Making Righteous Judgments and Judging Others

I was given the opportunity to teach a lesson at church today in Elder's Quorum. It was nice change from teaching the youth Sunday School for over the past three years. There were a few insights that I got from teaching this lesson.

1. It is easy to judge other people without knowing all of the facts. Martha in the new testament is an example of this. It would be easy to judge her as one that did not have a deep testimony of the Savior. However, the story of Lazarus tells us that she knows for certain who the Savior is and has the utmost faith in him and his divine power. Another example is the prophet Samuel from the Old Testament. Samuel did not realize that the Lord judges not by the out ward appearance when he went to anoint the king of Israel. He was taught by the Lord through that experience as he thought first to pick the eldest son of Jesse that "The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

2. All of us are required to make judgments about people on a daily basis. This is what God requires of us in order to be able to keep his commandments.

3. The way to judge is given to all men and women, through the Light of Christ. All men are able to discern between good and evil.

4. In order to be able to make righteous judgments we need to qualify to have the Holy Ghost in our lives. This will enable us to have compassion on others, and say what God would have us say. We need to remember to pull the beam out of our own eye before attempting to take the beam out of our neighbor's eye.

Summer 2010

As you all know from reading about my interests, I love to lift weights. I have for years. Some people in high school would say that I could have etched my name into my high school gym. I was and still am a gym rat, and glad to be. Well, crazy me, I couldn't take a break from lifting weight to save my life. I got so excited to see an Olympic bar and free weights at my in-laws. The excitement ends right after I lifted those weights the first day. I thought I was being helpful to myself or just plain lazy by leaning the 45 lb plates up against the awning in the back yard where the weights were situated. Then, later that evening, my youngest daughter Lyla, accidentally knocked into one of the 45 lb plates and split her right foot open. It was very deep and we immediately rushed her to the ER. Luckily, no extensive damage was done to her foot.

Sadly, the next day we went to Disneyland with my daughter in her soft cast. The strange thing

is that my son Jacob got more attention and help at Disneyland for being autistic than my daughter did not being able to walk. Lyla was so happy to see Mickey Mouse and I was overjoyed that I did not have to wait in line for long.

One of the highlights from our Disney day was that Jacob and his cousin Ian got to be Padawan learners at the Jedi Training Academy. I was down right amazed that they both got picked. I guess it helped that their grandma put in a good word or two for them. I was very impressed with the Jedi Academy show which took the young lings through an extensive training with the light saber. To top it all off, Darth Vader and Darth Maul show up on the seen to make things interesting and gave a chance to take some pretty cool photos. I was also very pleased to find out that James Earl Jones does the voice overs for Vader

which really sounded amazing.

The begnning

Where do I start? I suppose I could talk about my life right now, but so many other interesting things have happened over the summer that I would be leaving out too much. My plan for this blog is to just be me. Don't be surprised if you don't see a blog post every week. I will do my best with what time that I have, which isn't a lot most of the time. So with that...here it goes.