Cell Phone POW! #6

There has been no spinoff yet. Here, however, is a fantastic pic sent in by Andy, who snapped this of a sign in the building at BYU where he works. I'm thinking BYU printing services should invest in a token dirty minded employee that can help them know that signs with words like penetration can be taken other ways. Maybe though, BYU printing services is run by someone with a sense of humor.

Thanksgiving was fantastic. It started with a delicious breakfast with a good friend and ended with The Blind Side, a movie that I thought was set in the early 90's because of how Sandra Bullock looks in it. It was actually set I think around 2000-2003? I made more sense when I realized that the movie took place in TN. No offense to my friends in TN, you two are nothing but class! Sandra's hair was horrible though. So was her wardrobe. I may have cried a little bit in the movie though.

In between the bookends of my day, I volunteered at a church in Portland and had dinner with my friend Diana and her family and it was d to the licious. Diana is the friend who invited a group of us down to press cider. There were no didgeridoos, but her dad did make the most delicious apple pie ever. Of course.

I'm thankful for NPR and Adam

This morning I was listening to NPR on the way to work, something I haven’t done in a while. I go through phases of regularly listening to NPR. It all started the summer after I got home from my mission. I got home in December and my friend Adam got home that spring. We both worked at the same small office in SLC for the summer and during that time, Adam discovered NPR and immediately fell in love. He listened to it while he worked. It fed his curiosity and desire to know more about everything.

After work during the ride home, he would go on about what he’d heard that day. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a carpooling companion, conversation-wise, back then. I listened and rarely had anything of substance to contribute. I was a smart kid and did well in school but it was mostly the kind of smart where you memorize facts and regurgitate them. I was really good at that. Adam, however, was fiercely intellectually curious.

That summer started something for me though. Sometimes I’d go home and look stuff up that Adam had been talking about. At the time, a lot of it had to do with the lead-up to the 2000 election. Looking back, it probably would have been the summer before the presidential primaries. After that summer, we lived together at BYU and I was able to continue witnessing Adam’s fierceness. As a side note, Adam was also the first person I came out to outside of my immediate family.

The following summer (or maybe the summer after) I worked driving an airport shuttle for a hotel in downtown SLC. This meant that I was in a minivan driving between the hotel and the airport all day long. I decided to start listening to NPR to help pass the time. And I listened from 6:00 am to 3:30 in the afternoon. Every single day. It didn’t take long for me to get hooked. NPR became my crack cocaine. I’d get my fill on the day’s news with Morning Edition. Then I’d listen to the Diane Rehm show and I loved her. I’d also listen to Doug Fabrizio’s beautiful voice on Radio West. Juan Williams on Talk of the Nation. Ira Flato on Science Friday.

Needless to say it ignited a fire of intellectual curiosity. I was also meeting interesting people every day on the shuttle. I think that summer was also the first time I heard of Sunstone. At that point though, I thought it was interesting, but something to be steered clear of. Anyway, that was the summer when I began to engage in the world around me instead of remaining in my own bubble.

The story this morning on NPR was about ants. Some guy is studying them because he thinks they can count. He says they have internal pedometers and that’s how they are able to find their way back home after venturing out for food. Instead of explaining his experiment for how he tested this, check out the story at NPR. My question is how and who chops off the legs of the ants at the knees for the one group of ants, and how and who superglued pre-cut pig bristles as leg extensions to the other group of ants. If you didn’t read the NPR article, I bet you want to now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Month of Meditation

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article called Mormon Mantras. I want to return to that article because there is a whole lot more to that article than what I discussed in One hot mess of thought, which really was a hot mess. I also forget that just because I post a link to something, it doesn’t mean people go and read it. I’m going to try and do a better job of calling attention to items that I post that are really worth going and reading on your own. Mormon Mantras is one of them.

The article was sent to me because of my very first post, titled Listening, in which I talk about meditation and the benefit that I get out of it. Looking back at when I started the blog, I am reminded that the month or so before I started it I was in the habit of meditating almost daily. Although maybe the word habit is a little strong for doing it regularly for just a month. Either way, it kind of laid the foundation for my blog.

