, each of our kids had stories of helping others.  They ranged from sitting by the one kid who was alone on the school bus, playing with a neighborhood kid who needed a friend, giving a hug to someone being bullied, to playing with the kid no one would play with at recess.  On some days, our kids came home telling us about multiple cool beans moments they had that day.

This has evolved to now starting our family home evenings each week with a “cool beans minute,” allowing anyone who wants to the opportunity to share a cools beans moment they had earlier in the week.

Through this experience, I have come to learn even more that Christ rarely reaches out to others through formal service projects, large donations, or even big, life-changing experiences.  Instead, His method is more often through the simple cool beans efforts of others.  Thank you Lauren for showing our family how to touch the lives of countless others through some simple cool beans.

to brian from david

i feel i should write something here. david's name was put in the hat for the service gifts and he apparently got my name. i was told this morning that it might be nice if i wrote something about how i felt the influence of david in my life this year.

i'm not exactly sure how to do that. for some people the veil is thin and they feel confident in crossing it. as for myself, i think my logical brain holds me back too much from being able to have those experiences.

i often wonder how busy he must be and how i certainly wouldn't want to take him away from more important duties in order to hang out with me.

so i can't say for certain that david told me how to improve my life, but i can say this. i find it very interesting that in the service i was giving for laura i had decided to seek blessings in an area of my life that i know david had experience and a useful perspective in navigating.

it's prudent for me to be very vague about what that is, but i have often wondered how david was able to deal with those experiences (even wondering if he dealt with them). i assume his current perspective allows him to see things more as they are without having the veil of this world clutter up his view. i'm certain that if he chose to, he could certainly help me out with that clear perspective.

and i did receive the knowledge i needed in order to make progress. that knowledge could certainly have come from david, or it might also have been from one of the many people i was helping with my indexing (as laura suggested), or maybe i'm so hard headed and stubborn that i needed a team of influencers with david playing project manager to get it through my thick head. 

which it finally has after 45 years on this planet.

so thanks david for being an example and possibly being my advocate in project "donkey brain."

the blessings button (for Laura)

i had no clue what to do as a service project for laura. then one day i saw laura post something (i think on facebook) about doing family history work. i decided that if it's important enough for her to speak out about it, then that's what i should do!

and then i promptly did nothing. i wasn't sure how to get started. i wasn't sure what would be important about it. the work sounded really, really, really boring to me, so i dragged my feet finding other things that were more important. i had batted around doing other ideas hoping i could get inspired by something else.

i finally told myself "ok, this is the right thing to do. laura will appreciate it even though it's kinda bleh." i could picture myself writing a report that said "i indexed 1375 records for you. Merry Christmas!" and i could picture laura going "oh that's nice. thanks to you Brian!" and it would all be sincere and nice and happy and still kinda bleh.

but with the looming deadline staring at me in the brain, i realized i needed to do something, even if it was kinda bleh. so i made up my mind to do family history work!

and then i sat on that decision for two weeks. i didn't even know where to begin.

next i found myself in utah at the whipple's house listening to laura explain how she had encouraged a friend to do family history work to help with all her problems. "if you need blessings, think about all those people on the other side who feel so grateful for what you are doing who want to help you out!" she said (or something to that effect).

and i thought, that's it! i've got issues in my life that i could really use help with. maybe i should put her promise to the test and record the experiment. laura has the kind of big heart that she would love to know how service in her name had such positive effect for someone else. i decided to do family history work every day and record my experiences in separate blog posts.

now this is where this story gets a little troublesome.

i had decided to test the blessing experiment in an area of my life that is a bit personal. one that has huge impact in all aspects of my life and the area that i felt i needed the most help with.

but, it is a bit personal. which is tough to navigate. plus, from the very first day i was recording some ugly experiences that were happening in part because of the family history work i was doing.

it may sound a bit hyperbolic to say that family history was literally making my life much worse, but you'll just have to take that perspective at face value. i know it's probably hard to picture how that could possibly be, but it is and it was rough.

