Adventures in Hawaii: Snorkeling at Molokini Crater

Weekend round up. How was yours?

We had a great weekend around here. How 'bout you?

Thursday night, Jeff whipped out his trusty new steed chainsaw and went to town on what was formerly not-so-lovingly referred to as "The Mushroom Tree" in our front yard.

The mushroom tree was a pine tree that was funny on top--not pointy and nice--rounded and weird. The whole thing was kind of bulky. Hence the name "Mushroom Tree." He came home from work, ate dinner, changed clothes and announced, "I'm cutting down the mushroom tree."

I admit to being a little nervous about this. The tree was not small. It stood 15 feet from our house. But, the man is not inexperienced when it comes to taking down trees he can't live with, so I held my breath until it came down safely.

Amazingly, Jeff and Jared got this thing all limbed by Saturday morning at 10 am--when LDS General Conference starts. We watched the first session, and then they got everything cut up and stacked for hauling away before the afternoon session at 2pm.
When he got into the tree while he was cutting off the limbs, Jeff found out why the tree was so funny. The nice straight trunk you see in the first pic went up like that until about 5 feet from the top, and then it suddenly splayed off into 5 different little trunks, causing the funny rounded top. Don't know why that happened--did wind or something else break the top when it was young? We'll never know.

We are going to have the stump dug up, and then we will plant a couple of maple trees in its place.

The best part of the weekend was conference. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, 1st counselor in the First Presidency of the church, spoke about doubt and faith. This was a talk that a lot of members felt was overdue. One thing he said was, "Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith." He also said, "We must not allow our doubts to hold us prisoner." The beauty of the church is that it is NOT full of people who have never doubted--quite the opposite. Here is what President Uchtdorf said about that:


Doubts vs. faith, whatever you choose to call it and however you deal with it, it all goes back to free agency. We all have the right to choose whether we put our energies into our doubts
or whether we put our energies into our faith. 

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