Mother's Day Dinner: 19 Years Later

Today is Mother's day; it was also our opportunity to Skype with Ben.  When we Skyped Ben during Christmas time, we invited Jennifer's parents to join us us here at our home.  The visual connection worked fine, but the audio had problems.  To overcome the problem, we had Ben call us on the house phone and put it on "speaker" in order to hear him and talk to him.  Wanting to avoid a similar problem, Jennifer proposed to her parents that we come to their house this time.  The thought was that her father's computer would allow us to overcome the audio problems we had at Christmastime and allow us to talk to Ben without overly worrying about potential glitches and allow them to again be a part of the Skype conversation.

Unfortunately, a misunderstanding arose.  Jen's dad mistook this plan as us putting her mom a position where she would have to cook dinner for us; which, rightfully so, wasn't good because it was Mother's Day.  Jennifer responded that this wasn't her intention at all, but the ensuing conversation left the impasse unresolved.  When I came home from work that day, Jennifer told me what had happened and proposed us going out to dinner even though it was Sunday.  I could see where she was coming from; she was trying to smooth over the misunderstanding with her proposal, but I didn't feel comfortable about this idea either.  After thinking about it for a moment, I told Jen to tell her parents that I would make the dinner.  I felt that this would overcome the misunderstanding, keep us from having to pay for a meal on a Sunday, and keep both my wife and her mother from cooking.  I basically told Jen to tell them that my offer was "non-negotiable."  Thankfully, my offer ended the potential controversy.

Now that I had made the offer, I had to decide what to make for the dinner.  The more I considered it, the more I found myself focusing on lasagna.  Why lasagna?  For this reason: 19 years earlier, we had invited Jennifer's parents to our apartment for Mother's Day.  I had also volunteered to cook the meal back then and had decided on lasagna for that meal as well.   Because our ward met early (9:00 in the morning), I felt that the best thing for me to do would be to make the lasagna Saturday night and have everything ready.  I liked the idea of being able to pop everything in the oven as soon as we returned home from church and it would be all cooked and ready to eat by the time Jennifer's parents arrived.

However, Jennifer was also pregnant at the time.  By that Saturday, we'd had two (possibly three) false labors and knew that the time for our oldest son's arrival was imminent.  In the middle of me cooking the lasagna noodles and making the sauce, false labor changed to full blown labor.  There I was, in the middle of putting Mother's Day dinner together, and Jennifer (who had been quietly enduring true labor pains for about 30 minutes because she wasn't sure they were real and didn't want to stop me in the middle of making the dinner) finally announced she was having labor pains, they were about 5 minutes apart, and been consistent.  Imagine my shock.  I have a pot full of cooking noodles, a pan full of simmering sauce and a bowl full of cottage cheese mixture and my wife is telling me, "It's time."

Thinking back on it, that moment was pretty comical in some respects.  Totally caught off guard and sandwiched between what I was doing in the kitchen and what was taking place in the living room, I asked Jen if I should stop and take her to the hospital.  She told me that I should finish the lasagna "just in case."  I spent the next 30 minutes to an hour layering noodles with meat sauce and cottage cheese mixture in a Plexiglas casserole dish for a moment before hurrying to the couch to check on Jennifer when a new wave of labor pains struck.  Noodles, couch; sauce, couch; cottage cheese, couch; repeat twice more.  When I finished the lasagna and put it in the refrigerator and after we read scriptures (Jennifer insisted that we read our scriptures before she went to the hospital), I took Jennifer to the hospital and the rest is history.

A few hours after Ben's birth, the nurses sent me home to make phone calls get a few hours of sleep (it was a 14 hour labor through the night).  Later on, instead of coming to our apartment as originally planned, Jen's parents came to the hospital to see the new addition to our family and returned home.  When I came home from the hospital and looked into the refrigerator, I realized I had this big lasagna and no one to eat it.  I put it in the freezer and figured we'd eat it later.  After Ben came home, Relief Society sisters brought us dinners; the lasagna remained in the freezer.  About a week later, my mom came down to help Jennifer and meet her new grandchild while I returned to work.  She stayed for at least several days, possibly a week.  While she was there, I transferred the lasagna from the freezer to the refrigerator to let it thaw.  In the end, my culinary work was eaten by a grandmother, just not the grandmother it was originally intended for. ☺

