The Plan --by Jeff Richins

I’m not paying a lot of attention to the road since Denise is driving. My mind is focused on something else. I keep thinking about the next step in the plan. I think that if…

“Which way?” Denise’s question snaps me back to awareness. She’s coming into town and slowing down to an intersection. I sit up and glance around to figure out where we are. “Nice little town.”

She’s already been noticing that. “Yeah, I like it. You know, if we had more time…”

Time! That’s right. We’re in a hurry. An afternoon stop is not in the plan. We’ve got a long way to go to get back to Provo. I pull out my smart phone and click Google Maps to figure out where we are and which direction to go.

Just kidding! It’s 1987 and the closest thing to Google Maps is a Rand McNally road atlas with all the states. I thumb to Arizona and look at our route.

In her naiveté, Denise sweetly stamps on my toes. “We could stop for a little bit and ask somebody which way.”

I shoot an incredulous look towards Denise. I’m a fairly young man, but I’m still a man. There’s just something fundamentally wrong with asking for directions! I hastily look around until I see a sign for Highway 666 North. “That way!”

Whew! That was a manhood trap! Best to just keep traveling.

She shrugs and soon we’re again heading north. I settle back into my prior thoughts, mentally evaluating the overall the plan, ticking each point off on my fingers.

Serve a mission… Check. Go to college… Check. Get good grades… Check. Get married… Check.

None of which went as smoothly as planned, but so far, so good. Now we’re close to graduating and we’re job hunting. The plan is to finish school, get a good job…

A chuckle from my wife interrupts me. “What so funny?”

She looks surprised. “I didn’t laugh. You laughed!”

I shake my head. “No, not me.” I shrug and continue on my thought train. Let’s see… Get a good job. Get a home. Maybe move up the corporate ladder in a couple of years…

This time it’s more than a chuckle. It’s a hearty laugh! Denise looks over at me. “What are you laughing at?”

I’m confused! “I, uh… Nothing. I’m not laughing. I was just thinking of our plans and then…”

Now it’s a burst-out belly laugh – the kind where your Pepsi comes shooting out of your nose. Now both of us are wondering what is so dang funny.

They say that if you ever want to hear heaven laugh, just tell it your long-range plans.

CLUNK!

Our car comes to a shuddering stop at the side of the road. Great! Now what? We hadn’t really planned on this. (There’s that giggle again.) I step out to assess the situation. Three of the tires are parallel with the highway, but the fourth is pointing awkwardly at 90 degrees. I scratch my head. Maybe if I get some baling wire… Nah, it’s beyond baling wire. So I pull out my cell phone and call for a tow truck.

Just kidding. It was still 1987. Cell phones wouldn’t be a thing until for another ten or fifteen years.

So we started walking back to town. After about a mile, a policeman picked us up and gave us a ride to St. Johns. We arranged for a tow truck and then had the rest of the day to spend. We were eating at Katy’s Kountry Kitchen when a jolly old cowboy scooted over to our table. “What are you kids doing here? Where ya from?” We explained our situation. Charlie Patterson paid for our meal and said, “I’ve got some time. Why don’t you let me show you around.”

So we climbed in his pickup and got our first tour of St. Johns – it actually didn’t take very long. But he talked and told stories the whole way. Denise asked about the school so he took us to the District Office.

The nice receptionist greeted us and asked how she could help us. Denise was a little timid. “I don’t know if you have any job openings, but I wondered if I could pick up an application.”

Joyce Dimbatt leaned forward across the counter, eager to hear our story. “Where are you from? What brings you here?” Denise explained how she was just graduating from BYU with a teaching certificate and we were looking for jobs. Joyce walked around the counter and took Denise’s elbow. “Actually, the superintendent is meeting with the principals there in the boardroom. Why don’t you go right on in there and introduce yourself and visit with them.”

Denise was embarrassed. “Uh… no thank you. I’ll just take an application and…”

“Pshaw!” Sister Dimbatt pulled her towards the board room.

Now Denise became mortified. “I’m in jeans and a T-shirt! My résumé is back in the car! No! I’ll just…”

By then Joyce was knocking on door. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’d like to introduce this young lady to you.”

