Light and Dark

It's easy to think of darkness as an overwhelming force, one that is capable of drowning out light. However, in reality darkness has no power over light. No amount of darkness will ever be able to extinguish a flame, or drown out the light of a bulb. Rather, darkness comes as the natural consequence of a weakening light. Just as darkness does not put out a candle, but rather comes as the candle begins to die, darkness, and the influence of the devil, will enter our lives when we allow the fire of our faith and testimony to die. I've often had the mental image of "fighting off the darkness" of the world around us. However, instead of "fighting" the darkness, we merely need to feed the flame.Thus, darkness has no power to overwhelm or drown out our light unless we allow it to by letting our fires die, or dowsing them with the waters of sin. Luckily, we have been given the means to feed our flames and light them when they've been extinguished. Scriptures, Prayer, Church attendance, all these things enable us to feed our flames and remove darkness from our lives. Furthermore, in the event that our fires are extinguished we have been given the blessing of the Atonement of Christ which can help relight our fire and bring light into our lives. So never give into the darkness, feed the flame, and keep the light.

"This is the desire of our hearts"

What is the desire of our hearts? Our hearts and desires are constantly being pulled in multiple directions by the many things in our lives that demand attention. For instance, do we desire money, fame, family, education? It's not necessarily a bad thing to desire money, or recognition, but we must be careful in the desires of our hearts, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." In the midst of all our desires and aspirations it is important for us to remember where the focus of our hearts must ultimately lie. We must focus on things of true importance, namely our spiritual health and our relationship with Christ. In order to best judge our relationship with Christ, and best determine the true desires of our hearts we can ask ourselves a number of questions. Are we willing to stand as witnesses of Christ in all things and all places? Are we willing to mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort? Are we willing to serve God and keep His commandments? Are we willing to enter into the fold of God? These are the questions asked by the prophet Alma to his people. When asked these questions they responded with joy saying, "This is the desire of our hearts!" And so it should be ours. We must find within ourselves the desire to answer yes to these question, and then act accordingly. This desire and focus will bring joy into our lives as we become friends with Christ and align our lives with the desires of God. And so I add to the words of Alma's people; to stand as a witness of Christ, this is the desire of my heart.

Vacation: Sequoias

The second part of our family vacation began when we woke up the next morning to beautiful mountain air. There is seriously nothing better than that feeling when you wake up in the mountains. After eating a quick cold breakfast we headed out to see some of Sequoia National Park. It truly is an amazing place! Everywhere you look there are gigantic trees, and I mean Gigantic! And they're old too, some are estimated to be over three thousand years old. If you think about, that means they were about 100 years old when Adam died... That's old. Walking through this ancient forest was an amazing experience and I definitely plan to go back there some day and show them the beauty of those ancient, and gigantic, trees.

That's us at the very bottom, the small white specks, it's huge!

Photos are mostly credited to my dad, I was stupid enough to not bring my camera...

After exploring the Sequoias for a few hours we headed off to begin our trip to Disneyland! We still had about a six hour drive to get there, and boy was it a fun six hours... We traveled down many more long and winding roads to reach our destination, crawling along the walls of the canyon. We thought that after getting out of the canyon we'd be on nice straight roads again. But no, that was not the case. Instead we ended up on a wonderful road called Auberry. It wound and wound and wound some more. However, after finally reaching the highway we cruised along, hit some L.A. traffic jams, and finally reached our hotel. Too exhausted to want to go and explore Disneyland we headed off to bed, while dreams of Mickey Mouse danced in our heads.

Vacation: Tonopah, Yosemite, and 15 long hours

This past week me and my family went on a vacation! It was great to get some time off work and spend time just having fun with the fam. So here's the first part of our vacation. We woke up early Monday morning, somewhere around three or four in order to head off to California. Little did we realize how long the drive would be! Normally a drive to Disneyland is only ten hours, but we decided to take the long way around, and amazingly enough, it was more than worth it. The first memorable stop on that 15 hour drive was a small town called Tonopah. Yeah, you've probably never heard of it, pretty sure no one has. Suffice it to say, it was possibly the creepiest town I've ever been in. It was a small town with kind of a weird feel to it. We only saw people who were drunk or smoking, no small children... I wonder why... Beyond the slightly strange population, it had the creepiest building I have ever had the terrible opportunity to witness, THE CLOWN MOTEL! (Appropriate Scary Music)

We ended up staying about an hour in Tonopah, I have no idea how that managed to happen, we think the clowns had something to do with it. From there we continued our drive to possibly the most beautiful place on Earth, Yosemite National Park! We didn't stay long, we mostly just drove through it, but I was in awe for the vast majority of the time. I'm pretty sure I could live there my whole life, it's beautiful!


Those are just a few of the pictures we have, it's an amazing place! We then continued our long drive through long and winding roads, which resulted in a couple bouts of car sickness from members of the family... Eventually we made it to our destination for the night, Sequoia National Park! We set up our tent in the dark, had a close run in with a bear, and then went to bed. I slept for a couple hours under the stars, until it got too cold. The stars were incredibly clear, and I even saw a satellite crawling its way across the sky, and a shooting star. Not a bad night. And since this post is getting a little long, I'll save more for later. And Part 2, is freaking awesome!

Happy 4th of July

First experimentation with some blurred motion photography, it's unedited, just cropped a little.



SOOC fireworks shot






These two are compilations of a couple of fireworks shots, all the individual shots are unedited, but I merged them together. It's kind of crowded though so I'm not sure I like them all that much, but it's fun to mess with the shots!