I'm a Geek, and Proud of it!

Summer quarter starts on Monday and I did a last minute switch. I enrolled in a short story class, but after looking at the reading list, I was kind of discouraged. I then discovered a course in Children's Literature. Sounds good. I looked at the reading list. Check it out:













Is that an awesome list or what? I am SO excited to read these books. Some are old friends and others are fresh reads to me. I'm going to read parts of them out loud to the kids too.

I deleted my last post about my epiphany. Because it wasn't. The more I thought about it, brainstormed, dreamed, doodled, the crazier I felt. It wasn't a good fit.

On our vacation this week (pics to come), Aaron and I had lots of time to talk in the car. He told me that I was just giving up because something got hard. He's right, you know. So I'm not giving up. I'm going to write. I am writing. And it's going to be crazy and busy and fun and stressful and great.

Speaking of goals and direction and all this, I just have to share this. Aaron's mom e-mailed me an excerpt from a devotional address given by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland entitled "Remember Lot's Wife."

Sister Holland and I were married about the time both of us were reading poems like that in BYU classrooms. We were as star struck ‐‐ and as fearful ‐‐ as
most of you are at these ages and stages of life. We had absolutely no money. For a
variety of reasons neither of our families were able to help us finance our
education. We had a small apartment just south of campus ‐‐ all of two rooms and a
bath. We were both working too many hours trying to stay afloat financially ‐‐
but we had no other choice.

I remember one fall day ‐‐ I think it was in the first semester after our
marriage in 1963 ‐‐ walking together up the hill past the Maeser Building on the
sidewalk between the President's Home and the Brimhall Building. Somewhere on
that path we stopped and wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. Life that
day seemed overwhelming, and the undergraduate plus graduate years we
still had before us seemed monumental, nearly insurmountable. Our love for each
other and our commitment to the gospel were strong but most of the other more
temporal things around us seemed particularly ominous. On a spot which I
could probably still mark for you today, I turned to Pat and said something like,
"Should we give up? I can get a good job and carve out a good living for us. I can do
okay without a degree. Should we stop trying to tackle what right now seems so
difficult to face?" In my best reenactment of Lot's wife I said, in effect, "Let's go
back. Let's go home. The future holds nothing hopeful for us."

Then my beloved little bride did what she has done for 45 years since then.
She grabbed me by the lapels and said, "We are not going back. We are not going
home. The future holds everything hopeful for us." She stood there in the
sunlight that day and gave me a real pep talk. I don't recall that she quoted Paul
but there was certainly plenty in her voice that said she was committed to setting
aside all that was past in order to press toward and seize "the prize of God" that
lay yet ahead. It was a living demonstration of faith. It was "the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews
11:1). So we laughed, kept walking, and finished up sharing a root‐beer, one glass,
two straws, at the then newly constructed Wilkinson Center.

Twenty years later I would on occasion, look out of the window of the
President's Home across the street from the Brimhall Building and picture there
on the sidewalk two newlywed BYU students, down on their money and down
even more on their confidence. As I would gaze out that window I would
occasionally see not Pat and Jeff Holland but you who were walking that same
sidewalk ‐‐ sometimes as couples, sometimes as a group of friends,
sometimes just one lone student. And I knew that some of you were having those
same thoughts we had had. Is there any future for me? What does a new year, or a
new semester, or a new major, or a new romance hold for me? Will I be safe? Will
life be sound? Can I trust in the Lord and in the future? Or would it be better to
look back, to go back, to go home?

To all such of every generation I call out, "Remember Lot's wife." Faith is
for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that
God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ is the "high priest of
good things to come."

It's exactly what Aaron and I needed. "Faith is for the future." And so we will press forward. Aaron will focus on improving his LSAT scores. I will finish my degree. Aaron will apply again to law school. He will do things differently this time. And it will work. I know it will. I'm not going to be Lot's wife. I'm Aaron's wife, and we look ahead, not back.