I was recently reading in Deuteronomy chapter six where Moses instructs the people thus:

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

As I read that, the thought struck me that there are some laws and instructions that must be followed literally, such as the command that the people mark the upper and side posts of their door with the blood of their Passover lamb (Exodus 12) but that commands such as this, which are literally kept by wearing phylacteries and having a mezuzah on their door, are more important to be kept figuratively if the people are to become covenant people with the Lord than they are to be kept literally.

Of course it is hard to truly keep a command figuratively while ignoring the literal interpretation but ask yourself where the saving power of this command is. Is it in nailing a box to your doorpost and tying boxes onto parts of your body or is it in speaking and thinking and acting upon the law even in casual situations such as sitting in your house and walking by the way?

Even a casual observer could walk down the street of an orthodox Jewish neighborhood and notice the mezuzot on all the doors. If they knew nothing of the Jewish religion they would still recognize that there was something going on in that neighborhood. Should they enter a Jewish synagogue they could notice the phylacteries tied on arms and heads even if they did not understand the meaning of what they saw. It would take more careful observation to notice how dominant religious discussions are among the orthodox people than to notice the boxes on the people and on the buildings.

Just as it is easier to see the boxes than hear the conversations, so it is easier to imitate the boxes than to infiltrate the conversations. Anyone might place a mezuzah on their door and have the home mistaken as a Jewish residence but to constantly speak of the laws and traditions without coming to understand and appreciate their meaning would be virtually impossible.

Christians have no command that they should wear phylacteries but if they wish to become people whom their Lord would side with in a day of reckoning they must talk of the law while sitting in their homes and walking by the way, and not just when they are attending their worship services. How else can we expect to have the law written upon our hearts? (see Romans 2)

I hope I live what I believe in a way that it is as obvious in my life as if I were wearing phylacteries and had a mezuzah on my doorpost.

At first I limited what they could buy so that no one child would use up all the virtual money at the expense of the others but once I built up a sizable reserve of coins I dropped that restriction and it has been interesting to see each tank take on it’s own character according to the person who owned it.

Please note that I would not presume to read much into looking at the tanks if I did not get to see the other aspects of each child’s life as well.

Without being familiar with the game you would not know by looking at it that Savannah chooses a large portion of her fish based on their profitability. She learned from me which fish make the most money and she always keeps many of them in stock. She doesn’t do this to be selfish, she does it because the likes to emulate adult behavior and I have one tank of my own which is used exclusively to grow the most profitable fish available (that’s how I built up enough coin reserves to allow the kids absolute freedom with their tanks). Savannah has also learned the dangers of not feeding her fish. The game only works when I have an Internet connection so when we go camping we can’t care for our fish. Once we left home for what I thought would be a short enough trip that the fish would live but when we got home almost all the fish had died in each of our tanks. Savannah now keeps a food brick in her tank. This has to be purchased with coins, unlike regular fish food which is free, but a food brick will keep the fish alive for at least a week (depending on which size she buys).

Savannah’s tank also shows her propensity to collect things. The collection is very eclectic to the rest of us (the only part of her collection that I understand is that most of the items make her fish happier and consequently more profitable) but once something grabs her attention she collects it. Once collected there is no rhyme or reason to where she places it in the tank.

Alyssa’s tank shows her artistic streak. While the plants in her tank make her fish happier I doubt Alyssa really cares about that. She cares to make her tank beautiful so the background and the placement of each item are chosen very carefully.

Alyssa tends to keep a limited variety of fish in her tank at any one time (I suspect that is also subconsciously for artistic reasons) and she tends to prefer ocean creatures.

Mariah does not care for decorations. Her fastidious personality demands simplicity although, like Alyssa, she chooses her background carefully. That is her one decoration and she enjoys changing the background regularly. She chooses her fish purely based on which ones are pretty to her. Like the background, the fish she stocks tends to change fairly often which is why she does not stock much in the way of ocean creatures which tend to take weeks to mature rather than hours or days.

