Creepy and funny!

Who thinks of this stuff?

Elder Evans

Our nephew Elder Evans is serving his LDS mission in the Philadelphia PA mission. He is a great young man and he was grown so much since he was been gone. We get some of his emails. He and Andy are just a couple of months apart in age and they have been serving their missions at the same time. E. Evans shares some very interesting experiences. Here are two, one touching and one funny. Great kid that Elder Evans. He has a wonderful spirit and a great sense of humor.

We've had two baptisms this week. One was a woman whose life was in a downward tailspin. For her entire life, she was abused by everyone around her. She has simply taken the criticism from every individual, and as a result, has no self esteem whatsoever. She has accepted everything that her children, ex-husband, and parents have said about her. She felt like she was nothing, but for the first time in her entire life, she is something. She is now surrounded by people who love and care for her. She is involved in a positive life. She is not surrounded by pessimism but is embraced by a gospel and people of optimism. She has been given the gift of the Holy Ghost. She finally feels as though she is worth something.

P.S. I heard that Michael Jackson died of a heart attack. That came as a shock to me. I never would have guessed that he would lose his life to a heart attack and be gone too soon; I thought he would just Beat It.I don't have much to say about him as a man but I heard that his funeral was a Thriller.I wonder how Billy Jean is doing with all of this. After all she is just a girl, and the girl is mine. I wonder if she still says that he is the one.You know I think it’s terrible when people make fun of Michael Jackson, and me, I guess they just don't care about us. I've been listening to Michael Jackson since I was about five. I remember putting his CD in my first boom box and then learning my ABC's. Man operating that boom box was easy as 123.

Utah!

We live in an incredible state. Seriously, there is so much to do and so many amazing things to see. Recently this article came out in the DNews describing ALL there is to do in Utah. It is entitled "Utah's top 10: For little or no cost, Utahns can enjoy wealth of recreation." There are some links at the end to find out more specifics about locations. Here are a few highlights:

• More than 400 miles of raftable rivers.
• About 23 percent of the state is high-elevation country, roughly 9 million acres, featuring some of the most majestic mountains anywhere, and probably twice that amount of country in rugged, rocky desertlike areas, along with 17 designated wilderness areas.
• Areas designated as scenic byways and backways, all spotlighting some of the best landscapes the state has to offer.
• More than 30 museums, showcasing everything from the state's pioneer history to its earliest residents — dinosaurs.
• Forty-three state parks, five national parks, seven national monuments, two national recreation areas, one national historical site and one of the most spectacular lakes found anywhere in the world — Lake Powell.
• More than 400 public and private campgrounds.
• More than 1,000 fishable lakes and a similar number of streams and rivers.
• A spider web of trails covering the state for biking and hiking, ranging from the very easiest to the extreme.

The best part? Most of these places can be visited for a small fee and, in some cases, no cost.

The 10 ten things the article highlights are biking, hiking, history, animals, swimming and boating, fishing, city parks, state parks, drives, national forests and national parks. Check it out! My sister Lee and her family have been in our area the past few days enjoying some of the local activities and they have been having a great time.

Over the years we've taken our family to explore the great state of Utah. We've had an amazing time seeing all sorts of natural beauty and enjoying all the state has to offer. The National parks are fabulous including Zion, Bryce, Arches, Capitol Reef, & Canyonlands and we've enjoyed seeing each of them. Timpanogos Cave and Cedar Breaks are spectacular national monuments and we've hiked to/around both. We've been to dinosaur land in Vernal and visited the dinosaur national monument. We've enjoyed Dead Horse Point state park, camped and gone 4-wheeling in Goblin Valley state park with our friends the Philipps, and some of us have enjoyed the sand dunes of Little Sahara recreation area. We've been to the Bingham Copper Mines and Andy and I went deep into the earth in Park City with a school field trip to explore mining in our state when he was in grade school. We've been canoeing/camping (again with the Philipps) on Payson lakes. We've been to Bear Lake countless times with Rick's family and enjoyed all there is to do at that beautiful lake. We've floated down the Colorado river with a group of friends and their families near Moab and had the time of our lives. We've hiked and camped in the area near Fairview canyon countless times with church groups of Young Women. Rick has gone on river runs down the Green river with scout groups and he has climbed the tallest peak in Utah (King's Peak) at least two times. He and the boys have climbed Mt. Timpanogos about a half dozen times. Hoogle Zoo is a fun place to visit and we've been there many times, including school field trips. We went camping/fishing with my extended family in the Wasatch-Cache National forest area a couple of times. Four corners area was a dreary place, but it was cool for the kids to stand in four states all at one time. Between us all we've skied or snowboarded almost all of the major resorts in the state. We've gone snowmobiling (again with the Philipps!) through some beautiful country near their cabin and behind Mt. Timpanogos. We've been out on Pineview reservoir on jet skis and enjoyed that adventure. Rick and I went to the Golden Spike National historic site last summer and learned more about the important events that transpired there. We've been to lots of museums in Cedar City, Salt Lake City, Hill Air Force Base, the Beehive House, and all the sites of church history including the Salt Lake City cemetery. Rick and I went to see the Mountain Meadows massacre site in the spring (more on that later) and we've enjoyed seeing all the church history sites near St. George.

There are a few places I've never visited that are left on my list:

Lake Powell. I've driven by the lake on the way to AZ, but I've never been out on a house boat and I really want to go spend a week on the lake!

Antelope Island. I want to see the buffalo and tour the island.

Flaming Gorge. I've driven past it but never explored it.

Havasupai. I'd love to see it. Major hiking is involved, however. I might be too _ _ _.

This is the Place State Park. Yeah, I know, I haven't been there since it was renovated. Hopefully this summer!

Are there other places you've visited that you would recommend?

Is There Hope for the American Marriage?

Is There Hope for the American Marriage?


This article in Time magazine is spot on. I'd recommend it to everyone. It addresses the real question of why marriage matters in our society at a time when it is being trivialized and almost abandoned as a time honored institution. Here are some quotes that I particularly liked:

• ...make manifest a bleak truth that the late writer Leonard Michaels once observed in his journal: "Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another."
• a lasting covenant between a man and a woman can be a vehicle for the nurture and protection of each other, the one reliable shelter in an uncaring world — or it can be a matchless tool for the infliction of suffering on the people you supposedly love above all others, most of all on your children.
• Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise.
• Most notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.
• How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass.
• The growing tendency of the poor to have children before marriage — the vast majority of unmarried women having babies are undereducated and have low incomes — is a catastrophic approach to life.
• The reason for these appeals to lasting unions is simple: on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.
• Put a Ring on It. That prompts the question, Does the father have to actually be married to the mother of his children to have a positive effect on them?
• ...was wonder at the sight of a middle-aged man and woman still together, still in love. We want something like that for ourselves; we recognize that it is something of great worth, but we are increasingly less willing to put in the hard work and personal sacrifice to get there.
• The underlying premise was that their marriage was an enterprise dedicated not to making themselves happy but to taking care of the cavalcade of children they had produced, that they were laboring at something more significant than their own pleasure.
• It is time instead to come to terms with both our unrealistic expectations for a happy marriage and our equally unrealistic beliefs about the consequences of walking away from the families we build.
• The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren't many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.
• Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.
• ...the good among us, the ones who are willing to sacrifice the thrill of a love letter for the betterment of their children.
• What we teach about the true meaning of marriage will determine a great deal about our fate.

and so it begins...