Light and Truth

In the early spring of 2019 I was in the midst of my second year at Yale University pursuing a Ph.D. in Statistics & Data Science. With my wonderful wife, Bethany, and our newborn son, Aaron, things were going very well for us in many aspects. But fatherhood and graduate school can certainly require a large amount of energy and time. Consequently, I attended the local Institute of Religion class on Tuesday evenings for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I found to help me relax and focus on things that matter most. At one such class the teacher, Randy LaRose, shared a quote from one of his friends who served as secretary to the  First Presidency  of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Paraphrasing the quote, I remember it indicating that the mindset of the members of the First Presidency is much like the advice given by the professional American entrepreneur Jim Rohn: "Focus on the solution, not on the problem." The moment Brother LaRose s...

Ever since I was a young boy, well over a decade ago, I have enjoyed riding a bicycle. As a teenager I would pedal through the hills of Bountiful, Utah to my grandparents' house to mow their lawn, to Bangerter Farms to help in their summer harvest, to my part-time job at Nielsen's Frozen Custard, and many other places. My father and many siblings also greatly enjoy biking, enough so that it almost seems like a family tradition. And the tradition continued on my mission as I rode a bike around the towns just outside of Westpoint, New York, and once even through Manhattan for an activity. Upon returning home from being a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the end of 2013, it was time to start school again. But with minimal amount of money, and no straight-forward way to obtain a scholarship, my educational pursuits at The University of Utah needed to be accompanied by some form of part-time employment. Miraculously enough, my older brot...

Many years ago, while sitting in a health science class at Woods Cross High School, another student leaned over to me before class and casually asked, "So are you an optimist, perfectionist, or pessimist?". A couple days earlier, we'd been studying these three personality types during that class, talking about what characterizes them. My answer to this student was easy and straightforward: "I am a pessimist". While I wished I could say otherwise, it was nevertheless a fact that I was someone who always focused on what was not going well and the negatives surrounding me. And I was rarely in a state of happiness. With epilepsy influencing every aspect of life, having a scarcity of friends, and needing to deal with all of the homework that continually got piled on me, it seemed to me that my pessimism was completely justified and inescapable. A few years later, I found myself serving as a full-time missionary in Middletown, New York. My full-time teaching compani...