First of all, we need to get in shape. After all the tacos in Mexico, we need to buckle down and get to walking. Europe is going to be physically demanding, and we want to be ready. So we are going to be hiking a lot with the kids.
We also need to just stabilize the financial boat a bit. Preparation for this trip was quite expensive, and we’ve got three months in Europe coming up. So we are going to get back to selling granola. It was successful in Michigan, and we think it can be successful here as well. We would also like to try selling homemade salsa. Betty’s is exceptional.
Part of stabilizing financially is selling the old Sequoia. But we don’t have the title for it yet (we left it in Michigan), so we will hold off on pushing too hard on that for a week or so.
Finally, this is a good time for the kids to learn some stuff. We hope they can do some reading and learning while we are here.
After our walk, we talked with the kids about our plans, and I think they are on board -- although they aren’t super excited about reading.
We fell behind a couple of days of seminary this week, so we did two classes today to make up for it. The first one was on Nephi’s response to Lehi’s decision to take his family into the wilderness. I think we often assume it was easy for Nephi to follow his dad, but 1 Nephi 2 talks about how Nephi prayed to the Lord for understanding and that the Lord visited him and softened his heart. So his heart must have been hard before. The Lord doesn’t always expect us to immediately accept everything, but He does want us to be like Nephi and to pray for understanding.
Later, we did our second seminary lesson on 1 Nephi 3:7 -- “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded ...”
It’s a classic for a reason.
In the evening, Betty and Dad and I had a really good talk about some mixed feelings Betty has been having about the trip. She is concerned about some things in Mexico, and she wonders if she should stay in the US so she can be closer to that situation.
In the end, however, there is just not much she can do but pray for God to help, and that conversation led us to a discussion of pilgrimage. We talked about how the whole point of pilgrimage is to draw closer to God and to ask Him for help with our most difficult burdens. On one level, it makes no sense. What does my walking to Santiago have to do with problems in Mexico. In that regard, it makes me think about fasting. What does my not eating have to do with anything? And yet, we know that fasting is a powerful way to focus our attention and faith. So pilgrimage is like fasting in that the physical effort allows us to focus on the purpose of the journey, and that focuses our faith. In a very real way, this pilgrimage to Santiago maybe exactly what Betty needs in order to help focus her faith and allow her to trust that God will take care of things when she can’t be there.
