What do Cases, Lockards, Shepards, Campanellas and Shaws have in common?

The short answer? They are all our friends and family.

The longer answer? They were all in attendance today for our special Sacrament meeting, during which I had the opportunity to exercise my Priesthood authority and give a name and a blessing to our 6th child, Myra Jasmine Case.

This blog will not make you laugh and hopefully will not make you cry, but it needs to be written. I am not a perfect man, not in the least. I make more mistakes than someone with my testimony of the Gospel should be allowed to make. For some reason my Heavenly Father has seen fit to bless my life with a ridiculous amount of blessings. A few of these just on the subject of relationships:

- A beautiful wife who for some crazy reason adores me. 6 amazing children that still want to give me a hug and a kiss good night after I have yelled at them for stupid things all day long.

- Parents and siblings from my family of origin that are also imperfect, but seem to love me perfectly and provided me with great growing-up experiences and the opportunity to find out who I am (still working on it) and love me all the way through it.

- My married-in family (aka the Lockards) is awesome too. I think they are more like me than they would care to admit, but they are also different enough to keep it interesting (I seriously cannot follow many of the computer-related conversations, though I try just as hard to understand them as they do when I am going on about sports).

- Friends that I've known for what seems like forever. I can miss talking to Craig for years and we can pick right up where we left off. And the Campanellas are just kindred spirits. They are the family that we chose instead of marrying in or being born with. Too much love for them to summarize here, I'll have to blog about it another day.

The bottom line is that all of these wonderful people have testimonies of the truthfulness of Our Heavenly Father's Plan and they have true faith in our Savior Jesus Christ. This means the world to me. I said before (and in my testimony today) that I am a very imperfect man and as such my efforts to live worthy have seen highs and lows. I'm not sure I will ever truly be worthy of the Atonement that my Savior suffered through on my behalf, but being surrounded by family and friends that are "imperfect" too gives me comfort in knowing that we can all get there if we work together and try to love one another.

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I forget who was quoted as saying it but "The little things are the big things." I believe this is true of the Gospel and I am committed to working harder on those little things so that my ENTIRE family (for we are ALL eternal brothers and sisters) can return to live with OUR Heavenly Father someday. And (this is highly unorthodox but) I blog these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.