cc: file, Mom, Sara and Des, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Darrell Krueger,Charles and Diane Cluff, and Claude and Forest Warner
"Today I wrote my 566th daily `Lovelet' e-mail to your Mom. On the 28th of February 1995 I decided to emulate a daily radio program in Houston called `The Engines of Our Ingenuity' and send your Mom an e-mail each day telling her why I love her. Somedays have been easier than other, but it is true the love was and will be always there.
While I was at Rob's league bowling yesterday I got thinking about Paul having just left for school, and Melanie being a senior, and specifically about how little communication there is sometimes with Roice and Ben. I decided a long time ago my family is the most important material entity in my life. In some ways I have looked beyond the mark and tried too hard to ensure we will be an eternal family. I apologize for those times I have taken away your free agency because `I knew what was the right thing to do.' In some ways starting a new weekly cycle of forced rememberance is doing the same kind of thing I have been guilty of in the past. However, you each have the freedom to say, Dad, please take me off of your mailing list. Even if you do that, I have the contentment of knowing I am reaching out, I am making my thoughts and concerns and experience available to you, and I am actively involved in doing good. I have seen tremendous benefits from my efforts to tell Mom how much I love her. Hopefully, as with all good communication, I have learned to listen a little better as well as write my thoughts, and hopefully that will be the case with each of you also. I start this process with no specific expectations, only a hope that something I write one of the upcoming weeks and years will prove to be of benefit to each of you at sometime in your life.
At the bowling alley I got caught up on some of my magazine reading. This included a Church News that quoted from a 1976 conference talk by President Spencer W. Kimball. He said `Indecision and discouragement are climates in which the adverary lives to function, for he can inflict so many casualties among mankind in those settings. Decide to decide! I have mentioned at this pulpit before, some determinations made early in my life, which decisions were such a help to me because I did not have to remake those decisions perpetually. We can push some things away from us once and have done with them! We can make a single decision about certain things that we will incorporate in our lives and then make them ours - without having to brood and redecide a hundred times what is it we will do and what we will not do.' His words resonated because Bishop Daniels used this same theme in his first talk. He said `I decided I wanted to get married in the temple for time and eternity, and that meant I wouldn't do things that make that impossible.' Putting it in mathematical terms for our college students, we need to decide what the first and second terms in the Fourier series of our life are, decide, and then not redecide. Rob, this means that we figure out what is the most important thing in life to us, and then make decisions so that we keep that thing part of our life.
We have a new pool table. It is fun. However, it is not even in the same catagory as your Mom, relative as to what is important to me. I knew family would be important in my life, and too often, because I have enjoyed my work so much, or have been concerned about a stereoscope or other inconsequential physical possession, have pushed family needs aside. However, I do know what is important and so I have decided to share with those of you who are interested thoughtlets about things important to me."