Carefree little Isaac loves to browse the stores and just buy anything that catches his attention. His interest in specific things is often short lived but he’s not discerning in what he buys. When coins were tight he had a habit of buying expensive creatures that matured slowly and then selling them long before they were profitable. He finds things, like the elephant and the eagle, that I did not even know existed in the game. Generally speaking it would be perfectly fine with him if I went through his tank and randomly sold things behind his back (I don’t but I know I could).

Isaac’s personality shows up not only in what his tank looks like, but also which tank he has. At first he had the last tank (we went in age order) but then he would get on the game when I wasn’t looking and start selling my fish. I learned to keep my fish out of the first tank until they were ready to sell and eventually I just let him have that first tank for his own while I adopted his old tank.

Over time my reluctance turned to ambivalence and shortly before the reunion I decided to go as a show of support for the one of my brothers who was planning to attend and who had put some work into pulling the reunion off – after all, the reunion was not 25 miles from my house.

I must say that when we went I was very pleasantly surprised to feel right at home talking with uncles, aunts, and cousins whom I have rarely seen and some of whom I had never met.

It’s always fun for me to write welcome posts when we are expecting a new arrival. We’ve done this enough times now that as we prepare for number six there would seem to be nothing new to say. That might explain why we have decided not to find out in advance whether this will be a boy or whether we have a girl coming our way.

When we went for the ultrasound the doctor captured a cool image of baby’s arms crossed in front of it’s face as if rubbing it’s eyes while waking up from a nap.

That last sentence should have been awkward enough to prove why almost everyone these days chooses to find out the gender of their coming baby in advance. I have suggested that we use male pronouns in odd months and female pronouns in even months when talking about baby but I don’t know if we’ll actually do that. The only thing we know for sure is that if this is a boy he will be named Noah and if this is a girl we have not yet settled on one name.

Last week we had a family reunion at Bear Lake. It was great for the kids to see their cousins and for everyone to have fun on the water and off. In planning for the trip the hardest thing was deciding whether we should come back Saturday night or whether we should stay over Sunday and come home Monday morning. For a variety of reasons we decided to come home Saturday.

We felt good about that decision but as if to confirm our choice, the discussion in Sunday School focused on the importance for each of us to be where we ought to be. Of course it included the declaration that “at this moment Sunday School is where you ought to be.”

As I listened to the lesson I thought about the fact that being where we ought to be, or as it was said of Gideon’s men, “{standing} every man in his place,”(Judges 7:21) is a prerequisite to obeying the counsel that President Uchtdorf gave in the October 2008 priesthood session of general conference that we should stand close together and lift where we stand.

I hope our family can always be found standing in our place and lifting where we stand.

Last night, before I realized that today was Father’s Day, Enoch taught me exactly what it means to be a father. He was fussy and tired, it was two hours past bedtime, and we had already had a long day. I went in and picked him up out of the crib and rocked/bounced/cuddled him until he finally fell asleep. I remembered times with various kids when I have done that despite being completely frustrated with the child and/or despite feeling that I simply could not meet their needs at that time.

The lesson was basically that fatherhood is all about doing what needs to be done because you love your children and it needs to be done even when you don’t want to do it or think it is more than you can do.

Lately I have been studying the Old Testament more closely than I ever have before and finding some hidden gems there. I am currently in Leviticus which I had remembered as nothing but heave offerings, wave offerings, burnt offerings, sin offerings, and instructions on where to burn “the fat that is above the caul.”

In Leviticus 19 I was surprised to find the answer to the one area of immigration policy over which my mind was not already completely settled – namely the issue of what approach we should take with regard to illegal immigrants who, aside from their immigration status, are decent members of society (which is almost certainly the majority of them). It is an issue that did not seem particularly important to me until some people began to try using immigration as a stumbling block for the LDS church by suggesting that local church leaders should be turning in members who they knew were living in the United States illegally.

Anyone reading the title of this post might have first assumed that the old testament approach to illegal immigration would be stoning – they would be wrong.

The Israelites are told directly in Leviticus 19:33-34 that “if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex (or oppress) him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.”

