Author Archives: Colby Alexander

Watch your Language

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Language

≈ Leave a comment

-Uma das coisas que Eu mas gosto nesta vida, E ser capaz de falar em outra lingua.

-emeber-ray en-way ee-way ould-way alk-tay in-ay ig-pay atin-lay?

I remember the day when I first wanted to try and learn a new language. I was super gung ho and knew that I would probably and most likely be the fastest human in the history of humans to learn Spanish in about an hour or two. I knew that I would be the 14 year old Spanish prodigy that humanity would look back at and revere as the gold standard in language learning. I was going to turn heads with my perfectly perfect accent, which I would develop in 10 or 15 minutes (after all I watched speedy Gonzales all the time on Saturday morning and had it almost perfect already) and that I would be able to walk the streets of many foreign countries and be perfectly aware of what was going on.  I was in 8th grade at the time. Reality was slightly different.

I was pretty much limited to colors and food items in Spanish, only accented by the random cuss words that our Mexican friends were so willing to share. Upon my call to Brazil, my dedication was again stoked, and I spent 2 months in the hotbed of cultural and language instruction that is Provo, Utah. After those 8 weeks, I just knew that I was practically three quarter Brazilian at that point and was already feeling like my skin turning a bit darker, I had random thoughts about playing soccer in the street barefoot etc. I knew I was the best the MTC had ever seen. I arrived in Brazil and soon realized I could understand maybe 5% of every conversation.  And that isn’t saying much as my name consisted of about 5% of every conversation. My experience with learning language was just as it should have been. Slowly but surely.

Language is something that is learned over time, little by little, piece by piece, word by word, phrase by phrase in baby steps. Its something that is different for everybody. Some people have a knack for it, others don’t. What I found most important in the learning of some Spanish, and later Portuguese, was that in order to really get it, and get to where you can actually communicate, you had to really WANT to, not like the “Yeah, it would be really cool to totally talk behind someone’s back about them in the hallway at school in another language, and then no one would know what we were saying” type of want. But the desire to be able to fully communicate and sound as if you were born there type of want.  It requires that type of commitment because it is a long, slow, tedious process, in which the wishy washy’s are weeded out. Along with that, the only way to really get to be to the level 17 awesome “Fluent” status is to completely immerse yourself in the language, day and night, dreams included, all day no exceptions. To get to legendary level 87 awesome “no accent” status? That requires you to get into a car accident, slip into a coma, forget everything, and start all over in the land who’s language you wish to master. Not really worth it if you ask me.

So, do I sound like a native Mexican, or Brazilian? Not exactly. But back in the day when I was doing it all day everyday, I could pass as a German guy speaking Portuguese. Not bad.

So, to get to the point. Lately the new language I want to learn is the language that the spirit uses. This language is a bit more difficult to master. Why? because there isn’t a google translate app you can use to cheat. Its an individualized customized language. The spirit communicates with us all in different ways. There are generalities and similarities that are consistent throughout His language, a lot like the common letters that form words in almost all languages, but the specific stuff, the really good part, where its an actual conversation? That is the grand prize. That is the level 984 Uber awesome fluent status that is so elusive to all of us.

So, whats my advise to myself? How to I get to that point? It has to be just like any other language, it starts with that desire to be able to communicate, to be as fluent as you can. It takes time, effort, effort, practice, effort and immersion. Immersion is the perfect word, because it describes perfectly how it needs to be. Immersion is a complete “All In”. No pinky toes out of the water, no sprinkles on the head, no Nacho Libre face dunk. After all, don’t we all get the “gift” after we are “immersed”? Am I there? maybe level 2. Am I closer than yesterday? yes. I know that it all comes down to Desire, Effort, Time, and Practice.

The Lord wants nothing more than to be able to freely communicate to us what we need to hear, when we need to hear it. The problem is us. We are the ones that need to learn specifically how He communicates with us. We need to be listening. We need to eliminate the noise in our life. we need to tune to the right station. We need to ask for help. And it only works if we as individuals learn for ourselves what this beautiful language sounds like to our hearts ears.

Blood Clots and Teeter-Totters

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Example, Support

≈ Leave a comment

I will start this one with two sentences.

1.   If you make it to the end of this post without falling asleep, you deserve a family size bag of peanut m&m’s.

2.   All truth can be circumscribed into one great whole.

A bit ago, Tyson posted on how competition spurred us forward as kids. it triggered us to be better and to improve to be able to beat each other up.  He also noted, that if and when we were on the same team, our skills were exponentially better when focused against the same common enemy. There is a perfectly good explanation for that. We need look no further than those voluminous tomes of human physiology as they explain the properties and principles of blood clots.

