WATCHING AND WAITING - MOTIVATIONS

For years I have gotten swatted down by the "mushy in the middles" (the 1/3 of the 2/3s that made it this far - and that comes out to 2/9ths if my math is correct......) who do always tell me not to worry about all the stuff on this blog.  First of all, to a degree, we should never worry; once the worrying has done its job and brought us to a state of readiness.  If you are prepared, you need not fear.  This state of preparedness encompasses both the spiritual (first) - and then the physical preparedness.

In FACT, we have all been commanded to be diligently watching and waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom and are our scriptures NOT filled with the signs of His coming?  Does that not tell us something?  Or is it purely to fill some blank pages and to keep us uselessly occupied?  Passivity is not on the list of states of being.  Either we are moving forward or we are sliding backward.  There is no neutrality in the battle - no sitting on a fence and doing nothing as the day goes by.

So, I still live my life and I have this hobby - and I tick one of the big things off the bucket list and one of the last things the Savior said before he left the Old World.....  I have a unique position that allows me to do this - a job that has a lot of down time along with a nice internet connection and a raging desire to never get caught with my pants down.  When I fail in life, I am very hard on myself.  The hardest thing for me to do is to get blind-sided by something - totally missing the boat.  When it affects those over whom I have stewardship (my family), and they suffer, it affects me profoundly.  I identified this shortly after I was married and had my first child and realized I had to put my biggest efforts into this area, because failure and letting an innocent child of mine down would hit me particularly hard.  My wife?  Sure, letting her down would be hard, but not as hard as a babe in arms.  My older teen agers?  Not as much as a babe in arms - because they have more of their agency and will have to soon sink or swim on their own.  My job there is done for the most part (on the big things).  I am sure when my 9 month old passed away (I was the one to lay him down in his crib that night), I was given that dream or vision before we found him the next morning so that I could have peace of mind and truly not drive myself mad thinking that I could have/should have done something different to make sure he woke up the next morning.  If my wife had laid him down, she is the type that would have never reconciled herself til the day she died (without some sort of external knowledge that it was supposed to happen that way). 

So, in a way, this blog is a major outgrowth of that desire to protect/serve those I love.  Those that come here to read, probably do so for the same motivations.  There are people we love who we are trying to find a sure path through what is coming for.  So, when I get a criticism (usually from a member of the Church or a well-meaning friend outside of the Church), I just blow them off and pray that they get the vision.  I just got a comment on my "defense of Spencer" piece I did a year ago saying that the commenter had seen, in vision, all the stuff Spencer spoke of including parts of Provo and Orem under water.  When he read the book, it was just a simple confirmation to him of what he had been given earlier.  So, we have two camps - those who have "seen" and believe and those who have not, and who choose to ignore and throw up barricades to other honest seekers of the truth and knowledge of what is coming in short order.