Caterpillar Peace Offering

I'm gonna start this post with something simple and innocent - We've got big caterpillars at our home again!  Daniel after church yesterday - 

These are from the eggs I found on June 22 - that is the earliest I've ever found monarch eggs! Previous record was last year on July 1st, breaking the standard of "around July 4th" (July 5 in 2022)

And now I shall present something that is not simple, but complicated and perhaps unnecessarily dramatic. So I mentioned that we went to Pineview over the weekend. When I made that post, I knew of this event, but not all the details. They filled me in that night and we've re-hashed it pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday. I shall now talk about it a little bit. So after hearing of said dramatic event, not knowing too much of the details yet, I decided to take a caterpillar over to Nancy's house, in an attempt to smooth over some contention that arose at Pineview on Friday night. Corey and the kids were going to stay up there and camp overnight, but instead most of the kids ended up not sleeping over and they called me at 11pm saying they were coming home. I checked life 360 and saw Nancy and her girls were all headed home too. Hmm. CMSODP came home together, AN stayed at Pineview with Ethan and Bella. This morning Corey got an email from Wayne to Nancy, Mark and Corey that said the following:

Around 5:00 yesterday afternoon as I was sitting off to the side of the camp at Pine View, I looked out over all of the activity going on around the kitchen and table area and felt very content, pleased and very blessed to watch those for whom I have so much love, interacting and associating with one another.  I felt the presence of JeNeal by my side nodding in agreement that it was truly great to see the joy, happiness and love being displayed among our children and their families. I was glad that I was sitting aside of the camp as that scene brought tears of joy to my eyes.

Then something happened. I was not in the immediate area when it happened so I was not witness to the events. All I know about it is what I have been told second hand. 

My understanding, the situation boiled down to the issue that someone became offended by what was said by someone else. It does not matter to me what was said or who said it. What matters to me is that the peace and harmony which I observed earlier in the day came to an end and the party fell apart.  This made me very sad.

There is a quote from Alan Greenspan which I feel to be true and most likely fits this situation.  “' I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”

This quote highlights that lack of communication which often occurs between people when they fail go try to understand what is being said from the other person’s point of view.

Recently I was talking to a friend about his family.  He said that he has one child living on the East coast, one child living on the West coast and one child living about 4 blocks from their home who they hardly ever see, and then only by appointment. I felt sorrow for him when, in my mind, I compared that relationship with how I felt about the love and comradely I held, and I hoped all of my family felt about each other.

It is my hope and prayer that those involved in the disagreement which arose yesterday will forgive one another for their words and actions and rise above the situation and work towards fostering a Christ like love for everyone in our extended family, and that this will not impact our future family dynamics.  It is only through forgiving one another that we can make any lasting progress in our life.  In the 64th section of the Doctrine and Covenants verse 10 reads as follows; “ I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”

I want to express my love to all of you and your families. Daily I thank the Lord for the joy and happiness you all bring into my life and how much I love the relationships we enjoy. 

Last night when I saw they were coming back, I called to ask why and we talked for almost the full hour of their drive. As we stayed up talking about it until 1:45 am, Katharine was awake too and enjoyed watching Bluey on Corey's phone. 

So, "the blowup" was the topic of discussion all day Saturday as they rehashed everything to try and make sense of it all. After Wayne's email, I felt like I'd go take a caterpillar to Nancy, I thought it could be good, kind of an olive branch "peace offering"? A "milkweed" branch? But milkweed isn't a branch, haha. Might have been a little silly, but the quote "never suppress a generous thought" came into my mind. So I went, Jeremy answered the door, that made me a little nervous, then it was good, I had a visit with Nancy, Alix and Rhyan joined for a bit, stayed and talked for 90 minutes. I think there were some judgements of intention and also just misunderstanding each other. 