As I had been reading that chapter the persistent thought in my mind had been, “How is this applicable in our times?” When I read verse 33 it was easy to conclude that we should treat immigrants decently even if they were here illegally. Of course we should prosecute them for real crimes against others (as we should for all people regardless of their legal status here) but simply being here illegally does not constitute such a crime.

Some will argue that illegal immigrants inherently steal resources from legal residents but in making that argument they always admit to breaking one of two other instructions from this chapter. Sometimes the argument is that we have left no resources whereby they can subsist throught their own labor as the Lord commands in verse 9 that we should not reap the corners or glean our fields but rather leave these for the poor and the stranger.

More often the argument is that through our social safety net we have shown undue favoritism to the poor whereby they can subsist off the labor of others without relying on their own efforts in direct violation of the instruction in verse 15.

She told me that Ethan Miller, a boy in our ward who was also baptized last week, had said that he felt a change when he was given the gift of the Holy Ghost and I answered that some people do notice a change while others do not. Savannah’s response was insightful. She said, “Yes, our house hasn’t been suited to having the Spirit these last few days, people have been grumpy and not very nice.”

I can’t think of a more accurate summary of what things were like in the days leading up to her baptism. We were busy with all the regular tasks of life plus we had the excitement and stress of preparing for a big event plus Laura was helping out the kids swimming teacher get ready for the start of swim lessons this week. A spiritual atmosphere had definitely taken a back seat to a hectic and frazzled one last week.

Later Sunday evening Savannah got upset over how we were handling dinner with the result that she screamed at Laura and I and then stomped off to her room. Later I was pleasantly surprised as she came down the hall and very meekly said, “Dad, will you forgive me for screaming at you?”

I told her that I forgave her and then she said, “that’s hard, I’ve never had to ask someone to forgive me before.”

A minute later I heard her asking Laura for forgiveness as well. Laura later explained that she and Savannah had discussed forgiveness and repentance that morning. Apparently the discussion had an impact on Savannah and it’s clear that she is doing the work to receive the Holy Ghost.

Shortly after we got our first litter of baby gerbils Laura had the experience of having Isaac pounce on the gerbil she liked the most with the result that it died in Laura’s hands when she picked it up. I thought of that as Stormy died. In Laura’s case she cried for the loss of life because Isaac was too young to understand what had happened. I remember hours later when I got home he still obviously did not understand what had happened. Unlike Isaac, Alyssa did understand what happened so she did the sobbing. While I really felt sorry for the death of Stormy I felt even more sorry for the pain that Alyssa was feeling.

I understand now why Laura felt so deeply in her experience. I’m hoping that I was able to say and do the right things to help Alyssa process and work through her grief. Time will tell but I am encouraged that she was able to go to sleep tonight without too much trouble.

Last week I received a new donor card from the Red Cross and a letter to go with it. The letter contained an interesting statistic that the Red Cross receives a large majority of their donations from only 30% of their donors. Just to be clear, the statistic is that 30% of those who donate – not 30% of the total population – provide much more than half of the blood supply. Specifically it is the 30% who donate repeatedly and of course the message of their letter is that they want me as part of that minority of donors.

Later in the week I was at the temple when the thought struck me that although I have no statistics on it, I think it highly likely that the great majority of temple work done is performed by a minority among those who go to the temple. I realized that this is a consistent pattern. Only a small minority of Boy Scouts perservere in their scouting and advance to the Eagle rank. A minority of families raise the majority of children in each succeeding generation. A minority of active voters participate in the primary process and earlier activities to get informed and select candidates for office. A minority of religious people actually attend services regularly and keep their respective churches operating.

As I thought about it I realized that the only minorities that matter are not those we are assigned to such as Hispanics, African Americans, blind people, or midgets, but the ones we decide to be part of like repeat blood donors or involved citizens.

Everyone, by their choices, is part of some minorities whether good or bad. For those who wish to make a difference the question is not merely “what good things do I want to do” but “what things can I do more or better than most of the people who are casually involved?” As we make those decisions we must recognize that we can’t do everything but we can choose where to do something.