I will have to say, this post may really belong on the “Super-boring blog of insignificant physiological minutia”, but its worth a shot.

The free lesson today is about something called a positive feedback loop. Its a rare thing in the physiologic sense, but Ill try to explain why it coincides so well with being on the same team.

A simple explanation of a positive feedback loop is in the way blood clots. After we cut ourselves or an injury occurs, certain chemicals in our bloodstream are released. When they come in contact with tissues outside the blood vessels, they go nuts. and yell “fire” in the movie theatre so to speak. Im going to call this an “event”.  After this “event”, these chemicals start stimulating others around them to change, the presence of these chemicals only trigger more of the clotting chemicals to be activated, and you have something like the effect of a giant domino design that starts as a few single dominos, but soon spreads exponentially until a whole football field of dominoes are falling simultaneously. Now you have a blood clot. The presence of one “trigger”, or “event” grows until the desired effect is reached, and the phenomenon stops. The principle of one trigger exciting another, and then those exciting more and more and making a bigger response and continuously growing is the positive feedback loop.

This same principle applies within a uterus during childbirth, the stretch from a baby’s head in the uterus will trigger uterine contractions, the uterine contractions then continue to expel the baby into the birth canal. the baby’s head then stretches the uterus more, and back and forth we go, till you have a happy screaming mom, and baby.

If you made it to here, and your name isn’t Casey, Congratulations!, you’re halfway to Tyson’s m&m’s.

This principle applies in our families like this. We each try and be as good as we can be. When we see the good “event” that our spouse, brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, or cousin does, we want to be better. We are “triggered”, or “excited” and we improve or do good ourselves. The more we are around that person the easier we are triggered. When we also improve, or do good, it “positively feeds back”, and the original person doing good wants to improve even more. Its like a teeter-totter that doesn’t have a down. When one side goes up, it stays up, and the other follows upward rather than falling back down. Pretty soon you’re a lot higher than you thought you ever could be on your own. You want to be with each other constantly because it makes you want to improve and you feel stronger when you are. This is why teams (In sports, or marriage) that are successful are so. They are on the same page, have the same goals, and work in synergy to achieve what they want. All truth is circumscribed into one great whole. Blood clots, child birth, and teeter-totters all in the same post. Beat that.  Enjoy the M&M’s.

Don’t Win by Forfeit

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Opposition

≈ Leave a comment

A friendly Giardia bug

A long time ago, back when mullets were still cool, cell phones didn’t exist, and Bart Simpson was just getting started on his long and illustrious career, I had little league baseball practices with Tyson. We had them at Wilson school. At this time, we didn’t live so close as to be able to walk home, so we had to wait after practice was over for your mom to come pick us up. Sometimes, I’m sure, she was on time with this task. Other times, however, we were left on our own. Im sure she was just a little late, but to us it seemed like we would need to make camp, hunker down, and wait for daylight for rescue.  As is understandable, after a long practice of being totally awesome, putting on these clinics of baseball prowess, and baffling coaches with our unbelievable skill and abilities, we were thirsty. Apparently, we didn’t have the modern technology of today called water bottles back then, so we were left to improvise.  Without the adult supervision that may have dissuaded us in our next move, we used our excellent judgement and problem solving skills and routinely quenched our thirst with the ever so convenient irrigation ditch water that ran just outside the fence of our baseball practice field. Im sure this water had absolutely no contaminants, fowl excrement, dog and cat urine, mouse feces, or any such unpleasant thing as it’s appearance was totally clear. Im sure we had been warned against such a thing, but when your mouth feels like the mojave desert in the summertime of a multi-year drought, you do what you gotta do.

In the years since then, I have come to realize that what we were really doing those days when we partook of that cool, clean water was essentially immunizing ourselves from varying forms of water borne illnesses. Instead of just drinking ultra filtered, sterilized, treated boring water, we were preparing our intestinal tracts for future missions to Brazil. The sublethal doses of Giardia, ecoli, cholera, ebola, or whatever other microbial disaster was in that water was just preparing our bowels against future onslaughts of nastiness. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were conducting our own organic health clinic immunization program as we dipped our heads and faces in the water like parched dying animals.

