Well this has been a much calmer week than the last few. We mostly stayed around the house and didn’t get out and about too much. We have all been a bit tired and so the few things we did this week were kind of a big deal!
Monday we had our normal family home evening. We try to set quarterly goals and that is what we worked on this Monday. We are pretty good about making goals every 3 months. We’re less good about actually following through with our goals. One of our goals this time was to try to get to bed earlier. I think we did pretty well this week but we were still tired for some reason. Maybe the kids had something to do with it.
We had the missionaries over for dinner on Wednesday. We have sisters in our ward now and they are doing better than elders have in a long time. Sarah said that they actually had a full sheet of investigators at their coordination meeting on Saturday which is something that the Elders never had. I hope that we can find a way to help.
We went to the temple on Friday night and left the kids with the Larsens. Eliza was excited to go and play but it turns out that James is totally a mama’s boy, and he had a hard time once he realized that we were gone. The temple was good and it was good for Sarah and me to get away and have some time to talk and be alone.
Saturday we just did our normal Saturday things. We did a bit of cleaning and fertilized the lawn. In the afternoon we took the kids swimming. Eliza has gotten a million times more brave than she was the first time we took her this summer. She loves to jump in and is even putting her face in the water and likes to jump in with the water over her head. We missed swimming lessons for her this summer but we definitely need to get her into them next year. She loves the water. James had a good time too. He basically just wanted to be held and splash. Eliza wanted him to jump in with her a few times and that was super cute.
We had the letter from the first presidency about the supreme court decision read in our meetings this week. I think it went pretty good and no one seemed to react badly to it. I pray that we can learn to live with this in a Christlike way and that we can keep our religious freedom. I know a gay couple at work and I work with both of them really closely and it was a hard experience this week to get a letter from them saying that they had gotten “married.” I respect both of them professionally and I would even call one of them my friend. I really want my relationship with these people to be good and Christlike but also I want people that I work with to know what my standards are. I am still doing soul searching on this and trying very hard to act with kindness to them and to be careful in what I post online or in social media about this because I don’t want to be misunderstood.
I feel that in order to truly understand why I am against “gay marriage” you really have to understand the entirety of the restored gospel. I think it is probably very difficult, if not impossible, to get to this point is a simple blog post or in a simple statement online. I hope that we, as a family, can learn how we are to appropriately react in these situations.