For the time being, Joy and Roy can no longer post blogs, therefore, after this week, I will no longer be submitting a Sunday blog. I want to thank Joy for inviting me to write this weekly blog. I love the Lord and have felt that this has been an opportunity to serve Him in some small way. Since there have been virtually no comments for many months, I can only hope that my submissions have made a positive difference in some of your lives. I expect that ingodwetrust readers will still be able to access the archives and the many wonderful articles that have been posted on this site.

If any of you would like to contact me, I can be reached via email at mytimelinesetc@hotmail.com Blessings, Sharon Anderson

UNITY– From Many One
Although many “experts” are claiming that America has passed through the worst of the economic and political crisis and that things are going to continue to improve, there are numerous indications that the worst is yet to come, including the continued devaluation of the dollar due to monetization of the debt, increasing unemployment and home foreclosures, and pending legislation (such as cap and trade, health care reform, gun controls and LOST) which if passed will further exacerbate our economic woes and compromise our liberty.
I want to recommend a few resources that you may find helpful in the months ahead and then discuss the importance of unity.

1) I have great respect for the John Birch Society and all they do to educate Americans. To search the archives of the New American go to www.thenewamerican.com

2 To learn about current legislation and to contact your Senators and Representatives go to
http://www.votervoice.net/Core.aspx?AID=972&APP=GAC&

3) To maximize your influence in upcoming elections go to www.ourcaucus.com . Watch the videos on the home page and then learn about their plan to replace compromised incumbents. This is where the rubber meets the road.

4) For inspiration and encouragement, I highly recommend the videos that are posted at www.realamericanstories.com.

The problems we face are serious, but we can trust that the Lord’s purposes will prevail and we can draw strength from one another. Now, more than ever before, it is important that we are united as Americans, as families, with our fellow believers, and most importantly, with the Lord.

Here is a video from realamericanstories that helps us appreciate the strength that can come from unity.

VIDEO LINK

http://www.realamericanstories.com/teuta-dedvukaj-new/?curpage=0

These quotes about unity that are worth pondering.

D. Todd Christofferson: “we must begin by becoming one within ourselves. We are dual beings of flesh and spirit, and we sometimes feel out of harmony or in conflict. Our spirit is enlightened by conscience, the light of Christ, and naturally responds to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit and desires to follow truth. But the appetites and temptations to which the flesh is subject can, if permitted, overwhelm and dominate the spirit.”

Henry Eyring: “Be humble. Pride is the great enemy of unity.”

Brigham Young: “A perfect oneness will save a people, because intelligent beings cannot become perfectly one, only by acting upon principles that pertain to eternal life. Wicked men may be partially united in evil; but, in the very nature of things, such a union is of short duration. The very principle upon which they are partially united will itself breed contention and disunion”

Howard W. Hunter: “… the key to a unified church is a unified soul—one that is at peace with itself and not given to inner conflicts and tensions. So much in our world is calculated to destroy that personal peace through sins and temptations of a thousand kinds.”

And here are some excerpts from an Sept. 2008 Ensign Article by Henry B. Eyring:

We can have His Spirit by keeping that covenant. First, we promise to take His name upon us. That means we must see ourselves as His. We will put Him first in our lives. We will want what He wants rather than what we want or what the world teaches us to want. As long as we love the things of the world first, there will be no peace in us. Holding an ideal for a family or a nation of comfort through material goods will, at last, divide them The ideal of doing for each other what the Lord would have us do, which follows naturally from taking His name upon us, can take us to a spiritual level which is a touch of heaven on earth.

We also keep our promise to remember Him when as families we pray together and when we read the scriptures. At family prayer around a breakfast table, one child may pray for another to be blessed that things will go well that day in a test or in some performance. When the blessings come, the child blessed will remember the love of the morning and the kindness of the Advocate, in whose name the prayer was offered. Hearts will be bound in love.
We keep our covenant to remember Him every time we gather our families to read the scriptures. They testify of the Lord Jesus Christ, for that is and always has been the message of prophets. Even if children do not remember the words, they will remember the true author, Jesus Christ.