So what does this awesome story of our bravery and survival have anything to do with anything? Its all about patterns. Thats the way things work in our lives. There are truths that span different aspects of everyday life. Tyson and I immunized ourselves against future disease by drinking that nasty ditch water.  By exposing ourselves to it, our bodies developed antibodies to whatever small amount of nastiness was in that water at that time. Our bodies then destroyed those intruders, and from the corpses of the invading germ armies, memorized their makeup, put out wanted posters, and FBI mugshots all over in our bodies to warn our insides about a future attack. Our bodies were then prepared with ammunition and specific customized armor to defend against that particular invading bug. Any subsequent attack would be thwarted instantaneously.

This true principle can be applied in all sorts of ways in our life. One has to do with how we prepare ourselves, or our kids, to go out in the disease ridden world. Do we send them out in the world after having lived in a protective sphere of purified air, water, and food, and living in a padded room in the basement with sunblock, a football helmet, and mosquito spray all over them? If we did, what would happen the first time they tasted a quarter pounder or sugar wafers? They would go crazy and devour every last one they could get their hands on. Do we send them out never having let them climb on a chair when they are 2 years old, fall out of a tree, never let them fall down the stairs, fall off a bike, or  scrape their knees, or get in a fight? As moms and dads, I think our first instinct is to protect our kids, and ourselves for that matter, from everything that can potentially hurt us, or them.  But are we really helping? Are we really helping by trying to shelter ourselves and our kids from the realities of the world?  Wouldn’t it be better to teach them to overcome these diseases by choice, so that they can live in the world and not of it? To let them drink out of the ditch so to speak?  We can’t protect ourselves from exposure to all the nasty things in the world, but we can immunize ourselves, and prepare ourselves to overcome, defeat, and withstand the fiery darts that are headed our way.  But, it requires us to allow that to happen.

What would happen if Tyson and I had asked our mom if we could drink from the ditch? What would the answer have been? Absolutely not! are you crazy? But, would Tyson and I have guts of steel resistant to all the horrible disfiguring diseases known to man if we had not? Did we, in some seemingly small way benefit from drinking a small amount of cow manure? I say yes, yes we did.

We have to be able to live full rewarding lives in the world we live in. Those are the cards we’ve been dealt. That world has some nasty garbage all over in it. But, its the world we live in. We can be strong, and honorable, and do the right thing, all while living in a wicked world. Remember, the iron rod was right in the middle of the mist of darkness, not around the periphery shielded from everything nasty. We cant shield ourselves from, hide from, and wish away all the bad things we will face. We have to trust ourselves, and our kids for that matter, to make the right choices. And sometimes, the choices will be to drink from a ditch. But, its not the end of the world. Real meaningful growth and progression doesn’t come living in a padded room with a helmet on. It comes from tripping, falling, getting dirty, and dusting yourself off, and moving in the right direction.

So, my advise to myself is, to teach myself, and my kids as best I can, and let them learn from their mistakes, just like I did. They need to learn to dust themselves off after they get dirty so to speak. to become clean after they get messy. Even though every last instinct is to do the opposite and try and protect them or us from everything that is coming our way.  We cant protectively squeeze ourselves or our kids so tight, that they suffocate for lack of air. We can do more damage than good. Sometimes we have to learn by trial and error for ourselves for it to actually mean anything.

Remember that war in Heaven thing when two plans were presented? The first would guarantee success, 100% retention, all God’s kids safely back home, no strays, no errors, no mistakes, nothing but pure obedience. The second plan, the dangerous plan, the plan that would cause pain, anguish, loss, betrayal, and every other fear of a parent. The second was the plan that was chosen. Because that plan included freedom and choice. Winning the game against a great formidable opponent means so much more than winning by forfeit. Its like beating Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one vs beating a guy with no arms or legs in a boxing match. Its better to prepare for the realities of life, and overcome them than to fear them, ignore them, and wish they weren’t there. All life’s obstacles are there to struggle over, not sneak around. In the end, we need to be immune to the nastiness of the world, not just simply “lucky” never to have contracted any life-threatening diseases by hiding in the basement.

The Greatest Prophet….you’ve never heard of.

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in General

≈ Leave a comment

Elijah

I love Spy Books. Jason Bourne, James Bond, and my latest favorite Mitch Rapp. All of these guys are cool under pressure, underestimated, under appreciated, smarter, and more tuned into the small details around them that tip them off to the bad guys’ plan. Its always a continuous nail biting experience until, in the end, they narrowly escape almost certain death, and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The story never gets old. The hero always wins. These unbelievably amazing stories are, of course, pure fiction.

However, many stories of actual heroes who have lived and battled actual evil are scattered throughout history. You could look at George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere and many others. All of these real heroes did a lot of good for a lot of people. But, even these great guys are actually small characters in the spy book of the history of the world.