This is why my plan to make dinner for Mother's Day today focused once again on lasagna.  I figured I had planned to make Jennifer's mom a lasagna dinner 19 years ago, but she wasn't able to eat it—for a very worthwhile reason.  As we started eating today's lasagna meal, I told Jennifer's parents this story and said that now, nearly 19 years later, I finally had the chance to give them the lasagna dinner that they didn't get to eat on the Mother's Day when Ben was born.  They appreciated the sentiment and the lasagna turned out good. ☺

Tried and True vs. Shiny and New

In my last post, I related my story about the "death" of my Civic and my acquisition of a new Kia.  I also mentioned that Isaac has been singing "21st Century Man" from ELO whenever he gets the opportunity. ☺  Well, I guess my latest step into the 21st century has now taken place with the purchase of a "smart" phone.  I know this is going to make me sound like a total dinosaur, but until now, I have been the happy owner of the pictured "dumb" phone.  For 12 years, my punky little phone has been exactly what I needed.  When Jennifer got it for me, she wanted to be able to call me if she needed to as I was on my way home, or it allowed me to contact her or work or (on several occasions over the years) AAA when I needed a tow.  Now I have a car with Bluetooth technology.  I can synch up a cell phone to my new car and use my steering wheel and voice commands to call people (hands free type stuff—real cutting edge ☺).  My punky phone couldn't synch up with the Kia and I want to use the Bluetooth technology because it would be safer than trying to punch in a phone number or talk with the phone to my ear while driving (which is also against the law).  So the choice was either upgrade or be stuck with technology that is of no use to me anymore.  Based on those choices, I decided the better option was to upgrade.  My punky phone was good enough for 12 years; now it's not.

To remedy this situation, Jennifer and I went to T-Mobile to upgrade.  I've never been a huge "phone guy" (why else would I keep my punky phone for so long) and we wanted to keep costs down, so we went with the basic smart phone instead of latest, newfangled "i" or "Galaxy" phone.  When the time came for us to swap sim cards from our old phones to the new phones, the sales associate helping us looked at my phone and said, "Wow, this should be in a museum."  At that moment, I had flashes of Indiana Jones on a rickety, old freighter, fighting for possession of the crucifix of Coronado; and yes, she probably thought I belong in a museum too. ☺

With new smart phones in hand, we wanted to do what we could to protect our investment and buy protective cases and screen protectors and such.  We didn't like was offered at T-Mobile and went to the mall to a kiosk that sold a wider variety of these items.  As we were picking out all these accoutrements, Jennifer happened to mention to the two 20-something sales people who were helping us that these were our first smart phones.  They were stunned by this admission and asked if we had our old phones—we did.  Jennifer produced her flip phone.  "Whoa!" they yelled in unison.  As they were looking over Jennifer's phone in amazement, I said, "You think that one's old, you really need to see mine."  "Really?" they replied as they looked at me expectantly.  I pulled out my punky dumb phone.  Their reaction was funny and interesting.  The young woman practically squealed and almost wanted to take a picture of it, while the young man looked dumbfounded that I would use a phone that old.

A few moments later, as the young man was putting the screen protectors on our phones, another interesting aspect of our time at the phone case kiosk took place.  The other sales associate, a young woman, said, referring back to our old phones, "I already think my iPhone 6 is old. I can't wait for the iPhone 7 to come out because I'm bored with my phone."  I make my next comment in no way as an indictment of her, but her comment got me thinking about what a fickle, throwaway society we've become.  That which is old is considered of no value and things become old very quickly.  The two workers were shocked because they couldn't believe I would keep my punky phone for so long, but, as I've mentioned, it was serviceable to me for that duration.  Meanwhile, technology companies go out of their way to make just enough changes to their new models (whatever they may be) to make people think they need to have “the newest thing.”  When Apple announces their latest phone, people line up in front of the store to be the first to buy said phone, but six months later those same people are lining up around the Apple store again because they think they need to have the new "newest" phone because they're bored with what used to be the latest and greatest thing.

My thoughts along these lines have now morphed into a gospel topic.  This desire to throw away “the old” and continually chase after “the new” reminds me of the anti-Christs in the Book of Mormon who claimed they didn't believe in the "traditions of their fathers" because those traditions were old.  These same types of people in our modern world would argue that religious traditions are "out of date.”  They would mock belief as boring or they would declare such belief as "old fashioned" and no longer fitting within progressive society.  They would accuse the followers of these "traditions" of being blinded by out of touch old men who claim to be called of God and would wonder how we follow them instead of thinking for ourselves.  They would tell us that revelation is nothing more than hocus-pocus voodoo and we are stupid for clinging to the crazy notion that God “speaks” to us through feelings.  They would attempt to reason away the spiritual with their intellect and proclaim that we are too blinded by emotion to see clearly and rationally about the things we claim to believe.  They would agree with the hardened Ebenezer Scrooge and tell us that our testimonies of the truth God has reveled to us as nothing more than an "undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato" (A Christmas Carol, www.gutenberg.org).

