January 7, 2019 - Week 30
Hi Jon -
Sundance got 21 inches of new snow overnight so I'm going to make this letter a little short and go hit the powder. This are pretty good at home but we're (I'm) going through a weird transition phase. We had a stressful December with all the wedding work and then we immediately left for Island Park which was great to decompress for a while but now we're back home and it's real life again.
The boys are back in school today, Maddy and Heber start a new semester today, I totally spaced it on NFL wildcard weekend so I don't even know which teams are good this year. Maddy and Heber live across the street above Uncle Chris' garage now so they come over every day and we see them at church. It's weird. They are married. I have a son in law. This whole thing is going to take a while to get used to.
I have a job interview tomorrow (2nd interview) and it's the first technical interview I've ever done so I'm a little nervous. A technical interview is where they ask you a ton of technical questions and ask you to program something. I don't even know if I like this company or want the job so that's weird. I've been programming a lot the last 2 weeks just to get everything fresh in my mind and that has been fun and stressful and time consuming and probably a big waste of time.
Mom is teaching seminary today. She is substituting for one teacher at Springville High School at 6:30am and then substituting for a different teacher at Timpview at 9am. I'm happy for her that she gets to do this thing she has always wanted to do but it doesn't feel right when she has to study for like 40 hours just to teach a 1 hour class. We were in Island Park when she got the call and immediately she stopped spending time with family having fun and started to study all alone in her room. The next day she wanted to go home early and cancel the rest of our trip. I compromised and we stayed one more day but went home a day early. Then at home she spends all day in the den studying and even until 11am last night when she has to get up at 5am today. I have worked all my life and know what a job looks like. This isn't it. A job is where you work hard to build up your qualifications (experience, college degree) and then you are offered the job and then you show up to work and start working. A job isn't where do 40 hours of preparation at home for free so you can go to work and get paid for one hour.
Island Park was pretty fun. We rented snowmobiles on Monday and again on Wednesday. Monday was slow because I went with Aimar and Mom and they were nervous and cold so I couldn't go very fast or very far. But on Wednesday I headed out with Matt Jones just us two on different snowmobiles and we were able to go all over the mountains between Island Park and West Yellowstone at top speed. Island Park has all these groomed snowmobiling trails which takes away most of the danger and there are great signs and maps everywhere so you don't get lost. It's the best place I've ever seen for snowmobiling.
One the way home from Island Park we stopped at Lava Hot Springs just off the highway south of Pocatello Idaho. There is a place where you pay an entrance fee and then go in and sit in these hot pools ranging from 112 degrees down to about 102 degrees. There were a lot of people there so it's not really private but the pools are concrete like real hot tubs but really big ones. It was fun to soak for an hour and then get back on the road to drive the rest of the way home.
Do you mark your scriptures? When I first got to the mission, I wanted to mark everything. I saw everyone else doing it as well. Now I recommend that you wait. Figure out a way to make sure that every mark means something important. Make up a system that will make sense to you. Make lots of notes in your scriptures. Make notes that mean something. Every mark should mean something.
For me I would use colors. Blue is water or baptism, so all the scriptures from the second discussion were marked in Blue since that is when you are going to invite someone to be baptized. Then, they are only marked around the scriptures with dashes and I underlined the word that corresponds to the principle of the discussion. So if the 4th word of a scripture was marked in blue that would mean that it was the fourth principle of the second discussion. Then you can expand that one method and do lots of other things. You will most likely use your scriptures for many years after you are done with your mission, so make every mark count. It is sort of like your whole mission, make every mark count.
A friend of mine once told me this story:
The best thing that I ever learned about marking the scriptures was this. I once got a chance to sit and talk with apostle Richard G Scott. Now this guy was a Jedi master! I saw his scriptures at his side. They hung like a light saber. I asked if I could look at them. I remember wondering what I would even find. He said yes. I took a deep breath and then I got to see a master teacher in action. I am sure what happened was meant for me. As I got to look through his scriptures, I saw many notes and how he marked his. I then saw a scripture that had brackets drawn out to the side and inside it had a date and a time and a short sentence. Like this:
{{San Vicentie, In bed 8-22-1985, while waiting to go home from Italy}}
I asked him, “What does that mean?” He explained this really important and almost sacred principle to me. When we read the scriptures, every once in a while the spirit can come and come really strongly. It can come so hard it may make you cry, it may make you feel hot like a fever. It may make you have tingles all over. It can give impressions that can become almost as loud as a voice speaking to you. It just is something that does not happen every day and is very special.
When it does happen, the first thing that you should do is get on your knees and say, “Hey man thanks for being there for me - this is cool and I will remember this one.” And then put the brackets and notes of when and where you were and something that will cause you to remember why the spirit came. Then in 5 or 10 years when you are weak or need a break or you may still be just as strong and you see that scripture and those marks and you can feel some of those same feelings again, you can remember just how strong those impressions were. I have about 3 or 4 of these in my scriptures after 12 years, so use these silver bullets when they come and you can always remember them.
Everything is online now so marking scriptures has sort of become a thing of the past. You can enter notes online and they get saved but it's not the same thing. I don't know if you even use paper scriptures on your mission but if you do I encourage you to mark them and use a system that works for you and has real meaning.
Have a great week Jon. We love you.
