English Teacher

Almost everyday, the boys hop in my car after school complaining about one person, their English teacher.  I listen to their complaints and then laugh as I think about how I should email her and thank her for helping my kids get into a good college one day.  But I don't want to email her because she would probably critique my awful writing since I didn't have a teacher like her when I was in middle school.

At the very beginning of the year, she handed them each a single jelly bean and asked them to write 12 sentences about that jelly bean.  I think tears were shed when they found out that they would have to revise those 12 sentences about 5 times to take out "insanely boring words" like do, get, give, have, take, make, etc. Then they have to take out "dead words"

like great, small, sad, nice, and happy.  Then they have to rewrite sentences that start with I, the, or an.  

They also have to memorize a helping verb song.  After all this work last week, they were both disappointed to receive only a "progressing" or a "C" on their work.  They are hoping for a higher grade this week.  They spent hours last night rewriting sentences and then woke up at 6 am this morning to continue working.  I love it!

Zach's First Sacrament Meeting Talk

I was asked to speak about finding happiness so I based my talk on  the Quest for happiness by Elder Jeffery R. Holland. In this article he spoke on four different ways to find true happiness. Here are some of the things he says.

 I do not think God in his glory or the angels of heaven or the prophets on earth intended to make us happy all the time, every day in every way, given the testing and trial this earthly realm is intended to provide. As President James E. Faust (1920–2007) once phrased it: “Happiness is not given to us in a package that we can just open up and consume. Nobody is ever happy 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”1 But my reassurance to you today is that in God’s plan we can do very much to find the happiness we do desire. We can take certain steps, we can form certain habits, we can do certain things that God and history tell us lead to happiness.
In short, your best chance for being happy is to do the things that happy people do. Live the way happy people live. Walk the path that happy people walk. If you do, your chance to find joy in unexpected moments, to find peace in unexpected places, to find the help of angels when you didn’t even know they knew you existed, improves exponentially. Here are at least a few ideas about how one might live “after the manner of happiness.”

1.  Live the gospel of Jesus Christ
Above all else, ultimate happiness, true peace, and anything even remotely close to scriptural joy are found first, foremost, and forever in living the gospel of Jesus Christ.

2. Choose to Be Happy.
Learn as quickly as you can that so much of your happiness is in your hands, not in events or circumstances or fortune or misfortune. That is part of what the battle for agency was over in the premortal councils of heaven.

3. Don’t Be Negative, Mean, or Angry.
You can never, worlds without end, build your happiness on someone else’s unhappiness. That is what bullying is. That is what catty remarks are. That is what arrogance and superficiality and exclusiveness are. Perhaps we think if we are negative enough, or cynical enough, or just plain mean enough, then expectations won’t be too high; we can keep everyone down to a flaw-filled level and therefore our flaws won’t be so glaring. Happy people aren’t negative or cynical or mean, so don’t plan on that being part of the “manner” of happiness. 

4.Work Hard and Study.
One last suggestion when there are so many others we should consider: Nephi said that in an effort to find happiness in their new land after their 30 years of trouble, “I, Nephi, did cause my people to be industrious, and to labor with their hands” . By contrast, those from whom they fled “became an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety” .
Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)—no one comes to true happiness except by Him.
If you want to be happy in school, or on a mission, or in a marriage—work at it. Learn to work. Serve diligently. 

God Wants You to Be Happy.

The Book of Mormon teaches many powerful, provocative truths. One of them is that the nature of God is synonymous with the nature of happiness (see Alma 41:11). It also teaches, therefore, that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10). So I ask you to reject transgression in order to live consistent with the nature of God, which is the nature of true happiness. I encourage you and applaud you in pursuing the path that leads to happiness. You can’t find it any other way. Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)—no one comes to true happiness except by Him.


I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen