Seeking the Best Gift, Even When They Are Really Small

On October 2001, Candice and I had a Family Home Evening about "Seeking the Best Gifts."  We had been married a tiny bit over 8 months at that point.  We put together a list of what each of us wanted to accomplish in our lives...what gifts we wanted to seek to glorify our Father in Heaven.

Here is Candice's:

Here are mine:

(Why the Hyatt notepaper? In July of 2001, I took part in a National College Republicans Convention/Elections in Washington, DC and stayed at the Hyatt, hence the Hyatt note pads)

Teaching Sunday School has had some unintended blessings.  First, it was the first time I really tried to put together any sort of videos or "movies" (number 11 on my old goal list). After I had made a number of movies, Candice found these old goal sheets, of which we had both totally forgotten about, and it was really neat to see how Heavenly Father really does answer the desire of our hearts, even if we have forgotten that at one point we pled with the Lord about those desires. 

This weekend I wanted to try a couple of other new things for my class.  First, I wanted to photoshop a tombstone that my lesson mentioned.  The lesson was on the power of positive influences.

Here is the before, the one that I got off the Internet (after editing out the inappropriate engraving):

Here is my Photoshop version  (the person and dates are fictitious, I used family names for both Candice and me):

No, it does not look super pro, but I was grateful it turned out for an object lesson for my Sunday School class.

The other thing I tried to do for my class was do a voice recording of President Kimball.  Rather than having the youth read quotes from the manual, I download conference talks and edit them to get the quote in the manual (or an equivalent one given by a modern Church leader).  That way they can hear and know today's prophets, apostles, and other general leaders of the Church by voice.  For example, rather than having them read Elder Hale's quote on friendship, they heard this on our iPod:

  

In the lesson, they had a quote from a 1965 BYU devotional from Spencer W. Kimball.  Sure enough, I could download it from the BYU website!  I was so stoked.  I listened to it three times and never heard the quote.  After further investigation, I found out that Elder Kimball had it in the published version, but not the audio version.  But the quote was so great.

So I decided to have a go at voice recording.  I figured I could do it.  I mean, come on, I used to do radio broadcasting in Taiwan for an ESL magazine, doing the English portion of a Chinese-English news program (I also did the voice for a company that was making an ESL version of Teddy Ruxpin).

I do not think it turned out so well.  Here is me doing my best Spencer W. Kimball impersonation:

After laughter from Candice and me, I came to this one conclusion:

I think I will stick with trying to learn soap making.  

I mean, hey, it was Number 2 on both Candice and my goal lists, and maybe someday I'll look like this guy.