I want to get back into the habit of meditating regularly again. Phil describes the benefit he got out of meditating. He started the practice because he was having lots of shoulder pain and headaches and anxiety and depression as a result of an injury he sustained a year earlier. Initially the meditation helped with his physical ailments, but as he got deeper into the practice of meditation, it expanded to other areas of his life. In his words:

Almost immediately, I noticed that my scripture studies were more insightful and my prayers more rich and profound. I soon realized that mediation was not primarily about relaxation and stress reduction but rather an awakening into the Spirit—and that this communion with the Spirit had the power to heal and transform.

After seven months of devoted meditation practice, I began to have consciousness-expanding experiences that provided exhilarating moments in which I felt a deep sense of oneness with the universe and all of creation. I also began to identify much more with my spirit instead of my body, thoughts, and emotions.

As the months passed, unhealthy thought and behavior patterns receded and Christlike virtues became more deeply rooted. After three-and-a-half years of daily meditation, I experienced the realization that, without the goal-setting or other conscious self-improvement efforts I’d tried in the past, I had become much less defensive, selfish, impatient, and judgmental. I had also become far more emotionally vulnerable, open, and honest.

I use to be fairly skeptical, but I think there’s a lot of power in the practice of mediation. I decided I want to engage in it more regularly (daily), and to get myself started I’m going to declare now until Christmas a month of meditation. It’s official, maybe I can get Andrew to make T-shirts. Does anyone want to join me? If you need more details about how to meditate, read the article linked above. Maybe cool things will happen to you if you give it a try…(seriously, as ridiculous as it may sound to just sit there Indian style [is that PC?] with your hands on your legs and thinking about nothing or repeating some mantra, you will be surprised at what it does for you if you’re patient with it.)

Cell Phone POW! #5 and possible spinoff??

This cell phone POW! comes from Quinn. I think I know what’s going on here. Correct me if I’m wrong. Quinn is in the market for a new car and he saw this one on the street with a for sale sign in the window. He really likes it, but isn’t sure how it would be received by others. He came up with the brilliant plan of floating it through as a POW! to see what kind of response it gets. I’ll go ahead and cut to the chase for you, Quinn. What do you think? Should Quinn pull the trigger on this one? Is it his color or should he hold out for something a little bit flashier and brighter?

I have a bunch of other good POW! submissions. I thought about either posting more than one a week on this blog or creating a spinoff blog of POW! goodness. I think I might do the latter and see what happens. Maybe that will be a Thanksgiving weekend activity.

Did anyone watch Glee this week? Bathroom humor usually doesn’t slay me, but when Finn was on the phone with Kurt in the bathroom at Quinn’s house and said, “I have to go, they’ll think I’m pooping!” I lost it. I think because it caught me off guard. Sometimes Finn has some really great unexpected lines like that. Also funny was the whispered line, “I think the duck is in the hat” and “Listen you little psycho, if I don’t get enough sleep my antidepressants won’t work and I’ll go crazy and I will kill you!” That’s funny chit.

Oh, and Ariel, I think you really did kill my fish. I don’t see them down there, are they showing up for anyone else? Don’t let Ariel near your pets, she will maliciously over feed them until they die. She may not eat animals, but she obviously has no problem killing them.

Thoughts on Winter and Sarah Palin

Last night at choir rehearsal, I was supposed to give a thought based on the text of one of the songs we are singing. We were running short on time, though, so I didn’t get to give it. So I’m giving it to you guys. The song is ‘Tis Winter Now and the text is by Samuel Longfellow, younger brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I can’t remember who arranged it and I don’t have my music on me. Maybe one of my choir peeps can chime in. Anyway, here are the words:

‘Tis winter now; the fallen snow

Has left the heav’ns all coldly clear;

Through leafless boughs the sharp winds blow,

And all the earth lies dead and drear.

And yet God’s love is not withdrawn;

His life within the keen air breathes;

His beauty paints the crimson dawn,

And clothes the boughs with glittering wreaths.

And though abroad the sharp winds blow,

And skies are chill, and frosts are keen,

Home closer draws her circle now,

And warmer glows her light within.

O God! Who giv’st the winter’s cold

As well as summer’s joyous rays,

Us warmly in Thy love enfold,

And keep us through life’s wintry days.