Love,
Dad
Sundance got 21 inches of new snow overnight so I'm going to make this letter a little short and go hit the powder. This are pretty good at home but we're (I'm) going through a weird transition phase. We had a stressful December with all the wedding work and then we immediately left for Island Park which was great to decompress for a while but now we're back home and it's real life again.
The boys are back in school today, Maddy and Heber start a new semester today, I totally spaced it on NFL wildcard weekend so I don't even know which teams are good this year. Maddy and Heber live across the street above Uncle Chris' garage now so they come over every day and we see them at church. It's weird. They are married. I have a son in law. This whole thing is going to take a while to get used to.
I have a job interview tomorrow (2nd interview) and it's the first technical interview I've ever done so I'm a little nervous. A technical interview is where they ask you a ton of technical questions and ask you to program something. I don't even know if I like this company or want the job so that's weird. I've been programming a lot the last 2 weeks just to get everything fresh in my mind and that has been fun and stressful and time consuming and probably a big waste of time.
Mom is teaching seminary today. She is substituting for one teacher at Springville High School at 6:30am and then substituting for a different teacher at Timpview at 9am. I'm happy for her that she gets to do this thing she has always wanted to do but it doesn't feel right when she has to study for like 40 hours just to teach a 1 hour class. We were in Island Park when she got the call and immediately she stopped spending time with family having fun and started to study all alone in her room. The next day she wanted to go home early and cancel the rest of our trip. I compromised and we stayed one more day but went home a day early. Then at home she spends all day in the den studying and even until 11am last night when she has to get up at 5am today. I have worked all my life and know what a job looks like. This isn't it. A job is where you work hard to build up your qualifications (experience, college degree) and then you are offered the job and then you show up to work and start working. A job isn't where do 40 hours of preparation at home for free so you can go to work and get paid for one hour.
Island Park was pretty fun. We rented snowmobiles on Monday and again on Wednesday. Monday was slow because I went with Aimar and Mom and they were nervous and cold so I couldn't go very fast or very far. But on Wednesday I headed out with Matt Jones just us two on different snowmobiles and we were able to go all over the mountains between Island Park and West Yellowstone at top speed. Island Park has all these groomed snowmobiling trails which takes away most of the danger and there are great signs and maps everywhere so you don't get lost. It's the best place I've ever seen for snowmobiling.
One the way home from Island Park we stopped at Lava Hot Springs just off the highway south of Pocatello Idaho. There is a place where you pay an entrance fee and then go in and sit in these hot pools ranging from 112 degrees down to about 102 degrees. There were a lot of people there so it's not really private but the pools are concrete like real hot tubs but really big ones. It was fun to soak for an hour and then get back on the road to drive the rest of the way home.
Do you mark your scriptures? When I first got to the mission, I wanted to mark everything. I saw everyone else doing it as well. Now I recommend that you wait. Figure out a way to make sure that every mark means something important. Make up a system that will make sense to you. Make lots of notes in your scriptures. Make notes that mean something. Every mark should mean something.
For me I would use colors. Blue is water or baptism, so all the scriptures from the second discussion were marked in Blue since that is when you are going to invite someone to be baptized. Then, they are only marked around the scriptures with dashes and I underlined the word that corresponds to the principle of the discussion. So if the 4th word of a scripture was marked in blue that would mean that it was the fourth principle of the second discussion. Then you can expand that one method and do lots of other things. You will most likely use your scriptures for many years after you are done with your mission, so make every mark count. It is sort of like your whole mission, make every mark count.
A friend of mine once told me this story:
The best thing that I ever learned about marking the scriptures was this. I once got a chance to sit and talk with apostle Richard G Scott. Now this guy was a Jedi master! I saw his scriptures at his side. They hung like a light saber. I asked if I could look at them. I remember wondering what I would even find. He said yes. I took a deep breath and then I got to see a master teacher in action. I am sure what happened was meant for me. As I got to look through his scriptures, I saw many notes and how he marked his. I then saw a scripture that had brackets drawn out to the side and inside it had a date and a time and a short sentence. Like this:
{{San Vicentie, In bed 8-22-1985, while waiting to go home from Italy}}
I asked him, “What does that mean?” He explained this really important and almost sacred principle to me. When we read the scriptures, every once in a while the spirit can come and come really strongly. It can come so hard it may make you cry, it may make you feel hot like a fever. It may make you have tingles all over. It can give impressions that can become almost as loud as a voice speaking to you. It just is something that does not happen every day and is very special.
When it does happen, the first thing that you should do is get on your knees and say, “Hey man thanks for being there for me - this is cool and I will remember this one.” And then put the brackets and notes of when and where you were and something that will cause you to remember why the spirit came. Then in 5 or 10 years when you are weak or need a break or you may still be just as strong and you see that scripture and those marks and you can feel some of those same feelings again, you can remember just how strong those impressions were. I have about 3 or 4 of these in my scriptures after 12 years, so use these silver bullets when they come and you can always remember them.
Everything is online now so marking scriptures has sort of become a thing of the past. You can enter notes online and they get saved but it's not the same thing. I don't know if you even use paper scriptures on your mission but if you do I encourage you to mark them and use a system that works for you and has real meaning.
Have a great week Jon. We love you.
Love,
Dad
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