Category Archives: House of Israel

A Tale of Two Watches — The “Gift of Time” — Part 2

Once upon a time, I had a dream. In this dream, I was sitting on a straight-back wood chair with my back to a pool of water. It was really a pond but had a shaped stone edge around it, like a swimming pool. My task was to swing my feet up into the air and do a back flip into the water so that I land farther out than the chair. Well, I’m quite a physical coward, so it took a minute for me to think through this and decide that the risk was better than being stuck in this chair. So I put all my strength into swinging my legs up and over my head. All went as planned, and I landed farther out in the water than the chair.

The next task was to swim to the bottom of the pool and find a gift that was waiting there for me. I’m a good swimmer so I didn’t hesitate to do a surface dive and head downwards. Immediately, some slimy looking seaweed appeared in front of me, waving its tendrils in my face. I was duly intimated, but decided I needed to push through it, no matter how unpleasant. As I did so, a strange thing happened: the seaweed parted and couldn’t actually touch me, much to my relief. I continued to the bottom of the pool to a white sandy natural bottom, with seaweed gone and a lovely yellow-green light filtering down from above. All was peaceful and still, but I didn’t see anything on the bottom.

So I kept swimming in a leisurely fashion, evidently not needing air. Soon I found it: a Mickey Mouse watch on the sand that had a yellow patent-leather watch band. I laughed at the whimsy of it, picked it up and swam to the surface. This all happened back in New Hampshire during my Hippie days of the 1970s, so when I described this dream to a friend there, she gave this interpretation: Yellow is the color of overcoming; Mickey Mouse represents a relaxed, childlike attitude to life; and the watch itself represents “the gift of time.” I squirreled this away and never forgot it through the ensuing years of struggle as a divorced mother of two, even though I didn’t grasp what the “gift of time” meant.

Fast forward to the last couple of years: I’m busily researching the most compelling Last Days timeline I’ve ever encountered and learning about the Hebrew Holy Days, especially as they connect with “Daniel’s Numbers” from the Old Testament. Studying these holy days in Leviticus 23 was eye-opening, especially when I read they were “statutes to be observed forever.” Then in Chapter 25, I came across the concept of a Sabbath year as well as a Jubilee 50th year. The first gives a year of rest and renewal to the land (and is the origin of taking a “Sabbatical Year” for research and renewal in the academic world), while the a Jubilee year describes a stunning, but belated, “restoration” of possessions/wealth, lands, and family, defined here in Leviticus 25:

The Sabbath Year:
3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof;
4 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.

The Jubilee Year:
8 And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.
9 Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.
10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

I’m writing this post on Friday, June 13, 2025 which is also the 50th anniversary of my baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! This anniversary marks the end of a possible, personal Jubilee year. And what’s a little spooky is that on this Sunday, June 15, it will be the 49th anniversary of receiving my own “endowment” ordinance in the Salt Lake Temple. So Sunday could be considered to be the first day of another Jubilee year. What will this year bring and what did last year represent, if anything? Here are my thoughts:

As the result of the dream described above, I bought a Mickey Mouse watch at Disneyland during a visit there with my son’s family in 2004. I didn’t try to find a yellow patent-leather band but the more lady-like version I found satisfied my need to commemorate that long-ago dream and its embedded promise (see image below). Fast forward to 2020, I moved back to Utah from Idaho and brought three inexpensive watches with me, most needing a new battery. So I took them to the Jewelry Doctor in the Mall and had batteries put in all three. Several months ago, they all stopped, including the Timex I wore for errands and church, which didn’t survive an attempt to replace its battery myself. . . . This was an inconvenience more than a hardship, but finally I saw an open moment yesterday on Thursday, June 12. I went to Dillard’s and bought an affordable Coach watch and took my treasured Mickey Mouse watch back to the Jewelry Doctor for a new battery: Here they are:

Two Watches and the Gift of Time

You can see Mickey on the left as well as the M and mouse ears in the band. New watch is on the right, good for everyday with a slight touch of bling in the subtle pattern on its gold face.

