Old Friends they shine like diamonds
Old Friends you can always call
Old Friends Lord you can’t buy ’em
You know it’s Old Friends after all
– “Old Friends”, Guy Clark

This isn’t an easy one to write, because it involves a long goodbye. So I’ll just say it simply. Joe Stuart has been a good friend and neighbor for 21 years. He’s 90, nearly 91, and if his time hasn’t already come by the time I write this, well, that train’s almost pulled into the station. I took his family to the hospital the other night, late, right around midnight, and it was one of those hard rides that follows a hard phone call from someone you know, but at the wrong time to be social. Those calls are never easy, and they often involve a goodbye that you never want to say.

I’ll remember the words he said when I gave him a blessing. “Thank you. I feel so peaceful now.” Just a few hours later, we were driving to the hospital. Sometimes a blessing of health is a miracle cure that relieves suffering and gives a person joy in his life… and sometimes, that relief from suffering makes that life in the past tense.

I’m just glad that Joe, his family, and I all know who we are, where we want to go, and how to get there. There’s a place where there aren’t any goodbyes. With God’s love and Jesus’ grace, we all can get there, all of us, every one. We just have to find that blessing in our lives that makes us peaceful, and we’re there.

Goodbye, Joe Stuart. You’ve always been a person I wanted to share a bench with so you could tell me about old times and the wisdom you learned. I’ll have to say goodbye to you one day, so it might as well be today, here and now.

I’ll see you again, though. Of that I’m certain.

Well, according to Texas A&M University, olive trees are not well-suited for the roller-coaster climate of North Texas. While the temperature range here isn’t a major issue for mature olive trees, the range over a rapid period of time, such as going from the upper 80s to below freezing within a day or two during January-March, is what kills the olive trees, which is a pity.

So why did I come to know this about olive trees? I wanted to grow them. Why? because I wanted to understand better the allusions to olive trees in my scriptures, and I started reading about them. Olive trees are magnificent things and, if cared for, can last for centuries – even millennia. The cultivation of olive trees, in particular, is a beautiful process that lends itself to symbolism both deep and profound.

Even though I can’t grow them where I live, I can still read up on them. There’s a fantastic book I found online that I’ve started and I plan to finish it. The Allegory of the Olive Tree by Ricks and Welch explores the symbolism of the olive tree in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and it points out how the parable of the olive tree found in Jacob 5 (longer than, but similar to Paul’s olive tree parable in Romans 11) is such a deep metaphor for people that make covenants with God.

Which then makes me look even closer at the purported divine origin of the Book of Mormon. For, if it is difficult to grow olive trees for North Texans, it’s impossible for folks up in New York and Vermont, where Joseph Smith lived, and particularly so after the explosion of a volcano in Sumatra that plunged the globe into a short period of bitterly cold climatological variations. How would a young farmboy from New England, with no access to Theophrastus’ “Enquiry Into Plants”, know anything at all about olive tree cultivation? And yet, the account given in Jacob, which goes beyond Paul’s account in terms of detail, jives amazingly well with the advice given by Theophrastus from the classical era in regards to proper cultivation of olive trees to maximize both the quality and quantity of fruit.

Not that Theophrastus alone was an authority on olive cultivation: it’s just that a boy that learned to read from a family Bible didn’t have a rack of books at home that dealt with agricultural practices for the Mediterranean climate. And yet, the counter-intuitive and involved practice of olive tree maintenance is evident in Jacob 5. The author of that passage was not someone unfamiliar with the olive tree. The author of that passage had intimate knowledge of the olive tree and how it should be grown.

To me, it is self-evident. To others, it can be the same as I see it, or a coincidence of varying degrees of likelihood. So be it. To those interested in olive tree imagery in Jewish and Christian religious traditions, the above link contains many non-Book of Mormon related essays to be well worth reading over. There are a number of other Jewish and Christian essays regarding olive trees on the Internet that I’ve also looked over that gave me some great insights: let me, therefore, vouch for and share this resource with other people with a fondness or fascination with the amazing olive tree.