But then I got a taste of what happened when, after I was finished talking with Nancy, I went back to the van which I had parked across the street at Wayne's house. As I walked over there, I approached Jeremy who was mowing Wayne's lawn. He looked at me, and since we had eye contact, I said "Sorry about what happened." He paused, looked at me with a firm stance, and he asked if I'd like to hear his point of view, I said "If you want to share it..." and I guess after a pause to remember how bad Corey  is for what he did, Jeremy let me have it and yelled and swore at me for a few minutes. I held a brave face in those few minutes, but as soon as I got in the van, I started to cry and I was shaking. I called Nancy to tell her that if that is how Jeremy feels towards Corey, then I do not want Corey going up to Park City at all for the Wride reunion in 3 weeks. I don't want them to be around each other. It continued to be on my mind at church yesterday, and the Sunday school lesson yesterday gave me lots of good ideas. I like the quote at the end by Elder Maxwell: We are each other's clinical material.

And Joseph shared this via our family messenger, taken from President Nelson's instagram page:

"Differences of opinion are part of life. I work daily with people who sometimes see an issue differently. My two noble counselors, Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring, have taught me how to disagree in a Christlike way. Over the last five years of working together, we haven’t always agreed. Still, they know I want to hear their honest feelings about everything we discuss—especially sensitive issues. 

From their examples, I have learned six ways to disagree:

Express feelings with love.

Don’t think you know best.

Don’t compete.

Don’t rigorously defend your position.

Let the Spirit guide your conversations.

Be filled with charity, the pure love of Christ.

Charity is the antidote to contention. It is the principal characteristic of a true follower of Jesus Christ. Charity defines a peacemaker."

The kids were all sharing voice messages and texts yesterday: 

Ethan - Yea I don’t think the thought of Jeremy punching you was just my own thinking. He had his fists clenched and was getting really close to you. It was pretty obvious with his body language. 

Corey - I was not aware

Ethan - If he had the audacity to talk to he like that he wouldn’t hesitate to punch you. The gap between what his words were doing and what his fists would do wasn’t very big. Like physical violence was the only way that would have gotten worse than it already was. That would have been the next step had you talked back to him

Corey - Ok, new rule for Park City - no compliments! Jordyn said saying Rhyan looked good implied she didn't look good in the past, which is horrible to say. Mark called it a "woke scold".

That's all I'll say about it I guess? Or maybe that is saying too much. I guess I did want to record it, for history's sake. But I likewise hope we all move on from it and heal. Not sure how to help heal all of our nieces dislike of Corey though. I did get up in testimony meeting yesterday and referred to it without going into detail. Other than mentioning that there was such kindness shown by everyone helping with the carnival, and then we felt the opposite of that at a family gathering, and how Ethan said he had never felt that much contention in his life. Also that Ethan realized he'd take a bullet for Corey, and also felt like he understood how hard it would have been for Jesus' apostles to see Christ being accused and attacked when they knew he was innocent and not guilty. 

A few other things from the past two days: Yesterday we watched "Harriett" about Harriet Tubman and that was amazing. Wow, if I ever knew that stuff about her, then I had forgotten most of it. What a miraculous woman. I'm glad that there is a movie about it that speaks so openly about God and her being led by God to do miraculous things! We also watched "Darwin's Doubt" by Stephen Meyer and I liked that too. Odds of DNA code randomly being able to create life are pretty impossible. 

At one point, at about 20 minutes in, Natalie who had been dutifully watching called out in frustration “I’m too young for this!!!” Then turned over on the couch and joined her sisters in sleep, haha. 

So that is what happened on Friday night, and that's what we've been thinking about it over the past two days. I'm going to lunch with Nancy tomorrow and I think that will be good. Mel took Lily down to Provo this morning for a BYU writers camp so that's going on for her this week. Tonight we had a mix and mingle with neighbors today, welcoming back some neighbors who are returning from serving as mission presidents in Philadelphia.

Kid's had fun playing. We had some friends who were curious about what happened from my testimony yesterday, and so we told the story again to some of them. We've never been a part of so much drama as we were Friday. 

I went inside the host house to refill the water dispenser, and got a good laugh out of this jar in their kitchen, ha!

Life threw something at us this weekend, but we'll be ok and it's good, cause atleast I don't have ugly children! Lol! And finally, it is actually February 6, 2025 when I'm finally reading this through again and publishing it (just for the record...) I planned to post it late after feelings had cooled, I didn't need to wait this long, but I'm just finally trying to finish July! I've got 8 more posts to do to finish July. Feeling productive though, I'll see how many I can crank out tonight.