So how does all this fit together? I believe that the Jubilee year just past capped that fifty years with an uphill climb that was very steep. I was doing the hardest job of my life, researching and writing a complex book about a living, pulsating mass of Last Days prophecy. Today, the last 12 months seems like a total end to those years of struggle and points to a promised liberation into further work in far more blessed circumstances. Now as I start Day 1 of the next Jubilee year this Sunday, in two days, I see what looks like a lovely downhill ski run (but only the Bunny Hill for me). Today and tomorrow feels like a quiet breather.

But before the future appears and to cap this last fifty years, I go to the Mount Timpanogos Temple this afternoon to do a proxy endowment for an ancestor, Hannah Marie Anderson, born in 1816 in Manhattan, New York. I’ll look forward to meeting her someday and hearing her story! Then tomorrow my son and grandson are coming down from Salt Lake to eat sourdough blueberry pancakes, local sausage, play our favorite games, and enjoy a Father’s Day celebration for this great father and his wonderful son.

PS, I’m finalizing this post after that temple trip: I was in a session that was bursting with dozens of local missionaries. Standing in the prayer circle with about 40 of them was an unforgettable experience, topped by a powerful and reverent prayer from the officiator. What a Jubilee gift!

These two converging Jubilee years seem to form a chiasm in my life with the point between them pointing skyward. They conceivably mark a mid-point between the uphill years of struggle, capped by a crowning, almost crushing trial. Was this the Jubilee year that finally opens the door to these promises? I see the next Jubilee year sloping downhill as time frees up, trials lessen, and I reclaim a more normal balance in my life. But will it also bring the start of a true restoration of my little, incomplete family to our true homeland, a family made whole, and our “possessions” restored to what we would have had in an intact family all these years?

I have real hope that these testing and growth years will bring God’s promised blessings of liberation, because that’s what the scriptures promise: “For after much tribulation, come the blessings” (Doctrine and Covenants 58:4). As one survivor of the Willey-Martin Handcart companies said in response to criticism that they left too late in the year to avoid the deadly blizzards of the plains: “You know nothing about it. The price I paid to know my Savior was worth it, and I would do it again”! I can say the same about this last 50 years, except for the part about “doing it again.” And I plan to be in one of the choirs in heaven singing praises to God for the trials that brought them to Christ. A greater closeness to the Spirit of Christ was a solid, initial reward for my work and suffering — the gift that will just keep on giving!

Fortunately, we don’t have to relive previous trials but just go on to conquer ever-greater heights of building family, community, Zion, and ultimately worlds populated with uncounted spirit children. See a previous high point in the sister blog post to this one, which illustrates how we can mistake a way station for a end destination: The Gift of Time — Part 1, link HERE. But read Brigham Young‘s words about a real destination:

Let me here say a word to console the feelings and hearts of all who belong to this Church. Many of the sisters grieve because they are not blessed with offspring. You will see the time when you will have millions of children around you. If you are faithful to your covenants, you will be mothers of nations. You will become Eves to earths like this, and when you have assisted in peopling one earth, there are millions of others still in the course of creation. And when they have endured a thousand million times longer than this earth, it is only as it were at the beginning of your creation. Be faithful and if you are not blessed with children in this time, you will be hereafter.            
(Deseret News, Vol 10, p 306, Oct 14, 1860)

What is yet to be seen: Does this next year signal the start of that promised “Gift of Time”? Only time itself will tell . . . But here are my final words, no matter what the future brings: Onward, Christian Soldiers!

A Breaking Wave

I don’t know how many of you know the back story of the House of Israel. You’ll know something if you’ve seen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat where Pharaoh is portrayed by an Elvis look-alike. The show takes off from there: It’s imaginative, hilarious, and energetic but it’s still also based on the true story of the 12 sons of the ancient Patriarch Jacob (from multiple wives). The older sons were jealous of the younger, favored one, Joseph. They conspired to throw him into a pit and kill him but in the end chose to sell him into slavery in Egypt instead. There he makes lemonade out of those nasty lemons, but you’ll have to read the Old Testament for the rest of his story.

Courtesy blogs.timesofisrael.com

Sadly, the sibling rivalry doesn’t end there. Later the nation of Israel is ruled by a greedy king who discovered, as many have since, the great wealth to be had through heavy taxation. The tribe of Ephraim took great offense, picked up their marbles and huffed off to Samaria, just northwest of their homelands around Jerusalem. Nine other tribes went with them and formed a new nation specifically called Israel (as opposed to the more general use of the term). They ultimately became The Lost Ten Tribes as they were scattered by the idolatrous kingdom of Assyria because of their apostasy and wickedness.

