President Gordon B. Hinckley on Joseph F. Smith, 20 September 2005

President Hinckley gave a devotional address at BYU on the above noted date. As part of the devotional, he shared some stories from Joseph F. Smith's life- much of it I had heard before, but as I reread the address this morning, I was struck by his experience in Hawaii- how much different it was for me there as visiting faculty at BYU-Hawaii! I was also impressed by his unwillingness to succomb to self-pity once he had gained a sense of who he was and how he wanted to BE.

Link to the devotional speech:

http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=10684

AAAAArmy Training, Sir!

So I've been at Ft. Hunter-Liggett in California, about 2 hrs drive south of San Jose for 1 and 1/2 weeks. Thankfully much less physically intense than our previous training about a month ago. We're getting ready for a deployment to Iraq starting around late Jan.

A couple of nights ago we were getting trained in hand to hand combatives by a reservist with specialization in martial arts and hand to hand combat. His civilian position is as a police officer and he did a monologue about how important it is to stay in shape. As he talked about himself and others that he's seen get out of shape in the police force he made 3 priceless comments-

1. Police with bellies so large they look like Front Butts
2. A belt so tight it was a poop tourniquet
3. A butt so fat that when you kicked it, a honeybun would drop out...

Well, we take our humor where we can. Another day of Arabic language training, 3 days of weapons systems training, then home to my loved ones.