Why no mask?

This might be silly but there has been a lot out there about wearing facemasks and somebody posted why won't people just wear them? tonight and this was my response: I want to give a simple answer but let me explain it like this: If I were to say, "I don't believe they help" and leave it at that, you would think, "well, actually, they do help. I've seen statistics from This Credible Organization or listened to the science from This Trusted Person" but what if I have seen just as compelling information from sources I trust? If we are both using information and personal experience to make a decision and act on it, aren't we both right and doing something good? I have seen many posts on here (Facebook) about giving dirty looks or making snarky comments to somebody without a mask on and everybody cheers. Are we really treating a fellow human being with disdain after knowing only one fact about them (they don't have a mask on) and it's not only acceptable to do that but it's applauded? Many things in the world today are dividing us more than ever and giving us an Us vs. Them mentality. The longer social media is around, the less admirable it is to do your own research and form your own opinions and the more pressure is applied to be like everybody else. For example, it's not enough just to be opposed to racism and to act accordingly but now you have to attend a protest or contribute to some organization or publicly declare your thoughts on the matter X-number of times, etc. There is this most amazing Podcast, called The Happiness Lab. All the episodes are good but if you listen to The War for Kindness, it talks about the Us Vs. Them mentality taking over right now and they are more fun & eloquent than I can be. I do not wear a mask very often. I do on some occasions but not all the time just because a bunch of people tell me I should. I wash my hands a lot, don't go to the store very often (it turns out milk is NOT actually a necessity-ha ha), and practice social distancing to the best of my ability. When I'm at the store without my mask and find other people (probably the same ones giving me those angry looks for not wearing a mask) cannot seem to grasp the concept of social distancing because they brush my arm and seem to be all up in my face as I get a few tomatoes on a trip to the store I've delayed for 2 weeks, my first instinct is to think, "You idiot! Don't you know what social distancing is?" and then I look at them and realize that's somebody's sister and somebody's daughter and somebody's friend. They are my neighbor really and we might not be doing everything the same way but we are probably both doing the best we can.

Looking Back

2 years ago today, I was with my family at Niagara Falls. I had spent a few years wanting to take my family to the Sacred Grove but didn't know how to do it financially. I can honestly say I prayed diligently about it and a way opened up. It took a lot of time and hard work, as answers often do. We fixed up a house we had been renting out and sold it and we had enough money to get a new heater/AC for the house (which is never how somebody wants to spend $17,000 but we were lucky to have a way to pay it) and we found a tour group we chose to go with to see some church history sites because we priced out going on our own and it would cost MUCH more. Our first day was amazing. We loved the falls.

We went to many church history sites and learned much. I read D&C to the kids before we went and I found much of it very unsettling, especially when it came to financial details. In my mind, I had this whole list of issues that I never had until I read all of those scriptures. I was nervous going because I had nagging concerns but the trip changed my life. Every question I had was answered and something about being there, learning about the day-to-day lives of the saints, seeing their homes, and hearing how grateful the early saints were to sacrifice for the cause made everything fall into place in a way that I could understand and appreciate. Words sometimes can't do what being there and seeing things with your own eyes can do. I had a very humbling experience. This is the kids at the Sacred Grove.

The pinnacle of our journey was going to the Sacred Grove. It meant everything to me. We had a tour guide that never shut up and made the days a little long and we struggled a bit with him. I thought things would be different for the grove. Nope. He packed a microphone in and talked for a while but did say he'd give us a little quiet time to think and reflect. I thought "Hallelujah!" Maybe 2 minutes later he started talking again and wouldn't stop. I felt really mad. Our daughter was really mad. I decided we shouldn't let him determine what our Sacred Grove experience was like so we just left the group and walked out far enough that we couldn't hear him anymore and we had our own Sacred Grove moments. Eventually, people in the group left the main site and were walking around and we went back when it was quiet and peaceful. I had imagined lots of quiet time for reflection and a certain reverence about the whole experience. It wasn't so much that.

Hearing him drone on constantly with no quiet time to absorb and process was not a good fit for me. In the moment, the trip was not very enjoyable overall. Every day was exhausting. I cried on the plane ride home and wondered why that had to be my experience there and the experience my kids had when I had been hoping to help them with their testimonies. Now that it's been 2 years, I can see the trip very differently. First of all, the Sacred Grove experience just plain wasn't ideal. There is no way around that. However, I realized that most of the revelations and experiences Joseph Smith had were FAR from ideal and that never thwarted anything. I thought about the little ways over the years that I've gotten and strengthened my testimony and most of it is not ideal. Testimonies are born in poor and undesirable conditions. Not only can I make peace with what our experience turned out to be like, I'm genuinely grateful for it.

I was overwhelmed with information at the time but now as I look back, I remember quite a bit. We saw where Angel Moroni appeared to Joseph in his home. We sat in the School of the Prophets. Not only did we tour the Kirtland Temple but we talked to a couple of religious leaders there (that are like our quorum of the 70) and had fantastic and enlightening conversations. We saw the home Emma Smith came from and several of the places she lived after marrying Joseph. We saw the Grandin Printing Press, where the first Book of Mormons were printed. We went to Harmony, Pennsylvania and saw where the Aaronic Priesthood was restored. We went to where it's believed the Melchizedek Priesthood was restored. We stood on the banks of the Susquehanna River and even got to stop and enjoy a brief time in Amish Country. It was an incredible experience to have had! We went to the Hill Cumorah and my boys rolled down the hill. A group of youth was there and some of them rolled down the hill and even complained about getting grass stains and I loved that! I can't believe our trip was 2 years ago but I'm so glad we had the chance to do it and even though I wasn't thrilled at the time, in the long-run it became a memorable thing to have done.

