With our meeting not starting until 1:00 I must confess that at times it is easy for me to just find a book – not the scriptures – and curl up and read for a couple of hours. A few weeks ago I read a talk about the Sabbath Day that changed my attitude about the way I spend the morning or at least how I am trying to spend the Sunday mornings.

I have found it a good time to read the Ensign and listen again to conference talks, and ponder what I read. This morning besides reading and listening to a couple of talks by Elder Neal Maxwell – there are 53 of his conference talks available at LDS.org – I read an article about President George Albert Smith in the January 2012 Ensign (http://preview.tinyurl.com/8hn722e). The article ended with this comment about President Smith:

“As one observer said of President Smith: “His religion is not doctrine in cold storage. It is not theory. It means more to him than a beautiful plan to be admired. It is more than a philosophy of life. To one of his practical turn of mind, religion is the spirit in which a man lives, in which he does things, if it be only to say a kind word or give a cup of cold water. His religion must find expression in deeds. It must carry over into the details of daily life.”

It really got me thinking if the same or at least most of it could be said about me and the way I live what I know is true. As I once read somewhere “If you were accused of being a Latter-day Saint, could they find enough evidence to convict you?”

So as not to create a false impression that I spent the whole morning at LDS.org reading uplifting articles, here are some pictures that I accumulated from visiting other blogs and taking screen shots.

   

I guess we have never really left Africa because one of our favorite websites is the Tembe Elephant Park webcam. Almost every morning – it is afternoon in South Africa – we check in to see what is going on there. Elephants actually standing in the water is unusual but this big old bull was having a great time. He probably left the water hole and threw dirt all over him – it is an elephant thing. The middle picture caught impalas in the front, an elephant and way in the back some waterbucks. I am pretty sure we never saw this combination live while we served there. I can remember the first time we saw an impala and how excited we were. After three months we had seen so many we didn’t even say anything when we saw a herd.

  

Our dear friends Elder and Sister Bell who are serving as PEF missionaries, sent this picture of them being Helping Hands in the Philippines which has been hit by one terrible flood after another. Another blog I visit shows scenes from the DRC. I thought we had seen some very interesting loads on motorcycles, bikes and carts but I think this one of a van being transported on a cart beats them all. The writer mentioned that the men, cart and van actually passed them while they were sitting in traffic. We had that happen in Jakarta when a man pulling a huge cart full of grasses kept passing us as we tried to get through a stuffed traffic area.