Special Bulletin

Be ye therefore perfect

Most of us are familiar with the words of Jesus, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect..” Many people think the commandment is absurd and pay it no mind. Others think it is a cute phrase because it has a nice roll when it slips off the tongue. “Jesus said for you to be perfect,” then they pass on to other matters, otherwise untouched.

But the phrase needs more than our passing interest because this is a serious injunction, a genuine destination we should be seeking. Before we launch on the trip it is a good idea to get a bird’s view of just where we are headed. We must hear what Jesus did not say. For example, he did not say, “Try to be a little bit better on the Sabbath and we’ll hope for spill over to a few odd moments during the rest of the week.”

Nor did he say, “Try to be about half as good as your father which is in heaven is perfect.”

No, Jesus didn’t cut us any slack at all. He didn’t even say “Try to be almost as perfect as your father which is in heaven is perfect.”

Just how far up the road of perfection does he want us to go? All the way. He doesn’t want us stopping anywhere this side of Celestial City. This target seems absurd to many, and it seems a daunting task to most while some simply wonder if anything could be worth the effort. A mere handful realize it is a challenge that is reachable, IF Heavenly Father will help us do it.

Far too many of us wait until the earthquake, the tempest, or the violence is upon us before we open our mouth and our heart to breathe a word of rebuke — or if the situation is really bad — an effort at prayer. If prayer and the deep soul-seated yearning for feeling the spirit of God found in our Scriptures had been a constant and consistent desire we would have been led to a place of safety ere tragedy struck, or at least safe and calm in the very mouth of the tragedy.
Prayer, constant prayer, and study, consistent study of the word of God will lead us in paths of righteousness and safety. By praying for the touch of his spirit while we pray or study we open our hearts and minds to receive inspiration, guidance and direction in all of our affairs.

When Moses was off hunting a sore-footed sheep he happened to glance over and see a bush that was burning, but was not being consumed by fire. Moses thought that was peculiar and he turned aside to see the burning bush more closely. Turning aside is what we need to do too if we want to approach God for guidance and direction. From taking the shoes from off his feet Moses was showing respect for being in the presence of God. We too need to show respect when studying the word of God in our Scriptures. Showing respect will open our minds and spirits so that we can read deeper and understand more of what is on the plate before us. This lets us see what we need to be doing right now to improve our mind, body, and spirit to climb the road to perfection. When we can feel the Spirit warming our heart within us we can know that we really are drawing closer to God. The more we know about him, the more we want to be like him.

The cares of this world can smother us until we are at the mercy of the world. “It’s when we don’t have a plan that we are more likely to waste any free time we find.” says Tsang Dick Hing Leung.

“Every added stitch of obedience (to the gospel) makes us stronger in a world that seems to be unraveling,” agrees Jessica J. Carrier. God gives us commandments that we may avoid the worldly trifles and fill our lives instead with true joy and real happiness. The commandments are like fences. At first glance they may look as if they lock people in, but if we look closely at the structure of those fences we will see their real purpose is to lock dangers and tragedies out.

For the first time in four years I saw the moon tonight. The missing sin was mine, not the moon’s.
I’m willing to bet good money the moon has not missed a major tide-swelling event in the past six thousand years.
Moonlight is the original form of fuzzy logic: Sunlight will show us things as they really are; Moonlight reveals things as they might be if we will but stretch a soft shadow or two. A tree trunk becomes a gnome, a solemn stare becomes a winking eye, a rose bush becomes a castle for fairies and a stretch of scrawny grass becomes a wrinkling sea. As I stood there this evening the moonbeams poured down around me like a Jersey heifer’s first cream. Tonight the stones and the trees glowed in a different way than I had ever seen these soft shadows glow before.
(Why, I marvelled — our home is a thousand times prettier by night)
We spend millions on landscaping our yards so they look good to strangers in the light of day, but hide our faces from the beauty that bathes our homes at night for free.