What I love about this song is that it isn’t all lollipops and mistletoe. Not that I don’t love lollipops and mistletoe, but I love art and music and movies and literature that present a scene or situation that is bleak and dreary and then show the hope or beauty that exists in the scene or situation or the beauty that can result. I think sometimes we look at life as either good or bad. If things are going well for us, life is good. If there are cold, sharp winds then life is bad. I love the first line of the second stanza after the first stanza sets up a scene of cold barrenness. And yet God’s love is not withdrawn.

Musically, there is a lot of oooing that sounds like cold and bitter winds, but then there are also sections of really beautifully rich and warm chords. I love it when I’m able to figure out how to let the two coexist in my own life and see the beauty that can exist in unexpected places.

On a completely unrelated note, has anyone else been watching Andrea Mitchell report on Sarah Palin’s book tour? Hilarious. All through her reports she seems like she is on the verge of cracking up. This morning they had a clip of her interviewing Sarah in a crowd. It’s very subtle, but when it went back to Andrea to do the wrap up, her eyes were just slightly wider and lips pursed a tiny bit more and you could almost see the words “Can you believe this lady?” scrolling across her eyeballs.

I don’t get what the fascination is with her. Help me understand. To be clear, I don’t think she’s a horrible person. If we were neighbors and our kids played hockey together, I’d totally chat her up at the games. I’d invite Todd over to watch the superbowl and share a six pack. Oh never mind, I don’t drink beer or watch baseball. I’m not a hockey mom either. Yet. I’m sure I could exchange pleasantries over the fence though.

Emotionally flat and surveying the land

Last night I had a session with my counselor. I walked in and she asked, “What’s up? You seem emotionally flat.” Those might not have been her actual initial words, but those are the words she used to clarify what she was asking. I hadn’t really thought much about it and said, “I dunno, I don’t really feel flat.” I think I did feel some absence of emotion but hadn’t really thought about it much because it wasn’t any extreme emotion.

So we went through our session and something that we talked about towards the end sparked an understanding of where the emotional flatness might be coming from. I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about but it occurred to me that the last couple weeks I haven’t been as enthusiastic about blogging. Ever since I started the blog, whenever I think of something I want to blog about I completely dive into it. A lot of it has been to help me process things. I process stuff best when I write it out and it’s also been exciting to share my thoughts with others.

Another thing about the blog is that it’s been a coming out tool of sorts. In the past year or two I’ve been on a path of gradually coming out to friends and family. I realized last night what great material the blog and coming out has been for me. It’s helped me change and deepen existing relationships and I’ve created exciting new ones. It’s given me lots of raw emotional material to work through. It’s helped me understand better who I am and what I’m capable of. The past year or two have been transformative to say the least. Ask anyone who has been walking with me through it that last few years.

The last couple of years have also been a period of intense reconciliation between my testimony and my homosexuality. Not that I think I now have that all figured out, but I feel fairly comfortable with things as they are right now.

Now I’m finding that all this is becoming fairly normal to me. The journey is still exciting, but not nearly as much as when I was in the thick of it. That’s where I think the emotional flatness comes from. I’m not trying to ascribe any great or deep meaning to this. I’m just sitting back and observing. I feel like I’ve come through the most intense part of my own great awakening and reached a plateau and I’m curious to see what comes next. Stay tuned.

Oh, and here’s my wordle. If you go to http://www.wordle.net/ and put in your blog address, it will take commonly used words from your blog and create a word cloud. I’ve seen a couple other people do this and thought it was cool.

Sunstone not Treadstone

This past weekend I went to a Sunstone symposium in Seattle with Ellie, Ginger and Seth. Last March Ellie and I went to the symposium in San Francisco and that was my first one. The Seattle one was much smaller and was held at some rowing club a few miles outside of downtown Seattle and the heater was not working well because we were frigid the entire day. I am normally one that likes things on the cool side, but my feet and legs from the knees down were frozen until well into the afternoon and by afternoon I was beginning to get sick from our lunch. I ended up hoarking in a Chevron bathroom in Tacoma on the way back to Ellie’s parents’ house that evening.

Needless to say, the cold and the beef brisket declaring war on my stomach made it hard to concentrate at times. Also making it hard to concentrate was the presentation on the settlement of Arizona by early Mormon pioneers. Not interesting.