Third, we promise as we take the sacrament to keep His commandments, all of them. President J. Reuben Clark Jr. (1871–1961), a counselor in the First Presidency, as he pled for unity in a general conference talk—and he did so many times—warned us against being selective in what we will obey. He put it this way: “The Lord has given us nothing that is useless or unnecessary. He has filled the Scriptures with the things which we should do in order that we may gain salvation.”

I am a member of the Independence Caucus (http://icaucus.ning.com and http://ourcaucus.com/ ), an organization whose primary mission is to replace our compromised, fiscally irresponsible incumbents with good men and women who share our principles and values.

Every conservative group shares that same goal and we have something to offer the other groups that they cannot do for themselves or their members. We truly are the last-mile solution to get the job done. At Independence Caucus, we have five golden keys to help us accomplish this.

1)      Independence Caucus has a well defined candidate vetting process which includes a set of 80 principle-based vetting questions, which we pose to all potential candidates for office. We believe that this is a job interview, and that the primary reason we have so many people in office who have not represented us well in the past is because we have not vetted them properly. The Independence Caucus members and partners for each area (comprised of people who are in that particular candidate’s voting district), must agree with at least a 70% majority, that the candidate is the right person to back before Independence Caucus will endorse that candidate.

2)      We conduct specific research on incumbents to show the link to their voting records & earmarks, and which big money special interest groups have donated to their campaigns and how much they’ve donated  (it’s a whole lot more than the media reports). We use that research to give our endorsed candidates an advantage in campaigning against that incumbent.

3)      Our founders understand that “all politics is local” and they have a strong knowledge of how politics works down to a precinct level and understand what is needed to win campaigns.  Their first win was Jason Chaffetz from Utah’s third Congressional district.  Chaffetz is the Congressman who sleeps on his cot in his Washington office to save the tax payers money.  Frank Anderson and Monte Bateman, the co-founders of Independence Caucus helped Chaffetz beat an incumbent Congressman while being outspent by 6:1.

4)      We’ve identified 26 specific functional positions within a campaign that are needed in order to win and beat compromised incumbents who are owned by the big money special interest groups.

5)      Finally, the Independence Caucus currently has programmers developing a powerful political social networking tool, which connects candidates to enthusiastic and motivated volunteers for their campaigns. This social networking tool contains all the tools a candidate needs to manage his/her campaign, as well as the tools and training volunteers need to be most effective in working for their chosen candidate.

We would like to partner with any and all groups as well as individuals who share our goals and would like to participate with us to use the tools we provide. Are you interested?

Thanks,  Sharon Anderson

Vilate, Frank, and Julia Hampton

The Hearts of the Children

I have one sister and one brother and we love to spend time together. Given our busy lives and the fact that my sister lives in California, we don’t get to see each other as often as we would like. Kristie, however, has been in Utah for the past week and the three of us were able to spend a day together. Among other things we went to the Salt Lake City Cemetery to find out about getting a marker for our mother’s grave. We also located the burial sites for our grandmother’s four oldest siblings.

I am trying to things in order so I can devote more time to organizing our family’s history. Last night as I was sorting through some boxes I happened to find a copy of their father’s journal that gives some details about what happened a hundred and thirty years ago.

In 1879 there was a diphtheria epidemic in Salt Lake City. At the time, my great grandfather Brigham Young Hampton and his wife Mary had five children. On July 21^st their little daughter Blanche fell ill and three days later (July 24^th ) she died – just a week an a half before she would have turned three. Four days later, six year old Vilate (Latie) took sick. She died July 31^st shortly before noon and was buried the same day. Just before midnight, her brother Frank who had just turned 4 died. He was buried the following day. On August 2^nd, eight year old Julia Ranolph (Ranie) was taken sick. She succumbed to the disease August 6^th just as the clock was striking midnight. She was buried the next day. Thirteen month old baby Leon was their only child to survive. Each of the children was buried without funeral services, but a dedicatory prayer was offered at each resting place. Their father recorded, “All that was possible for loving hearts and hands to do was done for them in their great suffering and sickness but without avail in checking the cursed disease. . . My prayer is that their mother…and I may so live and keep the commandments of God and our covenants with each other that we may be counted worthy, when we shall have completed our earthly existence, to join and be associated with them throughout all Eternity.”