Too much reality is never good for the human race; it would make dreamless, souless materialists of us all, like a wrinkled life deprived of sweetest slumbers. Soaring moons, reaching shadows, these were made to help us dream while we are wide awake, a time when our very thoughts can walk on wings across long bridges where mere reason cannot reach. Too much cold truth runs the brain so fever hot that its spindly bearings melt. Too much sun always darkens the eye, searing the retina — and thus we are blinded by too much reality.
Tonight, beneath the patter of soft moonbeams my walls were a pulsing glow and every leaf surged with memories that stirred my thoughts of long ago. You can’t cultivate that deep with a rake or a hoe; you can’t wake your dreams to see a world of soft beauty, not in the noonday sun.
As I stood there on my balcony I listened to the sprinkle of moonbeams slipping through my trees, I remembered how my dreams once mounted streams of starlit moonbeams like ladders dripping through the star sparkled sky. The magic of believing life could be different from what I knew it was was a magnet, drawing me out onto the pearled grasss to dance with silver splashing feet to melodies my ears could no longer hear, with angels I would never meet.
The moon was given us for signs and symbols, to rule the night and raise the tides of churning seas, and tilt the blood in the breast of man.

Straight up, straight down, the moon sips the spirits awake and draws them forth to play. A creamy full moon ruled that ancient night wherein I almost stole my first kiss. I was in love way back then with a slight little girl of glowing olive skin, though at that age I still struggled to know how to let her heart know of the ache making rot of mine.

A dozen of us, and none among us more than eight, came out skipping through the moonbeams that lapped along the tender blades of grass. We danced, light as angels on swooping wings. I was so light, so light I almost floated with the lilting melody singing from the heavenly spheres as I whirled round and round. Somehow I crashed into Sylvia and my front teeth butted into her olive brown forehead. Oh, if only I had seen the collision coming and kissed her instead.
Both of us toppled to the earth; she sprawled one way, and I the other. The whole band of kids gathered around us and cried, “What happened?”
“He kissed me,” Sylvia declared in wonder. “He kissed me.”
I knew in an instant she had longed for a real kiss to happen, perhaps even more than I had. She loves me too, I thought as I glowed in the wonder of a first young love. Then that magical moment melted. As I looked up at my young peers and heard the tinkle of their mocking chuckles purr I denied the charge with every ounce of my being. “Huh Uh!”
The shame of it lingers even now; they believed me without a murmur. Little did they know the fires of regret already choking my tiny bosom as I gazed at Sylvia’s grief-stricken face in the soft moonlight. Then she turned and fled, gone from my aching sight, gone from my aching arms, Gone — but not forgot.

Moonlit nights were made for sneaky games too. One hot summer night the twins rode two bikes eighteen miles over washboard roads to leave the better one with me, then with Biggie pumpuing and Littlie riding the handlebars, they rode back home. And my first brush with death came beneath a smiling moon. Norberto was jealous and proud. He pulled a knife and swore to scar my face so no girl would ever again love the sight of me. But the moon was my friend and brightly made the scene unreal. The cutting edge of the blade gleamed in the moonlight and I saw a game and not the steel.
Lightly, smiling in delicious fun, I danced around Norberto , nibbling at his jaw, his chest, with my fingers bare, and tapped his right arm in coup each time he struck. When he recoiled in confusion I would reach out and tickle him some more, laughing at his frantic lunges until everyone there quit worrying about murder and began laughing at him as I was.
Cursing a foul stream he stopped lunging at me and hurled the knife at my head. I merely laughed, ducked, and tickled him under the chin once more. Norberto turned and fled, bawling hot in shame, never to come out and play with us at night again.
The moon was big and bright the night I met the mountain lion too. He had killed a few cows and scared some night workers out of their wits. But we were brave. Amderos and I had built a tree house in the tamaracks that day, thirty feet high, and had decided to spend the night out there.
We had no candles so Mama gave me a can of lard when she wasn’t looking. We set it afire and basked in the warmth as we munched on melting cookies. The moon sailed above us in singing arcs as the huge tree limbs swayed in the sagging winds of the night. We told stories of hunts and captures, of the friends we had loved and the foes we had fought, and finally we spoke in hushed whispers of ghosts and fiends.
The stars had turned lonely and cold when we heard the cougar coming up the tree . I heard the scratches ratcheting on the rugged bark an the hot breath hissing and my heart knotted shut with fear. It was Amderos alone that crept to the doorway and peered down. His brown face blanched white in the moonlight at what he saw. With no thought for the heat, my brave hero saved my life. He grabbed the can of burning lard with his bare hands and hurled it down at the lion..
There was a terrible squall rend the midnight air. Then, like a mighty Hercules, Amderos heaved the tin roof off of our tree house — and leaped out headfirst before the tin clattered back on me.
Branches could not hold him, they craccked and splintered in brittle efforts to slow him down, but he still beat that lion to the ground. When I saw him again Amderos was halfway home, sprinting in a dead heat. In the bright moonlight I saw the little puffs of smoky dust smoldering vividly at his heels. Too scared to follow him, I trembled at every sound until the rising sun brought me back to reality.