So began Denise’s interview. They visited with her for about an hour and then toured us around the schools. We had a good feeling about the place and the job, but after that we didn’t really hear much from them.

In the meantime, we finally made it back up to Provo and soon I got an interview with Morton Thiokol in northern Utah. The position was to be an Instrument Tech on the Space Shuttle booster rocket. (After the original Space Shuttle had exploded, the company was doing extensive development and testing to prevent any future disaster.)

The prospect was exciting! The interviewing supervisor took me out to the testing site and showed me around the booster I would be working on. They seemed to like me and everything appeared promising. They said they would call me.

What a lucky break! What a blessing! A kid, fresh out of college with no experience. And the chance to start out on such an exciting project. Those kinds of opportunities don’t come along just every day.

A few days later, Morton Thiokol called me with a nice offer and asked me to respond within three days. “Yes!” Just right, according to the plan! But about thirty minutes later, Denise got a call from St. Johns schools with an offer.

Now we had a dilemma. But not a very big dilemma. We talked about the choices and decided that it made much more sense for me to take the Thiokol job, as Denise could teach anywhere. But we should probably pray about it, just to make sure.

The answer was a strong feeling to go to St. Johns! Uh… that’s the wrong answer! Let’s try praying again. You see, Heavenly Father, I’m the one who needs to get my career started. Denise is planning on being a stay-at-home mom. You’re the one that got me the interview! You helped me do well in it.

Again, the strong feeling to go to St. Johns. “No, I’m going to transplant you to Arizona.” What?! That makes no sense! Are you sure that’s what you want us to do?

Where was the happy burning-of-the-bosom? It was mostly a sickening feeling to turn down such a great job. But even though the heartbreak, there was an assurance.

So, it was a hard thing to call the Supervisor at Morton Thiokol and thank him kindly for the offer, but no thanks. I was grumpy to have to do that. Grumpy and scared!

We moved to St. Johns and I was glad that I found a minimum wage job, but I felt more and more sick that I had turned down the Thiokol job. Surely we must have misread the prompting. A thousand times I questioned and kicked myself.

But then, in late December 1987, there was a terrible accident at Morton Thiokol. A booster rocket explosion had killed five technicians during a test firing. I sat mesmerized at the TV as the news showed footage of the accident. It was exactly where I was shown during my interview.

I became a whole lot less grumpy about the answer I had received! But sparing my life was just the first thing to be thankful for in this transplant. A thousand times I’ve been grateful for Father’s plan over mine. The Lord didn’t give me what I wanted – He gave me something better.

They say we should “bloom where you’re planted.” That sounds nice, but I wonder if it might be a little passive. Elder Gene R. Cook said, “…[The Lord] often chooses to act according to our faith… The Spirit of Christ is in every living thing. I think often the Lord says, ‘Don’t ask me to do it—YOU do it!’ …If you were dependent on the Lord to do all of the work, you would be a puppet on a string. But because of the great love of the Lord, he says, ‘I will give you some of my power until you learn to act independently, just as I do, if you will do my will. And if you will, I will eventually give you all my power.’” We are to bloom hard where we are planted, to blossom!



The Lord has a plan for our lives. He knows the best way to help us – to help us grow! He is pleased when we work and plan and set goals and act and become. But we also need to allow him to adjust our plans. He is the Good Father, the Master Gardener – not the Hard Taskmaster. We can trust that His plan, His planting, will be for our benefit and growth.

Gratitude: A Characteristic of the Faithful --By Kip Anderson

I was recently taught a valuable lesson about gratitude. Fortunately, this lesson came through a tender mercy extended to me from my Heavenly Father. Had this new insight come some other way it may have been a lot more humbling.