Well, I’m tired and so weary, but I must travel on
‘Til the Lord comes and calls me away, oh, yes
Where the morning’s so bright and the Lamb is the light
And the night is as bright as the day, oh, yes

There will be peace in the valley for me some day
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh, Lord, I pray
There’ll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh, yes

Well, the bear will be gentle and the wolves will be tame
And the lion shall lay down by the lamb, oh, yes
And the beasts from the wild shall be led by a little child
And I’ll be changed, changed from this creature that I am, oh, yes

There will be peace in the valley for me some day
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh, Lord, I pray
And there’ll be no sadness and no sorrow, no trouble I see
Only will be peace in the valley for me, oh, yes
Yes, there will be peace, sweet peace in the valley for me, oh, yes

Song by Thomas A. Dorsey

Find the version you like best and enjoy it. My favorites are Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, but don’t overlook Loretta Lynn’s version and, of course, Mr. Thomas A. Dorsey’s rendition of his own work. If you like gospel music, but you don’t know where to start, start with Thomas Dorsey and go forth from there.

My son, Calvin, has been called to serve in the Chile Santiago South Mission. I am so excited and proud for him.

The place where he’ll be going has a climate like Northern Arizona. Santiago is a city of almost 6 million people, and Calvin’s mission will be in the Southern sector of the city plus a few outlying communities. It’s a very small geographic area.

A lot of his work will be in reactivation, it looks like. The Church had massive growth in the 80s and 90s, but anywhere from 10-20% of members there are actually active. Some members there created a system to correlate government records with Church records that had old or mistaken information to contact less-active members. The missionaries go out, find out if the people there would like to return, and go from there. Some want to come back, and they bring their families with them. Others do not, and can request removal from our records if they so desire.

There’s and estimated 250,000-400,000 members in Chile that are less-active, not dead, and potentially willing to be more involved in our faith. That’s a big number to go and find and to preach to. As Jesus taught, some seeds have fallen on rocky soil and did not grow. Some seeds fell on weak soil and sprouted, but withered in the heat. Some seeds fell on good soil, but weeds choked them out. While the seeds that landed on good soil and stayed strong have borne good fruit, it’ll be Calvin’s job to do what he can about helping those other seeds.

I’m a proud father because my son is going to commit his life to serving others for the next two years.

A widely-held view among biblical scholars is that the book of Isaiah from the Old Testament has had three different authors. While such a view can be contended with via scholarly arguments – and such arguments do exist – I argue against that view based upon my faith. Namely, I do not see it as impossible for the book of Isaiah to be the product of one author simply because citations from throughout Isaiah appear in the Book of Mormon. I believe that the Book of Mormon is true, and that the people who wrote it had access to the whole of the Book of Isaiah.

Yes, I know one can criticize my faith as being simplistic: I respond that my faith is simple, that God can and does reveal his will to his servants, the prophets, and that prophetic language can contain notions in it that challenge the notions of what we consider to be normal, causal relationships. So be it. While I could argue about wordprint patterns and symbolic assignments to historical events mentioned in Isaiah, the fact remains that I’ll hold the view of Isaiah as a unitary person, writing the whole of his book prior to the Babylonian Captivity of Judah. I believe in the existence of prophets and their implication that God is involved in our daily lives on an intimate basis, as a Heavenly Father to his beloved children. I’ll hold that view, regardless of whatever scholarly debates may transpire, because my faith is simple and I accept that we have contact with a world largely invisible to us through our own spiritual experiences individually and through our prophets collectively. They are, if I could borrow the concept, part of our sensory apparatus as much as our eyes or ears are.

Need another distraction, but you’d like one you can learn from while doing? GeoGuessr.com is for you. It’ll drop you somewhere in the world and you’re supposed to figure out where you are. You can play hard mode where you guess based only on what you know, or you can guess after using Internet resources to narrow things down.