The woman I married first was seen walking in the flowing light of a creamy moon. The shadows were soft, the beams were kind; I must have looked good to her. She put down her hoe and bade me sit on the darkened porch to watch the dual wonders of cloying moonlight and winking fireflies.

Even though later years threw a thousand shadows more harsh into the glaring sun there were times when the moon came up that we would stand there watching as if it were the dawn of time and the moon was a roaring fire. The sands of time would bathe us in bubbling light and our shadows go splashing free. If it was a good time we would walk across the fields of powdered dust until we found a hollow in the hills, far from the probing eyes of man.

Yea, God gave us the sun, the stars and the moon for signs and seasons in our skies. I was baptized beneath a full moon. The first time I went to the temple the moon was full again. The second time it again billowed full and bright like a giant clipper under full sail against the floating clouds. These signs from the moon made the events far more special to me.

Yet for all this, since coming to live here in the city, where nights were not made for walking, I have forgot — first to look, and then to care. What matters it now — when my muscles don’t stretch and my bones must bulge — if the moon doth still ebb and flow? If we see it not, have we not lost soft logic’s glow? Does it matter at all to the twinkling heavens if, unknownst to us, the moon rises, it sets, the magic ever wanes?

But now I know, again. I have once more seen the moon, now unable to forget the truth I see: my home is far more beautiful by night. The logic is still a little fuzzy, but it feels just right as I watch it soar free over the skyscraper horizon – like an old glove feels against the palm of my hand when there is work to be done. Beneath this evening’s old moon I shall drag my willowed frame forth and rock on the porch again, to spin out the old memories before my eyes like silver dollars cast across the counter top, and they shall dance, dance for me once more.

Way back when the man in the moon was just a little boy I used to wonder about my mother when she kept buying a magazine called Western Romance. If she was married, why was she looking for romance?

Max Brand, a top western writer for many years, was explaining that you needed a woman for the novel to work, but not much of one. A horse was much more important.

Reading westerns was not always a symbol of good taste. I remember when AT EASE, STORIES I TELL TO FRIENDS, by Dwight D. Eisenhower came out in the Reader’s Digest Condensed version that he repudiated the idea the public had of him being a man that would stoop low enough to be caught dead reading westerns. Why I hardly ever read a western, he said. That’s just the way idle tales get started and then they can’t be stopped.

Well, if reading westerns was so bad that Eisenhower would not read one, I was going to quit reading them too. Fortunately for me a copy of Reader’s Digest came out soon after I’d read that book. One of the stories in that issue fascinated me. It was about a man that served Ike in the oval office. The most important job he had, said Reader’s Digest, was finding western novels that Ike had not read yet. It was a hard job, said the guy, because so many westerns are published over again under a different title and the President got angry if one slipped past him. So there I was, my tastes for western were exonerated, and I decided to continue reading them with a clear conscience, even if that great war hero of World War II wasn’t brave enough to admit he did.

Several of my favorite westerns have been installed on Tale Wins for others to read for free. Here is my current list.. but more are coming, of course.

The Seventh Man, by Max Brand

Custer on the Plains

Riders of the Purple Sage

Indian heroes and Chieftains

The Life of an Indian boy

The Virginian

The Autobiography of Buffalo Bill

Calamity Jane — by herself

Boots and Saddles

The Red Badge of Courage

David Crockett Please RIGHT CLICK.

The Adventures of Col Daniel Boon Please RIGHT CLICK.

Arizona Sketches

Bull Hunter by Max Brand

Life on the Early Prairies *

Remember, you can read westerns even if you are married, and you can keep your preference a secret too, if you like. Happy reading.