prudence would tell me to put on "fake happy blog face" and hide the ugly truth. perhaps i should just pretend that the bad stuff wasn't happening and log every day about how my wonderful life got even better by doing family history! that's what's supposed to happen anyway right?! that's what would be the most inspiring even if it wasn't true, right?! people love happy lies, so why not give them that?

but i was compelled to record the honest, ugly, and raw truth as it was happening.

and it wasn't pretty.

about halfway through the experiment i knew that my blog posts could not be for public consumption, but something told me that laura could handle the ugly truth about my life; i'm just not sure she wants to see it. (laura, here is your access to that blog if you are interested in going on that journey.)

at this point it wasn't clear yet that the experiment was going to turn out to be a positive one. it appeared that the best i could hope for is a boring report of "i did x number of indexings, it didn't ruin my life, merry Christmas!" and we could all move on to doing other things and forget this ever happened.

but i forged on. my first day of blogging about my life and my experiences ended with "i take some solace in the fact that this is supposed to help someone else. it can only get better from here!"

which was truth. and it was also the needed faithful approach to the subject. proving now herewith and all.

and things did change. there was a pivotal moment where i got exactly the help i needed in the form of simply thinking different about things. it's too complex to go into here (and too personal), but i learned a few key pieces of reality that helped me leap forward in my one area of life that i needed the most help with. and i've grasped hold of those realities since then and my life has definitely gotten better as a result. i only hope i can hold onto those gains (which i spose is up to me).

there is no logical connection between what i learned that was so useful to me and doing family history that i can point to. all i do know is i set out to test the "blessing machine" that is family history in order to find ways to improve the most baffling and distressed part of my life, and improvement was had. significant improvement. seemingly life changing improvement.

so thanks laura for the opportunity and inspiration to make my life better. i tested your "blessing machine" and can now bear testimony to the truth of it.

Merry Christmas Jackson! Love, Alyssa.

 

For my Christmas service person this year, I had Jackson! As I was thinking of service projects to do, my mom told me that when Jackson was younger, he would get random fevers and would get really sick, and his parents were really worried about him. Brian wrote about it here: http://dogfoodconnoisseur.blogspot.com/2014/03/in-which-i-discuss-my-son.html As I was thinking about this, I also thought about my cousin AJ, who was super sick and in the hospital fighting a brain tumor. I thought about his poor parents, and how worried they must be. Whenever I would read their blog posts,(http://savethecheeks.org/ ), it made me feel horrible that I couldn't do anything to help them except pray for them to be comforted. I prayed for them all the time, but I wanted to do something more. Then, the idea for the service project came. I would send care packages to AJ in honor of my cousin Jackson!

My mom and I went to the store and found some coloring books, toys, cars, and other fun things to send to AJ. We decided to send 1 package to him every day for 5 days. I loved imagining how happy he would be when he received the packages. We put the care packages together and then shipped them off to Florida, one package per day, and then waited for him to get the packages.

A few days later, Lani posted this picture on her Facebook page, with AJ surrounded with all sorts of toys that people had sent to him. It made me so happy to see him so happy and to know that some of those toys were the ones I had sent to him.
So that was my service for AJ and Jackson this year for Christmas. Merry Christmas Jackson!

To Darcy, Love Hannah

This year for Christmas service, I got Darcy. I didn't really know what to do for a while, I was thinking maybe befriend someone knew, but not going to school made that kinda hard. I started to think about Darcy's personality and attitude toward life, and I realized that Darcy has always been a good sport about moving all the time and I have always admired that. She has been sacrificing so much in her moves and I admire her so much, so I thought that I could sacrifice something of my own. Whenever I have seen the bell ringers in the front of stores for the Salvation Army, I donated whatever I had in my wallet and then I went and researched a charity I could donate to in Africa, because I know how much Darcy loved her trip to Africa. This is for you Darcy, in memory of David <3

http://www.aidforafrica.org/home/