Leaving Behind Beauty

I have a few thoughts to share about "moving".  I've done it a lot and over the years and so I've had a few comforting impressions come to my mind that have helped me cope with it:

1 - First of all, I believe in a pre-existence.  I believe we are spirit sons and daughters of God and that we lived with Him in heaven before we came to earth.  That was our home and it must have been beautiful beyond description.  It was probably there that we developed our love for beauty, and we find ourselves trying to recreate that beauty in any way we can, especially in our homes.  I've realized that this is good to the extent that we can remain happy even though we can't make things as beautiful as we would like to. 
2 - Moving a lot or even once can be hard because a lot of time, energy, and money to make our homes beautiful has been spent in a way that can't be taken with us to the next place.  At first I grieved over the beauty I couldn't keep. With experience I try to invest in less permanent things, but even then, I've learned:  "The Joy is in the Building".  In other words, yes, we have joy in the end product of the beauty we create around us, but the real joy came from the actual creating process, and wherever we go, we can create.  As I've learned to remember where the real joy comes from, I see every living condition, no matter how humble, as a special challenge to create a beautiful home with what I have.
3 - "There is beauty all around when there's love at home . . . In the cottage there is joy, when there's love at home."  This hymn text really helped me when we first were moving to Kentucky, I couldn't see the place we would rent until I actually got there, and I knew it wouldn't be that nice.  The real beauty in our lives comes from the quality of the relationships we have with our family members.  Loving relationships invite the Spirit of God.  We can feel peace and joy at home no matter how ugly our living space is.
4 - There is more to beauty than decorations and the quality of our furniture or home.  I like to focus on improving order and functionality of a space.  I love to see my family using a space well, because it is inviting and comfortable to be in.  I can improve a space and make it more that way sometimes just by GETTING RID OF STUFF, haha!  In that sense, moving has definitely helped us keep down on the clutter, so there's a pro for moving!
5 - Back to the beginning:  I have found it very helpful to think of my homes in this life like a missionary would think about the temporary places he/she lives on their mission.  As much as we yearn to find permanence and feel like the time and energy we invest into our home will forever yield fruit to us, this life just isn't the time for that.  That's for the next life!  Then why bother trying?  It's just a balance we have to keep:  make life and home as beautiful as we can but realize that the joy is in the building, and nothing is permanent.  Just like a missionary is "roughing it" when they live in less than ideal living arrangements, we are roughing it in this life.  We all came from mansions of glory and beauty, we all can appreciate beauty here however fleeting, but we can look forward to re-inheriting that beauty at a later time.  No need to try and get it all in now.

Does that help anyone out there? 

Family Life - Stuck in a Rut?

I've been waiting so long to do this.  I guess I was hoping that I would know just the right thing to say and that I could make this so perfect.  Well, it's time to just start.

I'm striving for an ideal and I think you are too.  This ideal has nothing to do with how my house looks, how my current household systems are working, how much money we have or don't have, etc and everything to do with how the people in my family treat each other.  I have long believed that the quality of my life consists in the quality of my relationships with those around me.  That being said, my household systems are like the scaffolding that support my efforts to bring about real change in the relationships in our family.  So I will work on sharing them in this blog.  Our relationships aren't perfect, but this is what I want everybody in the world to know: they are getting better!!!!  I want to share with you the things that I have done and the changes we've made that have brought greater peace into our home.

I have been working towards this ideal so long that it's hard for me to determine what came first.  I don't know that it really matters though.  Years ago I imagined our family as a cart wheel stuck in a rut.  Obviously the ideal was to be NOT stuck in the rut.  I decided that the best approach to getting our family out of the rut we were in was not to sit there and try to think of the one thing that would move us up and out of the rut.  Improving family life is so much more complicated than that.  I decided to just move forward, to get moving forward as fast as I could doing the things I knew, making the changes that I could think of, and that in time, with enough speed, the wheel would just pop up out of that rut without my even realizing it.  That is truly what has happened.  I did what I could, made improvements as I could, one day at a time.  The changes we've made are building on each other and we're gaining speed.  We still pop down into the rut now and again, but for the most part, we have greater power to stay out of it with all we've learned and all we've incorporated into our family life.

Do you feel like your family is stuck in a rut?  Start with these principles that I quoted in my first post: 1- obedience to God's commandments, and 2- serving others unselfishly.  As we focus ourselves on these two principles, we gain access to God's grace, the enabling power of Christ's atonement.  Paraphrasing Howard W. Hunter, Sheri L. Dew writes "[I]f our lives are centered on Christ, nothing can ever go permanently wrong.  But if they're not centered on Christ, nothing can ever go permanently right."

My ideal is peace at home.  We're getting there.  You come too.

"For Peace at Home" by Elder Richard G. Scott

"I have learned a truth that . . . defines the way obedience and service relate to the power of God.  When we obey the commandments of the Lord and serve His children unselfishly, the natural consequence is power from God - power to do more than we can do by ourselves . . . His power is a fundamental component to establishing a home filled with peace."