Happiness.

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Dear Roice, Ben, Paul, Melanie, Sara, and Rob,

cc: file, Mom, Sara and Des, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Diane Cluff, Tony Hafen, Claude and Katherine Warner, Forest and Amy Warner, Ivan and Chell Warner, and Eric and Renee Miner

Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea, belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail box at any time.

"This weekend was the semi-annual Katy Stake Conference. Saturday evening the visiting General Authority, Elder Harvey Gardner, a boiler welder from Page, Arizona, started his talk with the words `We should be the happiest people on earth.' Then he proceeded to help everyone there know how happy he is. Our ward choir was singing and I was less than impressed by his appearance. Reminded me of a friend describing when he went to a Carl Haas presentation and when Carl came out on stage there was this gasp as this short, awkward looking man appeared. Carl looked at the audience and said, `You don't look like I expected either.'

Well, as Elder Gardner started to talk it became obvious he is a giant. He talked about President Kimballs prediction the iron wall will crumble and the bamboo walls will fall occuring two decades before they happened and when conventional wisdom said the only way they would come down was with a nuclear assalt. He talked about family mission statements, sharing his own family mission statement. And he told a lot of jokes as part of his talk. For instance, he was stressing the importance of daily family prayer and he referred to how much problem Brigham Young had getting his family together and to be quiet for a prayer. He reported Brigham said it is sometimes easier to curse. When he talked about the importance of weekly Family Home Evenings he said `We always had a Family Home Evening, but sometimes the opening prayer was Monday night football.' Then he got talking about being a football coach and how that is the reason he is such a good guy now. For instance, when they had a critical game to win he promised the Lord he would repent of all of his wrong doings if He would just let them win this one game. Sometimes the promises came down to the next first down. He was describing a friend who had a 35 year old son that had not married and how each Fast Sunday they would fast and pray for their son and brother to find a righteous wife. They had a little indian foster child living with them, and the first Fast Sunday after the son got married he came into the room to find his child pouring a bowl of cereal. He reminded him it was Fast Sunday and the little boy looked up and said `Mark already got married!'

Today he was saying what a good Stake President we have in the Katy Stake. After he had gone on for a while he kind of stopped and said, `But I am a little worried about President Jones. I've ridden in his little blue Porche. It's awful close to breaking the word of wisdom.' Then without missing a beat he talked about his pickups and how he needed to have a good pickup. In fact, how he hopes there will be pickups in heaven. He described how he let one of his sons drive his new pickup around the field before they got all filled up with metal. Said his son could just barely reach the floorboard and he got the truck stuck in the sand. Elder Gardner got a fork lift, hooked up a chain, told his son to really goose it when he started to pull on the pickup. The son did and the new pickup backed right into the fork lift, putting one of the forks through the tailgate. He walked around and started in on his son when the son looked up and said `How come you let little kids drive your pickup?'

Sometimes when I meet or listen to someone who is so enthusiastic and able to so fully express their joy in life, I get discouraged and feel like a failure. Thank goodness these feelings usually don't last long. I recognize I have let myself get down about stuff I really have little control over for the last several years. An important part of the reason I started writing these Thoughtlets was to let each of you kids see the positive, consistent, striving side of me. A side you might not see as much as I would like in our daily interactions. Part of the optimism I carry for the future is because I really am pretty much a happy person. Part of it is because I, like each of you, had a lot of happiness in my childhood. And part of the optimism is because I see such promise in each of you and expect you will each do much better than I have done in most parts of your lives. I recognize that too often I start to lecture and have criticized or made a sarcastic comment when there has been something much less than a forklift put through something much less significant than a tailgate. I hope we can all learn to make a joke about those times and to get after the next phase of our lifes with some zest.

Sort of like the way Big Roice moved one night when I drove Dad's pickup over to the bus stop to pick him up. He actually jumped in the big ditch by the side of the Union Field Road because he couldn't see anyone driving the pickup and he thought it was going to hit him. It was a real highlight in my life when I could put in the clutch and still see over the steering wheel of the pickup. Hope we all have a great week."

I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life. If you ever want to download any of these thoughtlets, they are posted at http://www.walden3d.com/hrnmen or you can e-mail me at rnelson@walden3d.com.

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 1997 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.