Blue Raspberry Sky

My daddy and I Christmas 1974 Lately thoughts of my dad have been coming up.  He died in 2008 with colon cancer.  It wasn't an easy thing to deal with, and the grieving process seems to be slow. When my grandma died in March, I was struck with this overwhelming feeling of loss.  Not just her death, but all the ones that had preceded it.  Grandparents, my dad, great aunts and uncles...  a whole generation, gone, and my dad was the first of the next.  And I thought about how I wished I could talk to dad, and just have that fatherly voice in my life.   To be able to connect with him and hear his thoughts on things. Remember I said I was in burnout the last time I blogged?  Well, I am pulling out of it.  I took some time and worked through a little book called Make It Happen by Lara Casey.  I'll blog more about that later - it's enough now to say, her questions kept bringing up some interesting answers for me, and my dad ...

I have been hesitant to write about religious things for a long time now.  I guess you might say I allowed the opinions of others to bother me...  I didn't want to be one of those that trivialized the scriptures, or made life seem more perfect than it is.  Being LDS does not mean everything is going to go smooth in your life.  It's more realistic to say that it doesn't. But I was listening to a 2017 Time Out For Women talk, and in it Laurel C Day  showed a clip of an address that Elder Holland gave.  He said, "Be of good cheer.  We are COMMANDED to be of good cheer."  And I thought to myself, "Oops."  I know that's something I've been lacking in, so I started looking for ways to have "good cheer," and I remembered that sharing what I've learned about gospel principles makes me happy.  So I'm going to write this, and I am just going to hope that even though I tend to wax long winded on gospel subjects, it will be okay to th...