Of Time and Money

Of time and money

It may not seem like there is any connection between time and money. We know however that if you spend time working you usually get rewarded with money. This is not the only connection.

We have here in this life only a limited amount of time available to us.

We also have only a limited amount of money.
But you may say that some people have a lot more money than most. This is true, but some people have more time than most.

When it comes to the point of the discussion, what we do with these resources of time and money make the difference in our lives and to some extent the lives of others as well.

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said, "Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of." My parents would often quote this to my brothers and me.

Christ said in a parable about a man who had money and goods and said that he would tear down his barns and build bigger ones to store his goods in. The upshot of the story was that the man died that very night.  What good did his money do? He ran out of time, and then the riches were of no use to him.

I might tell you a story of my good friend from high school, Donald Doughty, to further illustrate the point.  Don and I both played the clarinet. We occasionally did things together. One summer we went to Laramie to a summer band camp at the University of Wyoming. We competed for first chair first clarinet the following school year. My senior year Don went to the university and I became the first chair.

Don started smoking in high school. He went on to become a computer whiz kid. He sold his disk operating system and became a very wealthy man.
One day he came back to Lander to visit. He had emphysema and trouble breathing. He said that if he lifted the skin on his nose a certain way that he could breath easier. I did a little plastic surgery on his nose and he was appreciative of the result.

Because of his wealth and other circumstances his wife divorced him and made off with half of his fortune.

He found out that your grandmother worked for the travel agency, so she booked travel for him. She got a call from him one day from South America. He had been to Manchu Pichu and had gotten altitude sickness and ended up in the hospital where the doctor stole his cash. He was able to fly home where he wanted to get a heart lung transplant. Unfortunately he died before he could receive treatment for his chronic lung disease. 

So he wasted his time here on this earth and his money.

If you think that this in some way doesn't happen to many people, you are naive.

Time and money are to be used to improve ourselves and bless our fellow men. Any time we use time and money inappropriately we do not take advantage of the reason we were placed here on the earth. Christ made that perfectly clear when he taught here on the earth.

What are we to do with our time and money here on this earth? We are to do many things, but two things stand out to me. We are to do good and improve ourselves and others.

We have a lot to learn about everything. We should be constantly learning and improving ourselves. This is no time to spend our hours sitting on the couch watching TV and eating chocolates.

As the song goes; we have work enough to do e'r the sun goes down. We spend a lot of our time and money on things that have no eternal worth. Even our thoughts are subject to eternal scrutiny.
This does not mean that we must be at it 24/7, but it does mean we should be prudent with our time and money. We need to know that there will be an accounting that we will have to give to The Lord.

I must now at this point address a prevalent illness in our society. Because electronic devices are so ubiquitous, there are countless hours spent playing mindless video games. Most all of the games that I have seen have no socially redeeming value. Rarely does one learn anything useful or educational except how to maneuver a joystick. If those who indulge in playing for hours on end would use the time spent on the device to learn a new language, read some of the classics such as Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott or James Fennimore Cooper, or watch Pavarotti on You Tube, they would at least have something at the end to show for it.

There are so many good and uplifting things to spend your time doing, rather than squandering time at something that will not improve you and make you a better person.

You only have one life to live. Live it to make you a better individual and by so doing enrich the lives of those around you.

Love,

Grandpa

Decisions Determine Destiny

'Decisions determine destiny'

The home teaching message for January 2015 was by President Thomas S. Monson. The above quote was from that message.

Another statement from that message was; ‘history turns on small hinges and so do our lives’.

You, my grandchildren, will see how true these statements are. It is very important for you to make the correct decisions in your life. The commandments of God are a good place to start. The world will tell you that these are restrictive, but they are eternal laws of happiness. You can never break the commandments of The Lord you only break yourself against them.

I have learned that even the slightest deviation from the commandments of The Lord eventually brings sadness and misery into our lives. This may occur as a result of our own transgression or someone else's not keeping the commandments. As an example many innocent people died recently, because some terrorist did not heed the commandment to love their neighbor and 'thou shalt not kill'.

We will all make decisions that will turn out to be in error, but we should never make a decision that we know is contrary to what we know and have been taught to be right. We sing the song 'Do what is right, let the consequence follow.'

The nice part about this is that we can always make course corrections. We do not always have to continue down the wrong path. We may have to suffer the consequence of a bad decision, but through repentance we can avoid the eternal consequences.
The sad part about making poor choices is that they not only hurt us, but they hurt other people as well. We do not live in a vacuum. We are put into families for a reason. We were not hatched on a rock with no one to care about us or love us. When we make poor choices true parents do not say a Kaddish and never have anything to do with us. They may have their hearts rended and broken, but we are still bound by covenants to them and The Lord.

The parable of the prodigal son is illustrative of the principle of the love and patience of the father and most parents who are grounded in the gospel of Christ. We sorrow when those that we love make decisions, which bring us pain and bring undesirable consequences to the decision maker.

Unfortunately decisions do determine destiny and history does turn on very small hinges. When I was in high school we studied a number of Shakespeare's plays. He wrote Julius Caesar. Brutus and Cassius were key players in the drama. At one point Cassius says' The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."

There is a false notion that has pervaded the thinking of men from the beginning that if the stars were not aligned in our favor that nothing we could do would change the outcome. Our actions do determine what happen in our life. As is often quoted from the poem Invictus, we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul.

D&C 93:39-40 lets us know that when we are disobedient the wicked one comes and takes away our light and the truth that we have, thus our decisions do have very subtle consequences that we may be unaware of.

Please make the right decisions so that your destiny will be all that you are capable of.
 
Love,

Grandpa

Heath Care

In a recent discussion I was made more acutely aware of the changes in health care and the challenges that these changes present.

In order to help my posterity with some of the things that will be of help in the next few years, I will post these suggestions on this Blog.

The access to medical care is changing and will continue to morph until it will no longer be the same.
The sources will change and the avenues will become more difficult to navigate.  It will be imperative for you to be proactive and not rely on outside sources.
The insurance that is now operative requires medical records to be kept electronically.  This makes them more subject to loss. There are malicious individuals who may hack into the computer and alter or destroy data.  My suggestion is that you keep your own Heath records.  They do not have to be paper, they can be digital but they need to be copied so you have a digital copy in a safe and secure place such as a flash drive backup, which you can care with you on your key chain.

Changes in providers either within the same city or as a result of our mobile population are inevitable. If you have your records in digital format it will save you time when you go to a new facility or provider.
What should you include in the medical record?

A list of medications
Any allergies
Previous illnesses (include everything)
Previous surgical procedures
Family illnesses
Immunizations with dates

Every encounter with a health care provider should be documented with date, diagnosis and treatment. Do not rely on someone else, at least make a note either in your smart phone, paper note book or your computer. Keep track of the medications prescribed.
 
The care will become more depersonalized, as ancillary caregivers become more the norm. We now find what I call 'doc in the box' or urgent care centers. In a recent trip to Arizona I saw an ambulatory care center next to a gas station. CVS pharmacies now offer medical care as well. I have entitled one of the reports to the church medical service committee "The new kid on the block". It was a list of pharmacies that offer immunizations on a no wait, no appointment basis with comparative prices.

When I was in practice we used the term 'medical home'. It was thought that if people had one place to receive medical care it was ideal. The doctor was then to direct them to specialty care if needed. It hasn't worked well, because some doctors were not well versed in taking care of patients and the patients went to specialists without a referral. Thus it became fragmented care with multiple practitioners prescribing without knowing what other medications the patient is taking.

Rather than being dependent on someone else, you need to keep your own medical records from now on.

Love,

Grandpa