It definitely wasn’t all bad though. Margaret Young, mentioned in this post and this post, did a presentation on Mormon Literature. Margaret teaches creative writing at BYU and is the current president of the Association for Mormon Letters. She is a fantastic story teller and shared a couple of amazing stories from her own life. She also talked about Mormon literature and how there’s a lot of not so great stuff out there and how it’s currently very Utah-centric and how she’d like to encourage more literature from outside of the Mormon belt. We are a world wide church with a vast and diverse membership, but you’d never know it by what you see at Deseret Book (including art work, not just literature). Anyway, I obviously always love hearing from her.

Back to lunch though. I was sad that it made me sick because it was delicious. The four of us wandered up the street to this BBQ place called RoRo’s. I got a beef brisket sandwich and sweet potato fries and was way happy. Also contributing to my happiness was the fact that RoRo’s was not an icebox. Maybe that’s why the food tasted so good to me.

We had a server there who was hard to figure out. She had very manly facial features, but heavy dark red lipstick. Her eyebrows and lips, as Ginger so accurately described them, were overwhelming. She had eyebrows thicker than mine (not that I have big unruly bushes for eyebrows, but if I didn’t trim and pluck, they’d definitely be unsightly). This lady though, looked like she colored her eyebrows or filled them in with a pen to make them very thick and black. She also wasn’t wearing a bra and I think she was very cold standing at the cash register by the door. They kind of assaulted us when we walked in. It was the first thing everyone noticed, except for Ginger, who couldn’t get past her overwhelming lips and eyebrows.

Also fun was the ferry ride to Seattle early in the morning where I made Ginger take the picture below of a nice old man sleeping on a bench. Precious.

PS, did anyone notice that there are fish to feed at the bottom of my blog? Click to feed.

I posted this and then noticed that two of the presenters at Sunstone posted what they presented at By Common Consent and wanted to include links. Check this and this out.

In case you missed it

The LDS church announced yesterday that they support a Salt Lake City law that would prohibit discrimination against gays in housing and employment. Prop 8 was painful on both sides, but I'd like to believe that no matter how a person feels about gay marriage, surely we can all agree that no one should be fired or not be able to get a job or housing simply because he or she has attractions that were not chosen. Read all about it:

LDS Newsroom

LA Times

NY Times

Wall Street Journal

Deseret News

SL Tribune

Huffington Post

Here's another article that I'm adding to the mix, sent to me by a friend. It's by Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic

Why can't we be friends?

A while ago in moho blogoland there were some posts about friendship. That got me to thinking and my thoughts have been simmering on the back burner for a little while now and I think I’m ready to serve up a helping. One common theme I’ve noticed in moho blogs and in groups I’ve been a part of is the desire by moho’s to find that one best friend “that totally gets me”. I remember feeling that as well. I wanted that one best friend that was just like me and who I could do everything with. I felt very different from other guys at school (because I wasn’t interested in the same things and was attracted to them instead of to the girls) and thought my life would be much better if I could have a BFF just like me. I’m aware, by the way, that this isn’t unique to homosexual Mormon men.

As a result, my approach with friendships became the chameleon approach. I was Julia Roberts character in the Runaway Bride. My friendships involved me trying to become the perfect fit for whoever my current friend was. I was always just along for the ride. My friend KaRyn coined the term “come along friend”. Or maybe it was Alie? The term wasn’t coined specifically for me, but I was classified as a come along friend.

Martha Beck talked about this idea in an article of hers that I read on CNN a while back. I copied the article into a word document but sadly didn’t copy down the URL. Sorry. Anyway, she had the following to say about romantic relationships, but I think what she says is also applicable to friendships or family relationships.

There's a thin line between a romantic statement like "I love you so much, I want to share my life with you until death do us part" and the lunatic-fringe anthem "I love you so much that if you try to leave me, I'll kill you."

People who say such things love others the way spiders love flies; they love to capture them, wrap them in immobilizing fetters, and drain nourishment out of them at peckish moments. This is not the kind of love you want.

The way you can tell real love from spider love is simple: Possessiveness and exploitation involve controlling the loved one, whereas true love is based on setting the beloved free to make his or her own choices.

Perhaps you are neither a spider nor a fly, but a chameleon who morphs to match the one you love. Or you may date chameleons, choosing partners who conform to your personality. Either way, you're not in a healthy relationship. In fact, you're not in a relationship at all.

