1. One of my Church responsibilities as a member of the Stake High Council is to speak in Sacrament Meeting (communion worship service) in one of the Wards (congregations) on an assigned topic. I enjoy the entire speaking process, including the research, figuring out how to approach the subject, assembling the talk, and delivering it. There are always two High Council speakers and, as I am the more junior, I speak first. Quite often there are one or two youth speakers ahead of me (but sometimes not!) so I need to be fairly flexible on how much time I take for my talk. Today was a speaking day and my assigned topic was “Preparing to Worship”. I had a pretty good talk put together, but then the events in the Sacrament Meeting caused me to completely revise my talk in my head. Despite that, it came together and I left sufficient time for my speaking companion, although I could have pontificated for quite a while longer. The last speaker always has to be the most flexible. On a couple of occasions when I was the last speaker, I’ve been left with less than five minutes and once it was time for the meeting to be finished when my turn came (I just stood, bore a 10 second testimony of our Savior, and sat down).
2. There’s a teapot tempest about religion going on in our area. It seems that a group calling themselves “The Church of the Firstborn and Heaven’s Gate” recently relocated en masse from Magna, Utah to Ft. Hall on the Shoshone – Bannock Indian reservation. The sect’s leaders consider themselves to be the two witnesses spoken of in the New Testament and one of them says that he is the Holy Ghost and the father of Adam incarnate. They made application for a permit to build a dormitory on their land. It would be a three-story building with about 40 rooms. Granting the permit means granting a zoning variance, meaning that a public hearing was required. The hearing got quite animated with people speaking out because of the things they’ve heard about the group and they didn’t want that sort of thing going on around here. What they’re hearing comes from a former leader in the group who left them and since has been crusading against the sect. They’ve been investigated by every Federal and State agency possible with no findings of any wrong doings. The decision on the variance and the permit has been postponed until late next week. All this would just be amusing except for the wild and almost vicious attacks on the sect being made by some Mormons in the community. All too soon we forget what we went through to gain sufficient freedom to exercise our religious beliefs. They’re law abiding citizens. We may think they are misguided and perhaps deluded, but that doesn’t have any bearing. “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may” (Articles of Faith #11). It’s well for us to remember that!
3. Those previous two thoughts got rather lengthy. One of the youth speakers today remarked that she somehow had gotten onto the Bishop’s short-list of speakers because every couple of months she’s been asked to speak again. She wondered what she needed to do to get off the list and then proceeded to give a very good talk on friendship. I think she’s still on the short-list!
4. Every six months we have a Priesthood Leadership Meeting at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. On the Saturday afternoon preceding the meeting all of the Priesthood Leadership are invited to attend a meeting with a member of the Temple Presidency followed by a session at the Idaho Falls Temple (if everyone came, there would be about 140 men). I enjoy the Chapel meetings because I usually get asked to play the organ for the meeting. That means for about a half an hour I get to be in the Temple and play many of my favorite Hymns and everyone there is quiet, reverent, and listening to the music. Yesterday was the Temple meeting and this morning was the Leadership meeting. I was able to play the organ for both meetings. It’s been a very nice weekend.
5. Even though it’s Random Sunday Thoughts, it doesn’t all have to be about Church things. For instance, I’ve been working for several days on our hot tub. This is the time of the year when I need to drain the tub and put in new water for the winter. That has been complicated by the fact that a hive or more of yellow-jacket wasps have taken up residence inside the panel where the hot tub controls are located. So I’ve needed first to exterminate the wasps. When I got the panels off, I found a number of very large nests. They’ve all been sprayed, but I noticed today wasps are still making their way into another part of the paneling. According to what I’ve read online, as winter approaches, all the wasps in a hive except the queen die, but she lives to start all over again next year. That means not only spraying the nests to kill as many as possible, but also knocking them down, getting them out, and crushing them before putting them into the trash. This is not fun.
6. Flu season has not yet started, but the “normal” flu vaccine is available. Most places advertising flu shots (and this isn’t the Swine Flu H1N1 vaccine … that’s still coming) were charging about $25. I saw in the newspaper that the Senior Citizen’s Center was having a health fair and any adult could come in and get a shot for $20. I went and had a much better experience than a couple of years ago. I actually felt and saw nothing. I didn’t even know he was done. I want to find the same guy to do the H1N1 vaccine when it becomes available.
7. I am very unhappy with all the vicious political attacks going on. The bickering and maneuvering for political advantage (happening regardless of what is right or what is true) needs to stop. Our health insurance system is broken. It isn’t the “best in the world” … far from it. I’ve written to all my congressional delegation expressing my wish for the divisiveness to end and for bipartisan work to begin. It can begin with me. It can begin with them.
8. I have some fairly strong feelings about the responsibility of companies for their employees. Our labor laws and regulations don’t address, and probably shouldn’t have to address the moral integrity that should be the hallmark of leaders. Nevertheless I was stunned to read about what I consider to be a nefarious exploitation of employees here in our town. A local pharmacy built a new building as they had outgrown their previous location and wanted to focus on pharmacology rather than the usual drugstore merchandizing. In their new location they built two businesses. On the ground floor they developed a retail pharmacy business focusing individual customers. Upstairs they built a wholesale pharmacy business to service institutions in the area. Both businesses were thriving. Last week they announced that they had sold the wholesale business to a larger company out east somewhere for a substantial amount of money and then proceeded to LAY OFF THE 14 EMPLOYEES who worked in the wholesale business. The new company only wanted the customers. They’ll service those customers from existing offices in Utah. I consider this a reprehensible action on the part of the owners. It was their idea and their management that got the business going, but it was those 14 employees who made it work. The owners pocket a substantial chunk of money. The employees who made it possible leave with nothing. There’s something very wrong with this picture. I will NEVER do business with that pharmacy, ever.
9. At my Rotary Club meeting earlier this week the Engineer for this district in the Idaho State Department of Transportation talked to us about the road work going on in our area. Nina and I have been intrigued by the work going on east of McCammon. I think there needs to be some kind of a website that shows what the end results will be, so I talked with him about that. He said all of that information is in the environmental impact statement, including drawings and elevations of the finished project and that the impact statement should be available online. I went to the website, searched, and found that once the project proceeds past the public comment period and the statement is “approved”, it’s removed from the website. It’s in the form of a PDF (which is not very helpful) and a large file, there are many of projects, so to “save money” they’re removed. That seems kind of short sighted! Someone needs to invent an inexpensive way to convert a PDF into a nice website.
10. I’ve been trying to think of a third “R” to go along with Rambling Random … something that means thoughts or musings, or similar. Suggestions welcome!

And that’s My Story for this Sunday.