The problem with this approach is that the intellect alone cannot fully understand that which is spiritual.  Elder Dallin H. Oaks taught: "I have seen some persons attempt to understand or undertake to criticize the gospel or the Church by the method of reason alone, unaccompanied by the use or recognition of revelation. When reason is adopted as the only—or even the principal—method of judging the gospel, the outcome is predetermined. One cannot find God or understand his doctrines and ordinances by closing the door on the means He has prescribed for receiving the truths of his gospel" (Ensign, May 1989, 30).  The Lord specifically told Oliver Cowdrey: "I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost" (D&C 8:2, emphasis added) of the things he was seeking to know.  The Lord further declared "this is the spirit of revelation" (D&C 8:3, emphasis added).  The two (mind and heart; intellect and emotion) work together in harmony and serve as two witnesses to an individual as he or she receives revelation.  But a person who attempts to approach God's revelations using intellect alone or emotion alone will either fail to see the spiritual and reject the gospel as silly or will get caught up in the wave of emotion to the point where he or she might agree to be baptized, but then will quickly reject those feelings when the emotional wave recedes and mundane, ordinary life reasserts itself.  In the parable of the sower, these would be the seeds that fell "by the way side" and the seeds that fell "upon stony places" (Matthew 13:4-5).

I've said this before, but it is our focus that makes all the difference.  The book of Genesis recounts a time of strife between Abram (soon to become Abraham) and his nephew Lot.  They had reached a point where their families and flocks had become too great from them to be in the same place.  Consequently, they decided to separate from each other and Abraham gave Lot first choice as to where he wanted to go.  Lot chose "all the plain of Jordan" (13:11) and went to dwell "in the cities of the plain" but when it came time to set up his tent, Lot "pitched his tent toward Sodom" (13:12).  What is interesting is that eventually, Lot's focus on Sodom led him to finally live "in Sodom" (14:12).  The "natural man [or woman] is an enemy to God" because his or her focus is either inward or on Sodom.  "The world has so much to offer," the natural man would say. "How can I be bothered with that which is spiritual?"  If by chance a "natural" man or woman humbles themselves and turns their focus outward enough to accept the gospel message, the challenge continues to be one of focus.  Will they continue of keep their focus on the Savior and serving others, or will they be like Lot's wife and look "back from behind him" (19:26)?  If they do not fully turn from the cares of the world and "give up the summer cottage in Babylon" (Elder Christofferson, Ensign, Nov. 2008, 39), they would be the ones who Lehi saw partake of the fruit and then turn away from the tree in shame because of the mocking of those in the great and spacious building (see 1 Nephi 8:28).   In the parable of the sower, these would be the seeds that "fell among thorns" (Matthew 13:7).

If we desire to focus on Christ, then we should figuratively do what King Benjamin's people did when they came to hear his benedictory sermon and have our tents "with the door thereof towards the temple" (Mosiah 2:6).  Doing so will continue and deepen the refinement received when we were baptized.  Elder Bednar taught that "the process of taking upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ that is commenced in the waters of baptism is continued and enlarged in the house of the Lord. As we stand in the waters of baptism, we look to the temple. As we partake of the sacrament, we look to the temple. We pledge to always remember the Savior and to keep His commandments as preparation to participate in the sacred ordinances of the temple and receive the highest blessings available through the name and by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, in the ordinances of the holy temple we more completely and fully take upon us the name of Jesus Christ" (Ensign, May 2009, 98).  Keeping our focus on Christ through weekly partaking of the sacrament and attending the temple as often as possible will strengthen our foundation on the rock of Christ.  As Bishop Waddell assured us in his recent conference talk, "Each time we attend the temple—in all that we hear, do, and say; in every ordinance in which we participate; and in every covenant that we make—we are pointed to Jesus Christ" (Ensign, May 2016, 91).

If our focus remains in the right place—if we keep ourselves pointed toward Christ—and remain pointed in that direction for the duration of our life, then we will be like the seeds that “fell into good ground and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold” (Matthew 13:8).  By so doing, our willingness to stay with the "tried and true" precepts of our Father in Heaven will overcome any inkling of the constant chase after that which is "shiny and new."  The end result will be the opportunity, as King Benjamin taught, to "dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness" (Mosiah 2:41).