The Daily Honky Tonk 176th Edition

The Daily Honky Tonk
176th Edition
Monday, August 17, 2009
11:30 AM

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Table of Contents:
On Friendships
Mexico!

On Friendships

Going home after our trip to Mexico was one of the best things I have done this summer. On the drive back home from the Bloomington airport in the Honda Accord the I drove back in highschool, I felt more homesick than I ever have in my life. I don’t really get homesick, not for the two years on my mission and not really while I’m even out at school. But driving home, I became more sick for home than ever. I didn’t even desire as much to hook up with friends, as I just wanted to be at home and with my family. Okay, so this is kind of a weird way to start off an essay about friendships, but it will relate.
Over the past couple months, I’ve been pondering what it means to be a friend. While I still have a few friends who I consider my best friends, in reality, the relation we share is not the type we shared in high school. Several of us live hours away from each other, two are getting married, school and work keep us busy, for two of my friends I hope they wake up from their slumbers, and the lives we lead don’t just don’t intersect like that they did in high school. It’s not bad, it’s just different.
To add another factor to this equation, in coming to college I meet hundreds of new people, in classes, in my ward and apartment complex, and through meeting people here through friends from back home. One of the girls was teasing me and being serious when she said I would be a good person to know just to get to network people. And after dating a girl, I started to wonder if I still know how to build real solid friendships, or just unlimited amounts of relationships of trust. People trust me far quicker and to greater degrees than I trust them on a regular basis; or at least by my perceptions of things they do.
Finally, I’ve recognized that, in relationships other than dating relationships, most people aren’t strictly looking for best friends. Our lives, that of students, are rather transient; there is little that is constant and after leaving high school, I think people realize that everything they know will disappear in again in a few years. This cannot obviously be said for everyone- there are people who have friends from college that last for years. I don’t think right now that this is a bad thing- it is just different. And for me, after meeting many many new people, I’ve realized that I do want friendships that are more constant. Tying it back to home, I think being there helped me to see the constancy that I really enjoy in my relationships there.
Yesterday, I taught the Elder Quorum lesson out of the Joseph Smith manual during the third hour of church. In a very real way, I knew the Lord had allowed me to be in a position to study and teach that lesson for the benefit of myself. In learning about Joseph Smith, it’s obvious from the accounts of others that whether he spent lots of time with a person or little time they felt like he was really a true friend and that he care about the individual. It also became evident to me that we typically define people we know into a couple categories; family, best friends, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. I decided that the main difference between best friends, friends, and acquaintances is the amount of time that we devote to the individual and the amount of trust we build. Yet, one of the points of the lessons was that we needed to be true friends with everyone, especially in our Ward Family setting. If it was true that time was the major requirement for being a friend with someone in a ward with two hundred people, you couldn’t devote even an hour a week to all those individuals, there are only 168 hours in a week. Subtract sleeping, school and work, and you have much less time and more people that you interact with that should be your true friends. So, back to Joseph Smith. He clearly didn’t devote lots of time to everyone he met, but other felt that in the little contact they had that he was a friend. More importantly, I noticed in the comments from his journal how much he valued friends and how much a strength they were to him. In teaching the lesson, my thoughts were led to Christ. In the scriptures, Christ went amongst many people. And even if his ministry was somewhat limited, it was still a lot of people. In the instances where he allowed all the children to come to him, or where he administered to all the sick and afflicted, it’s obvious that he wouldn’t have had a lot of time to spend with each individual. Yet, they loved Him and they felt His love and testify to us from thousands of years before that He is the Savior and is our Redeemer and they must have felt that he was a true friend.
Bring this forward two thousand years to a college student who has been praying about friendships and how to properly build relationships with people. A couple of impressions have struck me. Although certainly there is value in the time spent with people and the trust we build in each other, it isn’t strictly a requirement for friendship. How you feel towards an individual, the love you have towards them is more important. In that sense, perhaps, acquaintances can be called friends. In some cases, I was devaluing my ability to make friends because I know so many people, but have built very few best friendships. My feeling is that while I want that, it isn’t strictly necessary and that I don’t have to devalue a friendship because there isn’t as much devoted to it. People that I feel are real friends are real friends despite the lack of time we share.
I began to think of more practical examples of people who are true friends to everyone they come in contact with. Youth leaders, my favorite teachers, and a few close friends came to mind. There are individuals I know that radiate friendship from somewhere deep within. It is deep, but it glows. Two friends who may have seen an overweight, awkward kid at the end of his freshman year, but saw a friend as well. Teachers that I knew cared about every student. Teaching wasn’t their job, it was the way they carried themselves and its what inspires me to want to be a teacher. Their students learned more because their teacher was a friend even if they weren’t going to be hanging out Friday night. And it’s the way I see my parents welcome people into our home. And it is the characteristic that led me most to my best friends in high school. In these individuals, friendship radiates to every person they meet whether they will spend ten minutes with the person or a life time. I’ve come to realize that this is one of the most attractive personality traits to me personally and the extreme opposite is one of my biggest pet peeves.
But what about the best friends issue? I still wanted to know what made a best friend. Joseph Smith said: “These I have met in prosperity, and they were my friends; and I now meet them in adversity, and they are still my warmer friends. These love the God that I serve; they love the truths that I promulgate; they love those virtuous, and those holy doctrines that I cherish in my bosom with the warmest feelings of my heart and with that zeal which cannot be denied. . . . To them I have proved faithful- to them I am determined to prove faithful, until God calls me to resign up my breath.” And that definition seems good enough for me. My best friends radiate faith and love. Most importantly that faith and faithfulness, not being to me, but to the God that I love and that I serve. In putting Him first, they become the best type of friend one can have and the love I feel from them perhaps is as one popular LDS songs goes a “window to His love”.