My grandmother was the tenth child to be born to this family. I remember her telling me how, when she was a young child, her father used to carry her on his shoulders as he walked along the streets in Salt Lake, but her mother never really got over the death of those four children.  The heartbreak of these weeks must have been almost too much to endure.

There seems to be a growing interest among many people to discover their roots and learn about their families. Some call this desire the Spirit of Elijah because the book of Malachi in the Old Testament talks about the coming of the prophet Elijah who will “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers. . .” (Malachi 4:6) I appreciate the opportunity that I had to reconnect with my past this week and am looking forward to getting our family records more organized so temple work can be done and so our children and grandchildren will value their heritage. I hope we will each grow in our love and appreciation for those who have gone before. I know we will be blessed as we turn our hearts to our ancestors and other family members.

(NOTE: Our own Terrie Soberg specializes in “Keeping Memories Alive: Preserving and Sharing Family and Community History.”  You might want to visit her website if you haven’t already. http://digitalteardrops.com/ )

Recognize the hand of God in your life. Record the miracles. Remember how He has blessed your life, then move forward in faith knowing that His plan of happiness is perfect and that He loves you. Henry B. Eyring said it this way:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am making a renewed effort to follow the example of President Eyring.

This week we saw the hand of the Lord in our lives when our son was hit by a car. He was on his long board and had slowed down to cross the street (in the crosswalk with the appropriate walk signal). The woman driving the car did not see him when she came to the intersection and looked to the right.  She saw no cars on her left, and then without looking right again, she accelerated into her right hand turn just as he was crossing the street in front of her car. He flew through the air several feet and landed on his side with his head hitting the pavement. Fortunately, he was wearing his helmet and his abrasions were so minimal that they did not even need bandaging. The EMTs who were taking his vital signs when we arrived at the scene told us they saw no need to transport him to the hospital. He was quite shook up, but an hour later he was on his way again.

We are so grateful that he was not seriously injured. We appreciate the influence of a member of our congregation (a fireman) who has impressed upon the young people the importance of wearing helmets when biking, skateboarding, and snowboarding! Our son also received some wise counsel from the police officer at the scene: Before crossing, make eye contact with the drivers of any oncoming vehicles so you know that they know you are there. This was also an important reminder to us of the importance of driving more carefully!

I typically tell our children when they leave the house: Have fun. Be safe. Be good. This is to emphasize that they need to be wise in their activities, but we also pray for divine protection each day. This week, our prayers were answered again when what could have been a catastrophic encounter was, instead, merely an inconvenience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s All About Love

This week Joy’s son Bryon, one of our frequent bloggers, gives his farewell before leaving for his mission in Louisville, Kentucky. He will be one of more than 52,000 missionaries who are currently serving in 348 missions around the world as representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these missionaries are young men (ages 19 to 21) who give two years of their lives to go wherever they are called so they can testify of our Savior Jesus Christ and teach His Gospel. They receive no pay, but rather are expected to pay their own way (insofar as possible). They leave behind their families, friends, coaches and athletic teams, cars, electronic devices, and scholarships, and they do it because they love the Lord. They have felt His love and it has blessed their lives and brought them happiness. They want to share what they know with others.

Missionary work is not easy. Rising early each morning and keeping a rigorous schedule of studying, finding people to teach, and then teaching can be exhausting. There are days of discouragement when it seems that no one wants to learn more about the Lord and His plan of happiness, when just a friendly smile and a kind word would be appreciated. But the rewards are great. Nothing else can compare to helping others come to the Savior, or seeing those who already love the Lord receive additional light, knowledge, and blessings. When we give our time, talent, and energy in serving others, we grow in our love for them, so we rejoice with them when they experience the heavenly joy that comes from making and keeping sacred covenants. That is why when missionaries return home they frequently want to tell about the wonderful people they grew to love and they are often heard to say, “Those were the best two years of my life.”