If you're living by the "We are one" ideal, it's high time you found out how terrific love for two can be. Follow your heart in a direction your partner wouldn't go. Dare to explore your differences. Agree to disagree. If you're accustomed to disappearing, this will allow you to see that you can be loved as you really are. If you tend to dominate, you'll find out how interesting it is to love an actual person rather than a human mirror.

At some point I began to realize that my desire to have a best friend who was just like me was more about wanting to validate myself because I didn’t feel good about who I was. If I found a best friend just like me, then it would be ok to be me. In the meantime I would try to morph myself to try and be exactly who someone else was. This was back when I saw my uniqueness as a bad thing and not as a good thing to feel confident about. Fortunately, that has all changed.

The bad thing about how things were before it all changed though, is that I couldn’t ever really accept the love I got from others, because they weren’t loving me…I didn’t really even know who I was. I was an amorphous personality. If people said they loved me or paid me some compliment, it always just bounced right off my amorphousness.

Now, however, I’ve explored who I am and opened myself up to let others in and take a tour, even of the stuff that I swore I would always keep secret. I have a better sense of who I am and let others see it, and as a result I’m able to accept the love and compliments I get from others because I’m able and willing to recognize it in myself. I also know that these kind expressions are coming from people who know all of me, even what I considered to be the darkest parts of me. I can no longer use the excuse, “they only say nice things because they don’t know about this or that.” They know it all and yet these people are willing, even anxious, to see the good in me.

As a result, I’ve also noticed I’ve become much more able to feel the love of God, or what I identify as the love of God. It’s difficult because he’s not a tangible person that we can be in the same room with and audibly hear speak to us. I really believe it’s our more tangible earthly friendships and relationships that help define our relationship with him, so it should probably come as no surprise that as my earthly relationships have deepened and become more meaningful, so has my relationship with God.

Any post that starts with a picture of Paris and Nicole and ends with my relationship with God has to be a good one, right?

I have never...

FHE last night was fairly entertaining. We played the game, I Have Never. If you’ve never played it, everyone sits in chairs in a circle with one person in the middle who says something he has never done. If it is something you have done, then you have to get out of your chair and find another chair to sit in and the person left without a chair is “it”.

The fun/devious part of the game is revealing secrets about others. Once when I played at BYU, the person in the middle said something like, “I have never made out for three hours in the back of a pickup truck at Squaw Peak.” His roommate sheepishly got up out of his chair.

Last night, Courtney thought it would be funny if she got in the middle to say she has never kissed anyone in the room. I got in the middle before she did and I looked at her to see if I could use her idea and she gave me the nod, so I said it. As soon as it came out of my mouth, in all the confusion of people getting out of their chairs to find another one, I heard someone shout, “LIAR!!” It turns out, I had forgotten all about the incident at the ward campout when we played kissing rugby and I pinned a girl in the ward to the ground and forced myself on her.

Another funny moment was when someone said he had never kissed a man. I got up, thinking it would cause a stir, but then something like 6 other guys stood up. Totally took the wind out of my sails. I guess some people kiss their dads.

Cell Phone POW! #4

This picture comes to you courtesy of me! I got some other good pics this week that I’m sure I’ll use in the future, well except for yours, Quinn. Sorry my phone ate it. :( This one was taken Wednesday while I was out running some errands during lunch. I’ve seen this rectal clinic building before, but it occurred to me when I saw it again yesterday that it would make for a good POW! If I had taken a wider shot, you would see that this short ugly building sandwiched between two taller buildings has two small windows with bars on them. I was going to take more pictures but then someone was walking up to the building and I figured having to walk into that building would be bad enough without having someone taking your picture. So I’m thinking there’s no way this is really what the sign says it is. It’s gotta be a front for something else. What though? Get creative.

I don’t really have any more explanation about last week’s POW! other than that it’s a goat with a bag on its head. I don’t even know where Stina saw that goat, but I’m guessing it was at work or on her way to or from work. She works in the country. I did, however, like the image that Courtney painted of Stina knocking the goat unconscious to take it home to make artisan cheese to sell at the farmer’s market. She’d totally do it.

Remember how I told you about the guy at work that shaved the top of his head so he could be an elderly Harry Potter for Halloween? I kind of assumed that he would just shave the rest of his head after Halloween was over. Nope. He’s just letting the top grow out. Somebody should tell him it looks ridiculous.

