terriebittner

Well, actually, when my children were in school, I intentionally asked for the biligual classes. The teachers in those classes are often the most dedicated and creative, and my children learned more in those classes than when they were forced into mainstream classes. They learned Spanish of course, but it seems like they learned more of everything else, including respect for other cultures. I pulled my oldest out of a non-diverse school and moved her to an inner-city school for that reason. But homeschooling is a great path if a family enjoys teaching and their children's full time company.

I'm on livemocha.com and I also downloaded the BYKI.com free software. I'm using as many free resources as possible for now. I have friends at church who answer my questions and help me practice. A book on homeschooling for those without money would be interesting. I've though myself of how it could be done, but I'm hoping to branch out away from homeschool writing eventually, since my kids are now grown.

I didn't explain myself properly. I don't refer to heart as a place of emotion. I refer to it as the place we generally feel the answers of the Holy Ghost. Our emotions are really in our heads, you know, not our hearts. So we need our minds--intellect, emotion, all of that--and to feel the spirit in our hearts.

I think what happens is we can't always tell the mind from the heart. There were two issues that bothered me--not the same two, since this was the 70s and I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of homosexuality then. We hear all these emotional appeals (Don't I deserve to be happy?") and we think we're responding with our heart, but we aren't. Our brain is analyzing the situation. Did you know homosexuality is only a mortal condition? It didn't exist in pre-mortal life and it won't exist in post-mortal life. Imagine for a moment building life and even a family around this type of relationship on earth and then getting to heaven...and having no attraction at all to this person, because that condition is gone. What a terrible thing to have happen. So the answer to, "Don't I deserve to be happy?" is, "Yes...that's why God doesn't want you in this relationship." More Good Foundation has a website that walks people who aren't LDS through the information needed to understand this issue. However, the important thing is really trusting God. We have to learn how to trust Him. When I was struggling with those two issues, the missionaries advised me to decide if Joseph Smith was telling the truth. If he was, then everything else has to be true. We might not like it, because we see with limited mortal vision, and we might not understand it for the same reasons, but God understands it, and someday we will too. So first we build our relationship with God. Shut out those two issues for now and just spend more time getting to know God and to recognize His voice. In time, you'll find those issues just aren't issues anymore. You'll reach a place where you know God well enough to trust Him on this one, and your testimony will be strong enough to sustain you through it. With one of my initial two issues, one is no longer a concern. As my knowledge has grown, and I've gotten older, I've figured out why God wants it that way. With the other one, I just trust God. He knows why things happen, and I don't have to as long as He does.

Remember that Satan can get to your intellect, but not to your heart. When you're struggling with doctrine, it's the intellect that's the issue. For me, that was really the very hardest part of conversion. Satan can't re-create a peaceful feeling in your heart--he can't give you joy or peace. But he can keep you from feeling it if you give him that power. That's not to say you're choosing him, just that he's talking so loud it's hard to hear the spirit over him. Sometimes I've had to use my intellect to counter the arguments of the world. Any intellectual argument has a counter-argument, and sometimes I just have to give those to myself to counter-balance them. They aren't the foundation for a testimony, but they help me tune out the other side for a while. Then I have to put the doctrine into the perspective of eternity. Things that seem like a good idea in mortal life are clearly not a good idea in Heaven and we take with us the choices we made here and the person we became. When I think about certain issues long term, I realize they don't make any sense, and that makes it easier to fight for truth. In the eternal scheme of things, if we can keep people from doing something stupid, we're making them happy for a lot longer than just this little speck of mortality. Eventually, we have to face the eternal consequences of our choices and can't continue to pretend they were unimportant, or less important than our temporary happiness. God promised us joy, if we are willing to obtain it, but not worldly pleasure or freedom from trials.

I'm in the Philadelphia area right now. My husband's a consultant and we move a lot, but we've been in the east quite a while now and I'd love to stay.

I use a website called LiveMocha.com and also BYKI.com. There are a number of Brazilians at church, so when I get stuck, there is always someone to help me. They're used to me rushing up to them on Sundays with my questions, or getting emails from me. We have people from probably 30 or 40 countries, mostly Spanish and Brazilian languages (African also), but I can learn Spanish lots of places. I figure I might never again live in a place where I have people to help me learn Portuguese.

Yes, I did. I wrote one and have one on preschool coming out. (Do people really notice the name of the author??)

Hi, I'm Terrie. I joined the church when I was seventeen, after a long search for the one true church--I knew there could only be one. Like Joseph Smith, I didn't understand how every church could teach different things and yet so many said all churches were equally true. Truth is truth. I have a husband and three grown children, and I'm on my second writing career, having taken eight years off to homeschool my children. (I am not organized enough to homeschool and write at the same time.) I teach the five-year-olds at church. I move a lot and always beg for Primary. A while back they released me (decided I'd been a teacher long enough and gave me a different job), but I kept sneaking back in to sub, so they gave up and returned me to my class. The other job, which I also got to keep, is Literacy leader, which I love. Right now, our focus is on teaching English as a second (or third or fourth) language. I teach the beginning class myself, and all but one of my students is non-LDS. Most are from Brazil, so I'm teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese. My other passion is learning about poverty and how to relieve it--one reason I like teaching people to speak English so they can get better jobs. That tackles a root cause of poverty. I have a number of websites as well.

Welcome! I am teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese...slowly...but today I told my Brazilian friend what I was wearing and she understood me, which is progress, right!

You don't have to have a perfect testimony to join the church. When Ijoined, I was pretty much at the level of "I hope it's true." When I prayed, I was having trouble getting an answer as to whether or not it was true, because I wasn't really ready for that answer yet--I think God didn't want me held accountable for something I wasn't yet ready for. But I did get an answer to my prayer about whether or not God wanted me to join. I joined because God told me to, so I hoped it was true. It took about a year to work my way up to believing it, and then knowing it. But I had the Holy Ghost with me, since I'd been baptized and confirmed, to help me reach that point. We're all taught to be working on our testimonies every day. So I'd say it's better to be baptized if you meet the requirements and then work on the testimony.