The Atonement, which can reclaim each one of us, bears no scars. That means that no matter what we have done or where we have been or how something happened, if we truly repent, He has promised that He would atone. And when He atoned, that settled that. There are so many of us who are thrashing around, as it were, with feelings of guilt, not knowing quite how to escape. You escape by accepting the Atonement of Christ, and all that was heartache can turn to beauty and love and eternity . . . unlike the case of our mortal bodies, when the repentance process is complete, no scars remain because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Boyd. K. Packer.
It was settled in the Heavens long before a man was born
that the Savior would atone for sins, that no one need to mourn.
Poor choices and black passions have begrimed us one and all;
yet through the grace of Jesus Christ we get up from our Fall.
So do not fear that you have sinned beyond the mortal pale;
when properly forgiven there's no penalty, no jail.
He is the Great Physician who has healing in His wings.
Embrace His promise to remove all scars and deadly stings!
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6:54 a.m.
I am going to Fresh Market to buy a fresh bagel, with these words haunting me from General Conference 22 years ago:
Some mornings my stomach gets a little dicey from the pills I have to take on an empty stomach. But a bagel with cream cheese always has a soothing effect. And I'd like to be able to walk to Church this morning without worrying about having an accident. Of course, I could have simply bought a bagel yesterday -- but then it wouldn't have that newborn savor I relish so much.
So I go from praising the sin-cleansing nature of Christ's atonement to committing a minor infraction just to satisfy my belly. Perhaps my friends and children can excuse such behavior, but I'm already depressed about it before going out the door . . .
On my Church mission in Thailand I worried about breaking the Sabbath by eating out, as well. Being a Buddhist country, they have no conception of the Sabbath -- so Sundays are wide open. Sunday was our maid's day off. Yes, we had a maid who cooked, cleaned, and did our laundry. I felt like John D. Hackensacker.
So on Sundays my companion and I would dine out, all three meals. Canned food, ramen noodles, and microwavable fare had not yet penetrated the raw environs where we knocked on doors and held street meetings. So it was either eat out or starve. I talked this over with Elder Heier one day, and we decided to carry our own lunch on Sundays when we went out tracting in the broiling tropical sun, and subsist on fruits and leftover rice for our breakfast and dinner. We bought 3-tier stainless steel stackable lunch pails and had the maid fill them with curry and Chinese pickles and other goodies on Saturday night. We didn't bother to refrigerate them, since our maid used an obscene amount of msg -- enough to theoretically disable every bacillus in a ten yard radius. Besides, once filled and stacked they didn't fit in our cramped little fridge.
That Sunday we walked through an entire muu baan -- a gated suburban community -- and didn't find a single person home. Sensibly, they were all at the beach. At noon we found a shady golden shower tree to sit under and opened our lunches. Noxious steam and gas escaped from our canisters with an evil hiss, but like dimwits we went ahead and ate it all up anyways. It didn't take long for our innards to reenact the Battle of Bull Run. And brother, did we run! Elder Heier and I were hors de combat for the next several days. When our mission president, Paul Morris, found out what we had done in our zealous pursuit of Sabbath purity, he patiently instructed us to forgo the deadly brown bagging and stick to the inexpensive noodle shops that lined every rural road . . .
10:03 a.m.
Well, sir, I did NOT go to Fresh Market for a bagel. I had cream cheese on crackers instead, with a V-8, and felt very sanctified for doing so. Then I strolled leisurely to Church, taking a dozen photos or so on the way to inspire my haiku. At Church I realized today is the Primary Program -- where the children take over the Sacrament Meeting with songs and stammering speeches. So I bailed after the first fifteen minutes. If any of my own grand kids had been in the program I would have stuck around. But as it was I made a bee line straight back home to push ping pong balls around in my vinegar pool. Nemo Sine Vitio Est.
2:18 p.m.
All the pickle soup is eaten up -- all nine people who had some said it was good. I put a meal out in the lobby most Sundays. Most of the jello with gooseberries and marshmallows is gone as well. I guess I should be pleased that I whipped up a big meal that gave nearly a dozen old people a pleasant break from their own cooking. But the skies have turned a flat disappointed grey, and I'm lacking the savor of life the way a cow lacks it until it finds a salt block. Another day lacking transcendence, which I've been searching for most of my life -- only to find the Janitor's Closet at the end of my quest instead.
And the vinegar pool is full of dead bugs. Fool insects; don't they know any better than to monkey around with acetic acid?
I'm gonna quit writing for the rest of the day, to - to - to - to what? Sit immobile like a slug? But a slug doesn't sit; what has it got to sit on? It doesn't lean on anything or lay down. It piles itself on itself, then spreads out like an amoeba or spilled corn syrup. The freshness I started out with today has gone AWOL. I need a good movie; something schmaltzy and ethnic. I'll watch Irene Dunne in 'I Remember Mama' on YouTube -- I can stream it for three dollars. I watched that movie with Amy years ago and I still remember her bright laughter during parts of the film. I loved to hear her laugh; it's been nearly 30 years since I've heard that pleasant sound. I could rarely make her laugh myself. Her brother Wiley could make her laugh until she wet herself, but I could hardly get a giggle out of her. So when I did hear her laugh it was always a happy grace note to my day. In the early days of our marriage we would go to bed early and read to each other. She would read Jane Austen to me, and I would read James Herriot to her -- she loved his puckish humor around barnyard animals, giving out with a fluttery chuckle that was both innocent and arousing.
