A more abundant life

We have a family party this afternoon during my singles ward sacrament meeting time, so I decided I would just attend all of my home ward meetings with my parents and Emily.  It was only my second or third time going to all the meetings in that ward since I started college, and it was really nice to see some neighbors again.  They were all so kind.  It was also fun to attend the sunday school class that my dad taught and see my mom conduct relief society.  Here are a few things I was thinking about during church:

::: I love how my parents still cuddle or hold hands during sacrament meeting.  I hope that I can be as in love with my future husband after 25 years of marriage as they are with each other.

::: Babies are so cute!  I miss being entertained by kids on the pew in front of me.  A while back I realized that when I am taking a picture of a group of people, I always mimic their faces, whether they are smiling, puckering their lips, looking surprised, etc.  I discovered today that I was mirroring all of the faces of the baby in front of me.  When her eyes and mouth opened wide in excitement, so did mine.  I can only imagine that this looked pretty strange if someone was watching me from the stand.

::: I love this scripture: "...I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." (John 10:10)  I hope to life the most "abundant" life that I can.  Once I got home, the scripture led me to this talk from President Spencer W. Kimball.  This was my favorite part of his message:

"Unless the way we live draws us closer to our Heavenly Father and to our fellowmen, there will be an enormous emptiness in our lives. It is frightening for me to see, for instance, how the life-style of so many today causes them to disengage from their families and their friends and their peers toward a heedless pursuit of pleasure or materialism. So often loyalty to family, to community, and to country is pushed aside in favor of other pursuits which are wrongly thought to be productive of happiness when, in fact, selfishness is so often the pursuit of questionable pleasure which passes so quickly. One of the differences between true joy and mere pleasure is that certain pleasures are realized only at the cost of someone else’s pain. Joy, on the other hand, springs out of selflessness and service, and it benefits rather than hurts others."

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Back to talking about babies' faces... I just had to re-post a picture from this hysterical blog.  It's now the wallpaper on my laptop and it cracks me up every time I look at it:

Anyway, the other plus side to going to my home ward was morning church!  I used to think I hated 9:00 church, but after three and a half years of 1:00 church, I really miss having church over by noon.  I can be so productive when I have the whole afternoon at my disposal, so I do useful things like blog and help my mom in the kitchen.

I am usually not allowed in the kitchen.  Seriously.  If I offer to help, I usually get assigned to set the table or take out the trash, but nothing complicated like make the homemade rolls or pie crusts that my sisters are assigned.  I usually get offended and tell my family they just need to have more faith in me, and then they laugh.  However, this afternoon my parents were going to a neighbor's house and my mom asked me to boil some eggs and fry some bacon for the salad she was going to make.  I was ready to prove myself.  Well... I broke three eggs just taking them out of the carton, set off the smoke alarm precisely nine times, and then tried to pour the extra bacon grease into a cup, and before I realized how dumb I was to pour hot grease into a disposable plastic cup, it had shriveled up.  Fail.

On the plus side, the eggs were cooked to perfection, so now when my family tries to bash my cooking skills I can point to the eggs and say At least I can boil water.