I went back to Yakuza (the place I mentioned in this post) and got a full on kobe beef burger, as opposed to just a kobe beef slider. The burger was incredilicious X 5. I went with Stina and interestingly enough, the beef patty (the word patty seems insufficient though as the slab of beef was like an inch thick) had a thin layer of goat cheese on it. Courtney, may actually be on to something. Stina may have some sort of weird obsession with goats and their cheese.

One more thing, if baseball preempts Glee one more time, I’m gonna go all Nancy Kerrigan on those baseball players.

One hot mess of thought

I’m not sure if I’ve ever blogged about this before but I know I’ve thought about it. I’m too lazy to go through past posts to check. If the first part of this post is a repeat, then deal. I have a really fantastic counselor. Some of you have heard her speak or present and know what a wonderfully wise woman she is. In one of our sessions we were talking about her approach to counseling. My memory of the conversation is a little bit hazy, but I remember her saying something about how counseling/therapy isn’t about the content of our lives. I kind of understood what she was saying at the time, but it’s something that I’ve been chewing on ever since (I seem to use lots of food imagery in my posts).

Now I’m going to jump a little bit. Remember, it’s all about putting together all the pieces. This past week, a friend sent me an article by Phil McLemore entitled Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation, which much more eloquently expresses what I was trying to express in my inaugural post. Phil’s article is definitely well worth your time and there are several themes in there that I could probably do many other posts on. Read it. The idea I wanted to focus on from that article for now is the following:

Many people associate their spirit with their mind and personality. However both one’s mental activity (thoughts and emotions) and personality traits can be observed. Whatever we can observe is not really us. We are the observer: the capacity to observe is a characteristic of spiritual awareness.

Our minds—which include our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions, as expressed through our bodies and behavior—were intended to be reconciled to perfections of spirit. However, we are seduced so much by the noise, form, and activity of the material world that we lose awareness of our true identity and become identified primarily with our thoughts (mental noise) and bodies.

Ok, so that might seem kind of weird and mystical and hard to grasp. I’ll bring it down to a personal level now. About a month ago, I had a session with my counselor that included lots of discussion that was nearly exclusively about my homosexuality. At the end of the session she asked if I realized that was the first time we spent the whole hour talking about just that.

Jumping again, I often use my blog to come out to people. I recently told a friend about my situation, gave him the address to my blog and said that I blog about balancing being both a Mormon and attracted to men. I just quickly scanned my posts though (I guess I’m not so lazy anymore) and rarely do I blog exclusively about homosexuality. I’ll make reference to it here and there and I’ll have an occasional post dedicated to it, but it’s certainly not the focus of my blog.

So there are a bunch of pieces. I’m not sure I’ve brought it all together in one coherent idea or thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t. I guess maybe it’s that I think sometimes we become prisoner to the content of our lives instead of seeing the content as clinical material that we use to create something better with. Act instead of being acted upon. What did you think? Was that all just a rambling mess? What did you get out of the article? Is there another idea in there you think I should explore in another post?

Three Classy Ladies

I have a couple of posts brewing (but not stewing, because beef and barley is gross). It’s a busy week, though and the posts are taking some effort to think through and pull together. In the meantime, here are some gems to keep you entertained. I may have something for tomorrow.

1. Has anyone heard of Elna Baker? I first heard of her in an interview that BCC did for her recently released memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. She’s a Mormon comedian in NYC and has done bits on NPR and for the Onion. I got her book for my birthday and I’m excited to crack it open.

2. If you have children and a home, you should read my friend Margaret’s blog, bonbonliving. You should also read her blog if you enjoy the writings of a witty, insightful and stylish woman. We used to work together at BYU and passed the time eating microwave popcorn and taking online personality quizzes and downloading music on Napster. Those were the days.

3. If you are wondering how you can help children in Uganda, check out my friend Ellie’s organization, Peace for Paul. It’s a nonprofit that is bringing kids in off the streets and out of the slums and giving them the opportunity to go to school and to live in a more stable and loving environment. They are raising money to buy land for an orphanage and to sponsor more children and could use whatever you are able to give.

There you have it. Three classy ladies. Check them out.