Stepping Stones for Generations: Thoughts on Pioneer Day

Hymn #36, “They The Builders of the Nation” is one of my favorite hymns in our green hymn book. I actually like it more than “Come, Come Ye Saints“, which I like too, but not as much. As I was listening to the words of Builders the other day, a line in the first verse stuck out at me and has been on my mind ever since, here is the first verse, and the line in bold,

“They, the builders of the nation,
Blazing trails along the way;
Stepping-stones for generations
Were their deeds of ev’ry day.

Building new and firm foundations,
Pushing on the wild frontier,
Forging onward, ever onward,
Blessed, honored Pioneer!

“Blazing trails for generations, were their deeds of every day.” This picture collage below is of my ancestors. They came from England, Scotland, and Germany. Some of them joined the church in the early days — the 1830s, some later in the 1920s. All of them were pioneers in their own way.

This lyric made me think about those every day deeds of my ancestors. What were they? What were the every day choices they made that laid a foundation of faith for their descendants? It was things like, reading the scriptures, praying with faith, acting in faith, following the prophet even when it was very hard, dedicating their lives to the gospel of Jesus Christ, building the temple, leaving their homes in far away lands to come to America to be with the Saints, leaving their families to serve missions, having children in hard circumstances, and sacrificing what they wanted for what the Lord needed from them. None of them had very easy lives. Continue reading

Confessions of a Scrapbooker’s Husband

My sweet wife has an addiction to rubber stamps, paper cutouts, brads, hole punches, picture layouts, colored paper, ink, toner, ribbons, scissors and tape. All signs indicate that she has contracted that life-altering infection commonly known as “Scrapbookus Giganticus Obsessium” or “Recordum Lifeus Largo” Some of the more obvious signs of this addiction include a dizzying array of colored ink pads, enough paper to make the environuts go postal, and photographs scattered from heck to breakfast throughout the house. An ever increasing number of scrapbooks seem to absorb an ever diminishing supply of bookshelf real estate, and the one thing in the house my wife can always find is her camera.

My wife’s “affliction” has ratcheted up her creativity (already impressive) to heights never explored before. She has become much more tech savvy with her digital camera and the computer that organizes a plethora of pictures each week. She can turn ordinary events into a celebration of family life, and records them in a way that drive us back to the books time and again to relive fun times and remember those moments which help shape our family’s character.

In the not so distant past, my wife took her scrapbooking out to the blogosphere where she has not only recorded images of our life, but written her own thoughts about the images shown there and how they have affected her. I look at her blog regularly to get her wonderful perspective on life and parenting, and I thoroughly enjoy the way that my wife is recording our family history. I am confident that future generations of my family will also be blessed by the things that she has recorded about us, just like we are blessed by the journals and photographs of our ancestors.
I am grateful for my wife and her attention to the details that make up our experiences here. I thoroughly enjoy her hobby and am glad that she has found something fun for her to work on during the few quiet hours she gets at home.