My Family in Black and White

Families don't have to match and we don't have to look like each other to love each other. Our family is not defined by our genes. It is built and maintained through love.

I would love more people to come sit around my kitchen table and listen to my children talk and laugh and discuss life and sometimes fight. Even when feelings are hurt it is never for long, because we say sorry and forgive each other. I'm not blind to the racism and prejudice in the world. I just choose to focus on all the good people and pity the ignorant and hateful ones. As a matter of fact, send them to my house! Give me one evening, some of my homemade rolls and pomegranate jelly, and Eli's silly faces and belly laughs, even the hardest man in the world couldn't help but walk away feeling changed for the better. 

I wonder about the world we live in.

How true is this statement!  I do wonder about this world that I send my children out into.  The voices from the Great and Spacious Building are louder than ever and temptations were never greater.  I am grateful for the wisdom and counsel from prophets that has helped us create a Gospel-centered home. We aren't perfect but we are precise.  We rarely miss nightly family scripture and prayer and have recently added watching 1 conference address before we start reading our scriptures.  Doing this hasn't guaranteed us that we would be free from trials or that our children wouldn't transgress God's commandments but we have felt the blessing of having the Spirit in our home and the peace it brings! At the end of the day (some more chaotic than others) we all gather to talk, pray, read and many times laugh (thank you Colby)!

End of the year festivities

So apparently I retain very little information in my brain! I had to totally retrain myself on how to blog!  

Eli was so excited to head off with the 5th grade to SeaCamp! 

He got out of the car and basically ran to the school, leaving me in the dust.  Of course I was much more worried about him being away from us than he was.  Which is good I guess...better than him crying about it ;)

Thoughts on marriage

Our Father knew exactly what He was doing when He created us. He made us enough alike to love each other but enough different that we would need to unite our strengths and stewardships to create a whole. Neither man nor woman is perfect or complete without the other."-Sheri Dew

The Family: A Proclamation to the World

WE, THE FIRST PRESIDENCY and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.

ALL HUMAN BEINGS—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

How wonderful is that beginning of the Proclamation to the World?!? To know we are the spirit children of God and are created in his image. Think what a happy place this world would be if people could see this in themselves! 

I am so grateful that I am blessed to be surrounded by these beautiful people and to know that we are sealed together for eternity. 

I'm back!

I am finally back to share the adventures of the Decker clan! I have taken a 7 year siesta! My motivation came from a religion class I am taking called The Eternal Family and in it we study the The Family: A Proclamation to the World. So in response to an assignment I am going to begin blogging again. Something I have wanted to do for a long time. Sometimes I need a little push to do those things that I keep putting off.

The class I am taking is part of the Pathways program through BYU Idaho. If you are interesting in getting a college degree its an awesome and inexpensive way to go no matter where you are on your college path (at the beginning or a junior like me)!

http://www.byui.edu/about/defining-aspects/pathway