I like the latter mode, which means I try to pinpoint my location. On the round I just did, I was within 11 meters of one location, but really lost it when I was off by 58km somewhere in New Zealand. I like to wander away from my start point to look for clues. One time, I saw a “You Are Here” sign for tourists that was invaluable.

The best part of this is how I sharpen my location-finding skills while seeing some really neat locations in the world. I love searching for road signs, flags, indications of traffic flow, and other clues to help me know where it is that GeoGuessr decided to drop me.

There’s a glib line that “there are no Italian military heroes.” It’s completely wrong. There’s one who stands out in my mind as the epitome of the soldier, a man willing to lay down his life to protect those of others.

His name is Salvo d’Acquisto. After Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Germans took over administration of Italy from Rome northward. In the area where d’Acquisto was stationed, a bomb went off and the Germans didn’t like it. They gathered 23 people to be killed in reprisal. d’Acquisto offered himself in their place, claiming responsibility for the bombing and letting the innocents go free. I must recognize the valor of men and women of Italy who fought against the Nazis and Fascists. Salvo d’Acquisto represents but one story of many, and although people may joke about the Italian army in WW2, the sacrifices of d’Acquisto and others should not be taken lightly, which is why I happily submit this to you all.

In measures of fame and popular acclaim, d’Acquisto has schools and roads and stuff named after him, had movies made about him, and is up for sainthood – I checked at the Vatican website myself. More than that, though, we see a man that realized a solution to a problem was not in killing the enemy, but in allowing the enemy to kill him as a sacrifice to protect others. As I observed Easter services today, my mind went over to how d’Acquisto’s sacrifice was in the manner of Jesus’ sacrifice. He died that others might live. The popular acclaim is there, yes, but what truly makes Salvo d’Acquisto a hero in my eyes is in the way he was able to drink from a bitter cup of sacrifice when there was no other way to save lives.

He was, and is, a true hero. I salute him.

I search for truth. That means I have to wade through a lot of stuff that falls in the category of “mistaken, misguided, or misleading statements.” No matter what the cause of the error, error is error. Seeking truth means humbling myself when error is found within and then seeking to know better.

Even if I believe to have found the font of eternal wisdom and perfect knowledge, I can still form my own erroneous impressions or heed the misjudgments of others as I sip from that font. Hence, the necessity of humility.

Pride in my knowledge means I cannot allow it to be corrected. That leads to arrogance and worse. Humility in my knowledge means I know that I must be corrected, that I am not yet perfect, that I *will* be corrected, and, ultimately, that I must be thankful for the correction that I receive.

So what is truth? That part is surprisingly simple, and I suspect that the greatest errors are made when we humans choose to overcomplicate things. Truth is this: God is Love. If we seek to be Godlike, we must love, and love with purity. We must have compassion, unselfishness, no desire of reciprocal utility, and so on, in our pure love. When we hear or think things that interfere with that purity of love, there is something of untruth about those influences.

The search for truth, therefore, is not so much a discovery of the simple fact that God is Love, but is instead the process of removing the errors in our own lives that we might be ready to not only better know the truth, but to be able to live that truth more perfectly.

The other day, I saw a picture making the rounds on the Internet: a sign that says that homosexuals, drug users, gangsters, feminists, Mormons, Buddhists, drunkards, Baha’is, Catholics, wife-beaters, atheists, New Age thinkers, Democrats, environmentalists, Promise Keepers, abortionists, effeminate men, racists, Scientologists, Emos, government recipients, adulterers, fornicators, thieves, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, perverts, idolators, pagans, loud mouthed women, agnostics, liars, freeloaders, liberals, high-fallutin’ sophisticated swine, and sports nuts all loved the devil and were in need of repentance and to then believe in Jesus. Leaving his punctuation errors aside, I’d like to address the charges and exhortations made by the sign-maker.

Jesus said, “As I have loved you, love one another.”

