My Video for Relief Society....

I put this together for my lesson on repentance tomorrow. I love to teach, but it is always nerve-wracking. I always want the Spirit to be the teacher, but that is often harder than I think. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. For all the hours I put into it, it seemed a shame to only let 20 or so women see it. (Sorry if it takes a minute to load...I hope you think it's worth it.)

That is me....

The problem isn't that there's no evidence that God loves His children. The problem is we're afraid to believe it.

Michael McLean

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A Time Gone By

Jesse's grandfather died the day after Thanksgiving. He had been battling cancer for several years, and it finally got the best of him. He was a tough old coot, sitting on his front porch, smoking cigarettes and keeping an eye on his hunting dogs. I am not sure if he had uttered, "I love you," more times than you could count on your hands.

But he left a legacy.

He was a product of the Great Depression. He was a sharecropper tobacco farmer. I didn't even know that there were still sharecroppers in the 1900's. Though they lived just a few miles from town, they went there once a year. Everything they needed, they made themselves or did without. I remember the clothes his grandmother sewed...without a pattern. Sometimes the sleeves fit, sometimes they didn't, but I didn't care. I was just in awe that she could sew something that looked like a shirt without a pattern. Recently, I sewed some pajama pants for Jesse (using a pattern), but got the legs lined up wrong and they looked like pants for someone with at extremely long torso and short bow-legs.

He got a mortgage, and financed his tractor, but paid cash for everything else. In later life, he even paid cash for his trucks. One year, he bought six. He would have bought more, but the state told him he'd have to get a dealer license. When he died, he had a new truck with 6000 miles on it.

I'm not sure how much money he had total when he died. He lived on a small pension and sent social security to the bank. He routinely carried 2 or 3 thousand dollars in his wallet. The safe in the house had 6 to 10 thousand dollars in it. Then there were the bank accounts, the cd's... He had enough cash on him to pay for the entire funeral with money to spare.

I am amazed at how much money a humble tobacco farmer could accumulate. We make many times what he did, but there is so much more we "have" to have. Or do we? I think that peace of mind, knowing there aren't any payments due and I can handle most any financial emergency, trumps "stuff" every time.

We are trying to learn from Granddaddy Cecil. Hopefully, we will learn in time to have the financial peace he had. Rest in peace Granddaddy.