Joom, being a Thai, loved laughing for laughing's sake. She could go from raging turmoil to guffawing delight in an instant -- for no discernible reason that I could see. One unbearably hot day, when we were both out of sorts, she warned me not to take another handful of her dog Neepoo's food from the bag to feed to the fish in the pond. I said okay, khrab. Then when I thought she wasn't looking I grabbed a handful of dog food, ran out to the fish pond, and began tossing nuggets into the water -- watching first the minnows come up to investigate, then the bigger fish to eat the minnows, then the solemn soft shell turtles to push every other thing aside to engulf the disintegrating nuggets. Enjoying myself, I didn't notice Joom creeping up on me, her scowl like a thundercloud, with a bamboo stick. With a crude curse she let me have one across the back of my legs, then chased me around the fish pond with every intention of raising some hearty welts on my farang hide. Half way around the pond I tripped over a liana vine, crashing into the mud. Joom jumped on top of me to continue her punishment but as she lifted the bamboo cane a gust of laughter overwhelmed her. We rolled around in the muck while I tried to take off her blouse, until Neepoo took it upon herself to start licking the mud off our faces. Joom was still laughing uproariously when she got up to go shower. I was smiling, too; but not laughing quite as much -- she'd left some very sincere weals on me.
I don't remember my mom and dad laughing very much. At least not with each other. When they were with their own crowd they yukked it up like normal folks, but when it was just the two of them (and us kids) they clammed up and lost their sense of humor. I'm sure that's part of the reason I always wanted to be a clown; to get them laughing together. When Amy and I stopped being able to entertain each other our relationship suffered a terminal stroke.
When I was buying vinegar at Fresh Market yesterday I also picked up a TIME Magazine special edition, called 'The Science of Laughter.' It set me back thirteen bucks. I haven't delved into it yet -- it'll probably just lay around the living room like a piece of fusty bric-a-brac until I throw it out. After being a circus clown for so long, I kinda know all there is to know about any science that goes along with laughter:
When you're with friends or in an intimate setting you work as fast as you can to get the laugh. And you never repeat yourself if someone doesn't get the joke the first time. Just keep going. That's the most effective way to get a laugh.
With big impersonal crowds, you work real slow. Slower than you think you should. I remember watching Otto Griebling, the great Ringling tramp clown, sitting on an elephant tub during come in -- when the audience is finding their seats and getting their popcorn before the show starts. He patiently knitted a formless skein of yarn, holding it up whenever a busty young woman walked by to see if it might fit her generous proportions. He did so in a slow, workmanlike manner -- dead serious. The crowd loved it, giving him a standing ovation when he finally shambled off at the tweet of the ringmaster's whistle. So I kept slowing down my own clowning, until it seemed like slow motion to me -- and that's when I finally succeeded in getting the real belly laughs out of a crowd.
Sunday evening; nobody calls, nobody visits. Should I watch Supergirl on Netflix or read a book to improve my mind? Seems like I can only read for an hour at a time anymore. After that my eyes start to smart and my attention wanders atrociously. It wasn't always that way.
On my mission in Thailand there was a snafu at the Mission Office, so I was left without a companion the very last week I was there. I was marooned at the office, since missionaries could not go out proselytizing by themselves -- they tried to give me some gainful employment. I don't remember what I did -- maybe lick envelopes -- but whatever it was I botched it, so I was told to sit in a corner quietly and maybe read a book or something. President Harvey Brown, who took over from Paul Morris, had a ton of Church books, which he kept at the office, so I dived right in. It beat tracting those hot muggy Bangkok streets, so narrow that a tuk tuk might run me over at any moment, or a rabid dog sink its fangs into my tender white shin.
I remember starting with a huge volume: MAN: His Origin and Destiny, by Joseph Fielding Smith. An anti-evolution tome that exhaustively examined the fakes and flummery of early evolutionists like Huxley and Thomas Hunt Morgan. Then I moved on to 'The Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith' by N.B. Lundwall -- a hair-raising account of the grisly end of some of the Prophet's worst enemies. I immersed myself in the Cleon Skousen trilogy:
The First 2000 years; The Third Thousand Years; and The Fourth Thousand Years. 'The Miracle of Forgiveness' by Spencer W. Kimball moved me to tears. I inhaled all five volumes of 'Out of the Best Books.' I read from nine in the morning until seven at night, with breaks only for eating and the bathroom. I didn't want to stop reading Church theology and history, and almost went into shock when it was time to get on the plane back to Minneapolis and I had to leave all those books behind.
As President Brown shook my hand and bade me godspeed at the Don Muang Airport, he asked me what I wanted to do when I got home -- try college, perhaps, or would I go back to the circus?
"I want to be a barber" I told him, truthfully.
"Whatever for?" he asked, thunderstruck.
"They always have a lot of reading material around their shop" I replied confidently, "and I want to keep reading like I did this past week."
He gazed at me shrewdly, saw that I was actually sincere, and gave me some profound advice:
"Elder" he told me, with his hand on my shoulder, "girls don't like men that read too many books."
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A friend in Thailand, with family ties here in Provo/Orem, emailed me back about barbers, thus:
ohhhhh Tim... you would have made a great Barber!
The barber from my youth, Don Dick, a Menonite with a sharp tongue, learned the trade in the Navy! I like to get my haircut by him just to have the conversation and hear his jokes and sarcasm!
Maybe you should go to barber school now and start cutting heads in your front room. You could use the Perpetual Education Fund to pay for it. Seriously! You'd make a great barber!
So, girls don't like men that read too many books, eh....what about men who "write too many books?"
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