In 2006 I decided to join the United States Air Force. When I was younger I knew I was going to do two things, serve a full-time mission and serve my country. When I came home from serving a mission in the Pennsylvania, Harrisburg Mission things really accelerated and between work, school and getting married I was pretty busy. Before I knew it years had passed and I still hadn’t made the jump into the military. However, that feeling of service to our nation never left me. So, at the age of 26 I joined. According to my test scores I was a natural mechanic. I fully expected to work on planes but the Air Force decided to make me a Meteorologist. The job would consist of making weather forecasts for our pilots anywhere in the world and required weather stations to be manned around the clock. The schooling was very long and would require me to be away from my wife and 2-year-old little girl. None of this sat well with me and I soon found myself complaining about it. After I graduated from weather school the Air Force assigned me to Hickam AFB, Hawaii. For the first 6 months we lived in paradise. Once the excitement of living in a new place, especially Hawaii, wore off all I could see were the negative things about it and the complaining continued. We had many good friends, but the people weren’t very friendly. We lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth, but it was too far away from home. We adopted our second child through LDS services while we lived in Hawaii. She filled a tremendous void in our family that was left by tragedy and continues to be a light and a joy in our lives, but we received a lot of racism as white parent adopting an Asian baby. If all we do is look for the negative, we’ll find it and there is always something to complain about.

My next duty station was Hurlburt Field, Florida. This was easily one of the most difficult assignments I ever had. Hurlburt Field is the Air Force’s special operations headquarters. Because my job required me to provide our elite fighting forces around the world with weather forecasts at any time our operations tempo was very high and it was very easy to get burned out. During this time, I was called to serve as a scout master and Priest Quorum advisor in our branch with no other help. In addition to everything else I got a distinct impression that I needed to go back to school. So I did, full time. Little did I know, at the time, this was a recipe for disaster. But our little family managed to get through it.

In late 2011 I left the active duty Air Force, we moved back to Arizona and I took what I learned to the Arizona Air National Guard. I worked for the Guard full time for a little while but my intention was to find civilian employment and only do the military thing part time. In 2014 I found a job doing environmental testing but the pay would decrease our income by almost half. As with most major decisions we make we try to include Heavenly Father and both my wife and I got the answer that this is what I needed to do. We took a hard look at our finances and realized it was going to be hard but we were in some good circumstance that would make it possible. As time went on my hours started to get cut back, we were barely able to make ends meet. We even had to go to our bishop for help a few times. As you can imagine I began to complain about our situation and questioned the answer we received. We endured this for 2 years and things began to change.

While all of this was going on our ultimate desire was to move to St. Johns and work at one of the plants. We prayed continually, almost pleading, for Heavenly Father to help us to get to St. Johns. We had a significant experience in the celestial room at the Mesa Temple that confirmed that we were to go to St. Johns and that all would be well. But year after year of submitting resumes to TEP and getting no response began to take its toll and I began complaining about that too. We knew we got confirmation about what we were supposed to do and we were doing it but we didn’t understand why nothing was happening. Finally, after 5 years of waiting I got a call from TEP and I got hired into operations and everything was good. We moved to St. Johns and I worked in operations for 10 months. Shortly after I got out of training a job announcement came out for an environmental position. The main requirements to qualify for this job was that the candidate have experience in meteorology, environmental testing and regulation and power plant operations. I was a shoo in for the job so I applied and was able to land it. To our great joy and relief what we had been praying for we were blessed with.

Before I even knew what I wanted the Lord was already preparing the way for me and my family to receive major blessings. When I look back on the last 12 years I can see every time we were blessed and that the Lord’s hand was in it the whole time. Yet, all I could do is complain about everything. I had to join the Air Force to adopt my daughter, what a blessing. I had to learn meteorology for a career I didn’t know I would want, another blessing. I was prompted to go back to school at the worst possible time to qualify me for my ultimate career, again another blessing. I took a job that almost ruined my finances but would give me the experience I would need, blessing.


President Monson said “A grateful heart … comes through expressing gratitude to our Heavenly Father for His blessings and to those around us for all that they bring into our lives…” For some, it’s easy to have gratitude for the things that we have and the blessings that we see, but the lesson I learned is to always have a spirit of gratitude for the blessings we don’t see no matter the circumstances. When our time is finished in this mortal life I have a feeling that we all will know how much the Lord was in our lives preparing a way for us to receive his blessings. Gratitude is the faith that we know the Lord is always there.