That’s a tall order, really. I could easily join in and add and subtract from the list above, but that would not be loving one another. And maybe there are people in those groups that love the devil, as evidenced in their actions, but that does not condemn the group as a whole. Neither does it excuse those who do evil that are members of other groups not mentioned. Nevertheless, we should not condemn the sinner. We have to find forgiveness in our hearts and then find the capacity to reach out in love.

This is a big world, with many competing, confusing views. I can’t hate a man that’s trying to good in the way he knows best, but follows after a different religion than mine – or no religion, as the case may be. If someone’s trying to do good, I have that in common with him. I call it the pure love of Christ, he may call it the pure love of God or the pure love of mankind – whatever we call it, it’s pure, and it’s love, and it uplifts people. We bless lives by expressing love and forgiveness.

What then of the liars, wife-beaters, drug users, gangsters, perverts, and so on? People whose sins also run afoul of the law? Love them, too. Jesus didn’t give us the option to pick and choose. We love them, too. We can pray for them, encourage them to do better, set a good example and hope they follow it, but at the end of the day, no prayer, encouragement, or example will help them if we haven’t first forgiven and loved them.

The labels themselves are misleading: I have a very good friend that’s on a sexual offender’s list. As it turns out, there are lots of ways for foolish young men to make it to that list that would not generate moral outrage. Child abuse and rape certainly repulse us and fill us with horror, but what about those lesser crimes that are lumped alongside them? Public urination behind a bar can get a man on that list. Making a misjudgment of months while still a teenager can also put a man on the list. Those guys still have to knock on doors in neighborhoods and explain their convictions at every job interview. If our society could at least forgive and love them, we’d have a little less hardship dealt out on a daily basis.

The French have a saying, “To understand is to forgive.” Sadly, I suspect the chap that made the sign isn’t too fond of the French. So, I’ll turn to another J.C., this time Johnny Cash. He made it to a number of the groups on the list above, but he still claimed he felt the love of Jesus in his life and the power of forgiveness. He may have been, as he put it, “a C-minus Christian”, but he still knew that that was a passing grade… with a little love from the Teacher, no doubt. He didn’t hate with his music. He offered understanding, and from that, forgiveness, and from that, love. Johnny Cash is one of my heroes, warts and all. So I’ll let him close this post with a list of his own…

“Man in Black”
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

– Johhny Cash

There’s love in those words, and no matter what his faults may have been, I’ll listen to them and take comfort in them. I’ll pray that I can put the wisdom of those words into my life. I want to be a better man, and I can do that only by walking my own road and taking the help I can get – not by throwing stones at those that are different from me.

There is a young girl at my church who warrants special mention. She is proof, to me, that we are all God’s children. She walks with difficulty and speaks with equally labored effort: Dickens would have likened her to Tiny Tim, of that I am sure. She is a wonderful person, though fate has given her challenges that most people do not face. Her name is Hannah, and today, she gave me a hug.

I don’t know exactly what I did to deserve it, but before I could get out of my pew at the end of the services today, Hannah was there and she flung her arms around my neck. She said nothing, just smiled, and I couldn’t hold back the tears. Anger wears down the heart while laughter revs it up: it’s tears, though, that lubricate and maintain the heart. I had me a good, strong, happy sort of cry while Hannah gave me that hug.

She has a lot of hardships, but she sees beyond them – if she sees them at all. And though she struggled to make her way down the aisle to give me the hug I did not expect, she gave freely of what she had to give. She gave a smile and she gave a piece of her heart.

I felt charity with that hug, I truly did. The pure love of God was in that hug, and none can tell me otherwise. I don’t know if it was with a purpose to reassure me for a loss or prepare me for a trial… or if it was simply a wonderful child that needed to share the joy she felt by hugging someone. I don’t know, but I accepted that hug gladly and with humility.

Her hug gives me hope. Thank you very much, Hannah. God bless us, every one!