Great Speech

I listened to this great speech by Josh Clark, the host of Stuff You Should Know. It's for the graduating class this year & I looked for the words but couldn't find them so I did my best to transcribe it myself and here it is: Dear Students, congratulations on reaching this point in your life. It's a big deal & you should be proud of yourself. Now that you've gotten here, I've come to fill you in on a little secret. You've been told practically your whole life now how special you are...& that is true. You are special. You are unique & you're important. But your parents & teachers haven't been telling you the whole truth all of your life. They've only been showing you a part of the bigger picture.

Surely you've noticed hints of this..like when you got older and suddenly the stories they told in history class began to get a lot darker. They told the same stories when you were younger. They just arranged the picture without ALL of the pieces to keep you from truly understanding and perhaps you resented it when you realized the whole truth had been kept from you. That's understandable. Most of us do feel that way. But don't waste your time stewing on this. Each generation does it to the next.

They think it protects the young when really, it just keeps things as they are. The important thing here is to learn from that experience because people are going to continue to do this to you your whole life. People will try to lay out the pieces that fit together to make the picture THEY want you to see. It's a way to get people to do what you want them to and throughout your life, you will get this from all sorts of people: people you're friends with, people you love, people on television, people on the internet, people running your government, people running other people's government. Your actions & your thoughts are powerful and influential and people want to sway them. This means that you will have to learn to think for yourself. Do your own research. Seek out people who are experts on the topic. Talk to other people. In this day & age, it's not enough to trust your eyes or ears. You have to put in work to find the truth.

Don't be lazy. Find the truth. It's not necessarily what's on the news. It's also not necessarily in some video that says the news is lying. Always remember this: whatever someone is showing you, they're probably only showing you part of the picture. It's up to you to fill in the rest of the pieces that make up the whole truth and maybe you'll never find it. That's okay. It will be exhausting to spend your life constantly searching for the truth, constantly paranoid that every person you speak to is manipulating you. Don't do that. That's not what life is about and people aren't that mean at their core. Most people don't even realize they're showing you an incomplete picture and usually they're not doing it for nefarious purposes when they do. Instead, the vast majority of people are just passing along an incomplete picture that someone else showed them.

This happens a lot. It's a big problem. So to keep from dying from exhaustion by age 30, all haggard and paranoid and upset, do two things. 1. Decide if something is important enough to you or the world to search out the missing pieces to find the truth of the matter. Sometimes all it takes is an effective google search and taking the time to read a couple of reliable articles. But remember that even if you do search high & low, you may never find the truth about whatever it is you're trying to understand so it better be important if you're going to go looking for the truth of a matter. 2. If it's not important, shrug it off. You will never know everything. You'll never know most things. Some things will be important enough for you to search for. Most will not be. If you decide it's not that important then, and this is really important, don't pass along the incomplete picture to others. When you do that, you're shaping someone else's view of things. They trust you. They know you're a good person with the good of the world at heart so why would you lie? Throughout your life, people will listen to what comes out of your mouth so be careful that you believe in what you say. Back to what I was saying before about your parents and teachers giving you an incomplete picture. I hope you understand a little better now that they don't mean any harm by it. They might think they were protecting you all these years by keeping ugly truths from you. But those ugly truths, as hard as they can be to take, are what allow us to grow as people. If you see a beautiful flower, you admire it and are glad that it's there. If you see a weed growing though, you pull it but if the people around you are telling you that the weed you're seeing is actually a flower, it's hard to know otherwise and it's even harder to know that the weed should be pulled.

Remember that your parents and teachers weren't lying to you because they wanted to deceive you. Their parents and their teachers showed them pictures of weeds that grow in our world and told them that they were flowers, too.

And their parents' parents and their teachers' teachers told them. Some weeds have been called flowers for so long that no matter what you say to some people, they will fight you tooth & nail that the weed is a flower.

That's their truth and people are deeply protective of what they hold to be true, even when it's not true at all. Part of the reason they'll fight and argue with you when you tell them a flower is actually a weed is just simple laziness. It takes a lot more effort to pull a weed than it does to pretend it's a flower. But the bigger reason they'll argue is because they don't want to believe they've been wrong all this time. The thing is no matter how long everyone's called a weed a flower, there's some aspects to a weed that a flower doesn't have that will always give a weed away, like hurting people. If something that people you know say is a flower harms other people, it's really a weed. Weeds can hurt people in all kinds of ways.

Maybe they give rights to some people but not to others. Maybe they make it so some people have more wealth or power than they could ever possibly use while some people have so little they can barely scrape by. Other weeds may get so that when some people hurt other people, or other life or the planet, they don't get in trouble for it. If you suspect a flower is really a weed and you look at it closely enough, you'll see that the people who say it's a flower are the ones who get all the benefits from it. You'll also find there's a whole other group of people out there who've been calling it a weed all this time.

It's just that nobody's listened to them and sometimes it's even worse than that. Sometimes those people are told that their own flowers are weeds. So what does all of this have to do with you being special and unique? Excellent question and actually, that's the whole point of everything. It's not a lie that you are special & unique. You are both of those things. But not simply because you're you as you've been led to believe all these years. That's an incomplete picture of the whole truth. You are special and unique because you are born a human being. All human beings are special & unique, not just as individuals but the whole human race. Every one of us is special. Every one of us is unique and the same goes not just for human beings but for all living things.

Life is special and in this way, every single person that you will ever meet in your entire life is as valuable and worthwhile as you are. Some of these other people that you'll meet will disagree with you and some of them may harm you. Just because a person is unique & special, doesn't mean they're good. But as hard as it can be to remember sometimes, never forget that on the whole, human beings are generally good. They generally care about each other. They generally want what's best and most just. Don't forget that humanity is generally good. It's just that sometimes other people don't recognize a flower as really a weed.