Remaining in their first homeland were the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, presided over mostly by Judah’s priestly class. Christ was born there, launched His three-year ministry, then was condemned for blasphemy, and executed by the people He had come to save from sin and death. Why did the priests not recognize the Messiah they had long prayed and sought for? The short answer is pride in their own learning and expecting Him to come as a great warrior and free them from the oppressive rule of Rome, but Christ brought spiritual salvation, not political.

Christ left behind many dedicated converts and so was born Christianity whose followers hid and scattered. Another great schism began between blood brothers: Christianity and Judaism, really just more sibling rivalry in ecclesiastical garb.

Fast forward almost 2000 years. Those same divisions exist today: Judah increasingly being centered in Israel with Jerusalem at its head and Joseph’s son Ephraim’s descendants making up a large component of the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Book of Isaiah says:

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways,
and we will walk in his paths:
for out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
(Isaiah 2:2-3, also Micah 4:1-2, and the Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 12:2-3)

This scripture refers to revelation given to our LDS prophets that Zion (Ephraim as leader) will be built in America and be one of two spiritual capitals in the world during the prophesied Millennium of 1000 years of peace and goodness – the other being in Jerusalem headed by the tribe of Judah. And many people are still watching for the Messiah to return and for the Restoration of the Ten Tribes “from the land of the north”:

In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel [Ephraim],
and they shall come together out of the land of the north 
to the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers.
(Jeremiah 3:18)

Jeremiah goes on to describe the greatness of this event – so great it will eclipse the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt:

Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said,
The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;
But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north,
and from all the lands whither he had driven them:
and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.
(Jeremiah 16:14-15)

Many of us in the Christian world are awaiting the return of our Messiah to unite these two tribes with the 10 others, but I’m here to testify that, on a small scale, it has already begun! My introduction to this came by listening to deep LDS gospel scholars who have discovered the connection of some my church’s history with the occurrence of Hebrew “Feast Days.” Two articles in my church’s magazine started some on this journey:

(1) Symbols of the Harvest: Old Testament Holy Days and the Lord’s Ministry, by Lenet H. Read. Read it Here, but be aware that other scholars align the Passover Feasts with the last week of Christ’s somewhat differently.
(2) The Golden Plates and the Feast of Trumpets, by Lenet Hadley Read. Read it HERE.

Many Jewish people are accepting that Jesus Christ is their long-awaited Messiah. Many Christians are recognizing the tribe of Judah as brothers with a common heritage and are also mindful of the greatness of this particular tribe of Israel, long leaders in religion, business, the arts, and more. They have laboriously climbed out of the deep pit of the condemnation they incurred at the death of their Messiah, and have embraced growing goodness and devotion to God which, I believe, will be crowned by reclaiming their leadership position in the House of Israel restored.

So, the title of this blog originally comes from my summer in Ocean City, Maryland where I worked as a waitress and enjoyed leaning to swim in the ocean. It was salty – no mystery there – but the big learning experience was being knocked down by breaking waves and ground into the sandy beach, an experience you want to learn from quickly! I then decided to watch a wave approach and dive right into the middle of it as it broke over my head. Cowabunga – success! In the blink of an eye, I was on the other side and feeling more like a dolphin than a human volley ball. Next I started to look farther out to sea and watch the slight swells on the water’s surface – waves in their infancy. Often, one would be bigger and more powerful looking than the others. I would wait for that one and it never disappointed me – it was extra big and extra thrilling to dive into.

Courtesy Pixabay.com Image 3070142

I liken this small swell of interest building between Christians and Jews with those long ago oceans swells, and I have the same confidence that this will be even more thrilling to dive into someday as it breaks upon an amazed people. Just like a fractured family, old wounds will be discussed, grieved over, then healed by the overarching love of God – the same God for all! We can then enter the glorious world of the promised Millennium, working together for the good of all mankind and not just a privileged few. It will be a wholesome world where love and fairness reign, and creation steps into endless fulfillment, “worlds without number.”

Billions of Stars in a Single Galaxy, Courtesy Pixabay.com Image 10995