Thanks for the great blogs you have shared with us here on this site, Bryon. We will miss hearing from you, but we know great experiences lie ahead and that you will be blessed as you serve the Lord. Good luck and God speed!

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matt. 24: 14 and 28:19-20)

In addition to these high priority issues there are so many potentially dangerous pieces of legislation in Congress that it is difficult, if not impossible, to follow all of them. But while some bills are reported on in great detail, others are often ignored and risk a smooth passage with little-to-no opposition.

Two such bills are H.R. 875 (Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009) and S. 787 (The Clean Water Restoration Act). These two bills combined would greatly increase federal jurisdiction over and regulation of our food and water supply. If passed, these two bills alone would represent one of the largest transitions of state-to-federal power that we have seen in a number of years.

Keep the pressure on Congress and let them know that you strongly oppose any legislation that would increase the federal government’s control over two of our most precious, life-sustaining commodities, food and water.

Follow the links below to take action on these items:

Food Safety Modernization Act
Clean Water Restoration Act
Thank you,

Your Friends at The John Birch Society

There is no better place to practice love than in our homes.  There are so many ways to show our sweethearts that we love them and that we appreciate them.

I am so grateful for my dear husband who recently demonstrated his love for me in exceptional ways.  For most of March and April, I was bedridden with a ruptured disk.  I must confess, it was a new experience for me to not be able to do things for myself, but even walking a few steps was excruciating.  During the healing process, he fixed me three delicious meals a day and brought them to me, did the dishes, cleaned the house, did the shopping and the laundry, took me to the doctor and physical therapy, made sure I took my medication, and even washed my hair for me.  He did all this graciously and without complaining, even though his own back was hurting most of the time. (I must confess he’s a better cook than I am and when I was finally able to start preparing a few simple meals for us, he cautioned me not to mess up HIS kitchen!)

At the end of May we celebrated out 44th wedding anniversary.  We went out for lunch and went to the new 3 -D movie “UP”–a simple celebration, to be sure, but it was special because we were together.  Being married to one’s best friend is a blessing, but it doesn’t just happen.  It takes a lot of serving, and caring, and sharing.

Thank you, Peter!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: back, bedridden, Peter, Sharon

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.  You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

The last couple of months I have become particularly focused on learning more about the Constitution, the principles and history of liberty, and the proper role of government.  As our nation continuous on this perilous path to collectivism, I want to be able to knowledgeably and articulately help others understand what is happening so they will be more aware of what is happening and want to do something about it.  Although I have a passion to learn, one of my personal challenges has been organizing the things I study in my own mind and then remembering them so I can confidently express them to others.

I recently read this quote by Wilford Woodruff about learning.  I will share this with my children, but it also encouraged me.  (emphasis added).

“There is one thing I wish particularly to impress upon your minds, and that is, the importance of improving your time while young in treasuring up knowledge and learning those things which will be useful to you in after life. I know from experience, and so do most parents, that the child cannot appreciate the worth of true intelligence, the importance of improving their time in storing up useful knowledge while they are young, as they will when they come to act upon the stage of life, become fathers and mothers, and feel the full force of the responsibilities of training up children.  Do not be discouraged because you cannot learn all at once; learn one thing at a time, learn it well, and treasure it up, then learn another truth and treasure that up, and in a few years you will have a great store of useful knowledge which will not only be a great blessing to yourselves and your children, but to your fellow men.” (G. Homer Durham, Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, 269. )

Because things are happening so fast in our country at this time, I feel a need to accelerate my personal learning process. I trust that my efforts in the past will begin to bear fruit and that the things I have studied throughout my life will surface.  I expect now that as I continue to learn, I will come to a greater understanding more quickly.
Since the words we say are powerful and can help create reality, instead of telling myself that I learn slowly and have difficulty remembering facts and details, I am saying that I can learn and remember things better than ever before, AND that I can express myself with confidence and conviction, for I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me!  (Philipians 4:13)

I believe the words of the Lord as recorded in Ether. “If men will come unto me I will show unto them their weakness, I give unto men (an awareness of their) weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” (Ether 12:27)

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