If we look at our life and purpose here on earth from God’s perspective, things tend to look quite a bit different. Things we thought really mattered, don’t. Each small covert act we carry out can alter a person’s life for the better, and can have overwhelming potential impact on that person’s future, and potentially their entire posterity’s future. The heroes that have truly effected the most people in history from this perspective, are the prophets. God’s prophets throughout the ages now seem to be the Jason Bournes of the spy book of real life.

Many of the prophets from history are still famous. Adam, Moses, Isaiah, Peter, Lehi, Nephi,Mormon, and Alma. All these guys are well known, and their works are well known. Their impact on the meaningful history of the world is common knowledge. But, just like my favorite characters in my spy books, I like the guys that fly under the radar.

One of the greatest prophets that has ever lived, is, in my opinion, one of the least known, or truly appreciated.  His impact on all of us is expertly embedded in the very fabric of the gospel. Not only was he crucial to the survival of God’s true religion against the idolatry of the prophets of Baal in the old testament times. He totally beat them down in a little 450-on-one call-fire-down-from-heaven my-God-is-better-than-yours challenge. He also played, quite possibly, the most vital role in the restoration of the gospel when he appeared to the prophet Joseph Smith. So who is this guy? The one and only Elijah.

Think about some of the most famous stories of the Bible.  You may think of Moses’ parting of the Red Sea and the children of Israel crossing on dry land. Did you also know about Elijah parting the river Jordan and crossing it on dry ground (2 kings 2:8)? We know about Jesus feeding the 5,000 with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish? What about Elijah blessing the widows last handful of meal and oil, and then that last meal lasting and sustaining her and her family throughout the famine (1 Kings 17:8-16).  Jesus raising Lazerus from the dead? Elijah raised that same widows son from the dead (1 Kings 17:17-24) We know Jesus fasted for 40 days in the desert. That had to be a record right? Well, it was tied by Elijah. He also fasted for 40 days (1 Kings 19:8). It is no wonder that Jews, to this day, open their doors for him and await his return.

So, what makes Elijah so great and important? All we really talk about is the “spirit of Elijah” in the annual lesson on family history in Elders quorum when 90% of us are asleep and the other half are figuring out how to check on their fantasy football scores without seeming too obvious.  The Spirit of Elijah is more than just a reminder to do family history though. Its the reason behind it. The word “spirit” could probably be changed out for a different word.  Its more like the “power” of Elijah, or the sealing power that he restored to the Earth. Elijah was one of the very few to ever have been entrusted with the sealing power. It was the power to seal or bind on earth and in heaven. That is pretty huge. What you seal on earth, is honored in heaven. Heaven is bound. That is rare. Power over the elements is included. You want it to rain? You got it. Drought? No sweat. Move a mountain? Just say the word. Nephi received this same power in the book of Helaman, and used it to “convey” out of the midst of his enemies. In today’s jargon, he totally disappeared, vanished into thin air.

Sealing power is the authority to bind families together. This is the essence of the Gospel. To bring everyone possible to join the family, and seal them together. When we think of binding families together, our natural tendency is to think of our own immediate family, our wives and kids. But it is beyond just that. We all are sons and daughters, as well as Fathers and Mothers, and Grandparents and so forth. So, “family” has to be extended to mean God’s family. All of us. The only way this is even possible is with Elijah’s “power” or his “spirit” that is mentioned originally in Malachi, and later repeated in a more pure form to Joseph Smith by Moroni. He said, “Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet…..And he shall plant in he hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to the fathers.” The priesthood he restored to Joseph Smith, is the sealing, binding, authority to make a family forever, and become a permanent member of the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God’s family. “If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming.” It would be wasted because we would not have had temple ordinances sealing ourselves together, and thereby connecting us with our fathers, and God’s family. God can only save His family. His family that is bound to Him through baptism, and temple ordinances. Our big brother paid for our sins, so that we all could be a family once again.

So, when Elijah came to Joseph about a week after the Kirtland temple was dedicated. It was kind of a big deal. Elijah is kind of a big deal.  And absolutely crucial in restoring the power to seal. Its just the kind of story I love. The amazing under the radar guy, seemingly single handedly saves the day, and barely gets a mention in the footnotes of history, and it will be totally awesome to meet Elijah someday and hear him tell us first hand about his royal beatdown of the 450 prophets of Baal. I think he may have also been the first prophet to officially talk some smack after that whole thing went down…some guys just have it all.