Mexico!

I’ve never had that bug, you know, the one where people are just itching to get out of the country and discover all the cool travel destinations everyone has seen in the media or read about in a book. I never had the traveling bug- and then I went to Mexico.
We spent ten days as a family as international travelers. The following is my list of what I considered my top items.

1) We stayed the first couple days in a Bed and Breakfast in Valladolid run by an American who lives down there. La Casa de Hamacas offers its visitors beds and also hammocks to sleep in as well as excellent food made by locals that the owner has hired. Dennis, the owner, is one of the nicest guys I’ve met and is knowledgeable about how to make the most of one’s experience in that area of the country.. Our family recommends this place to anyone and everyone. Dennis is very service oriented and was more than happy to provide us with opportunities to serve in the area. One of the highlights of the trip was visiting local Mayan villages with a translator who spoke Mayan (I translated back into English for my family) and delivering food and necessities to many families. We were humbled by the circumstances and appreciated the opportunity to see what we really take for granted.

2) We visited four different Mayan ruins. Chichen Itza, Ek Balam, Tulum, and Coba. I love the Mayan ruins. I am hoping in the next life that we will have a way in which we can visit/watch past civilizations and see what they were like. Our family favorite ruins were Ek Balam for a couple reasons. At Tulum and Chichen Itza you can’t walk around on the ruins. Coba, you can, but it is a little more spread about and very easily accessible to tourists for it’s proximity to Cancun. We really did like all of them, but Ek Balam was quite stunning and we loved one of the murals that was more intact than others. Another highlight of the ruins were that in Chichen Itza you can clap in front of the main pyramid and it will produce a sound that sounds like a bird call. This is due to the placement of the buildings that they built and how the sound waves bounce. It is way cool. And also there is shadow created once a year on the pyramid that looks like a snake crawling down the pyramid. They Mayans were genius. In Tulum, the buildings are placed so that the sun will shine through tiny windows depending on the months of the year, so that they could use their buildings as a calendar.

3)We enjoyed visiting Cenotes, underground water holes that are varied and beautiful. Are favorite was one where you could jump off a ledge from about twenty feet above the water.

4)In no particular order, we “love” how the road systems work and where often the lanes aren’t marked with lines, so a road might be two, four, or three and a half lanes. We really did love sampling various foods and fresh juices made by the locals. We discovered that in Mexico a waste basket is literally a waste basket, no toilet paper is flushed down their toilets. We discovered that Europeans believe in going topless on any beach they find. We were glad to know that we should always drink bottled water and even Addie, the three year old reminded us not to drink the water. We loved watching the storms come in over the ocean while we stayed at a beach house and I enjoyed speaking the language. We went snorkeling and few of us went on a turtle walk late at night and got to help baby sea turtles make their way to the ocean and watch a turtle land and build her nest and lay eggs and then leave (a two to three hour process!). We enjoyed going to a place called Hidden Worlds Cenote Park where you can ride ziplines (one that splashes into the water as well as ride a skycycle, which is a suspend bike which allows you to pedal on a wire to travel above the jungle and to enjoy the sights around you.

The best part by far was just being with the family. Spending time together and discovering a culture and a people that were new and different. I loved it. After the Mayan ruins, I definitely find myself wanting to explore all the ancient cultures and past cultures. That little traveling bug awoke inside me.

The Editor,
MARK