Letters from God --By Jessica Webb

Letters from God

Writing letters to God.  This was my first step to waking up from my “spiritual coma”.  Learning to write letters to God changed how I look at life.  It opened my eyes to an awareness that there was more going on than I had realized.

Before this, I was coasting.  I went to church, did my callings, read scriptures, said my prayers.  And yes, I even felt God’s love for me.  But I wasn’t progressing; I was coasting on what I already knew.  Was this my church’s fault for not teaching?  Of course not.  I love my church.  They teach the basic truths of the gospel and it is up to us to learn at whatever level we are at.  The principle of faith is so simple a concept it can be taught to children, but you could spend a whole lifetime trying to understand the full application of faith in action.  So my learning being stagnant was entirely my fault.  I was coasting.

The first time I heard about someone writing letters to God and getting letters back, my immediate thought was “good for you…”  I didn’t see the danger in this statement.  I wasn’t engaging.  I was still just coasting.  I didn’t even consider trying it to see if it would work for me.  I though “good for you” but I didn’t recognize the underlying message of rejection.  If I were to consciously finish the statement (as I did later) I would have said, “Good for you, but that kind of thing doesn’t work for me.  Besides if I try writing God a letter, what if I don’t get a response?  I wouldn’t handle that very well so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing now.  I’m comfortable and I don’t really want to change.  Besides, that’s really weird anyways.”  That is what was going on in my subconscious as I said “good for you”.  As you may have noticed in that response, there are quite a few untruths and red flags in that statement.  If you feel hesitant about writing a letter, then pull out a paper and write down why.  With words written on paper, it is easier to see what is going on without emotions attached.

Anyways, the first time I heard about getting letters from God I blew it off.  But a few weeks later I heard about a nine year old kid who had wrote a letter to God and got one back.  His letter back was so simple and sincere, it touched my heart.  I thought, “I’ll give it a try.  Why not?”

So, how does it work?  For me, I start with a prayer in my heart.  This helps the spirit, or thoughts of light, to be around me.  It’s best to do this in a quiet place (at least as you are starting out) to keep your mind focused and avoid distractions.  I try to write letters in the morning while my kids are asleep because, as wonderful as they are, they are my biggest distractions.  Get a piece of paper and something to write with and get to work on a letter to your Higher Power.  For me that Higher Power is God who I see as my Heavenly Father.

I know this is basically a prayer written out on paper but it helps give me the focused intent I was missing in my worship.  After you finish writing your letter, go to the next page and listen to your heart for your letter back.  When a thought comes to you, write it down.  It was hard for me at first because I didn’t recognize the difference between my thoughts and the thoughts that were coming.  They sounded so familiar that I was sure they had to be mine.  But any time I pushed one aside, thinking I had made it up on my own, nothing else would come.  So I’d hesitantly write the thought down and another would come.  This continued until the letter finished with, “Love, Heavenly Father”.  Mind blown.  It was so simple.  Why hadn’t I known about this forever ago?  I had always believed in personal revelation, but I didn’t realize how clear it could be.

Quick question: Why is it hard for us to recognize the difference between our thoughts and thoughts of light?  I’d like to pose a possible answer for you to ponder on.  Are we not beings of light?  Our soul—the innermost part of who we are, is it not made of light?  As sons and daughters of God, or beings of truth, won’t some of these thoughts be within us?  Can’t the guardians (angels) speak truth to our soul and those thoughts filter to our minds?  That’s something to ponder on.

I do know that as you continue to work on writing letters that your recognition of the spirit, or thoughts of light, will increase.  You will be able to recognize these truth thoughts with more clarity and in so doing, you will begin to be prompted throughout your day.  You will start to recognize the difference between wandering thoughts and inspired truth.

Realize that with writing letters there is a process of growth.  You may get a page the first time, or maybe a sentence, or even a single word.  But even a word is proof that it is possible.  If you don’t get a letter back it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t care.  Ask in your heart why you didn’t get a response and go from there.  It could be that you have some programs or filters that need to be worked on or updated.  The results vary from one person to another, so don’t be disheartened.  Know that as you work on this it will grow and you will be able to recognize thoughts of light more easily.

Will this work for you?  I believe it can.  But there’s one way to find out.