Last week my home teachers visited us on Sunday evening. At first we chatted and gave them an update on the happenings at the Goff home. I shared about the process of preparing my thesis. President Hall’s lesson was on being one. He asked, “what could come between husband and wife or parents and children to prevent them from being one?”Thinking back to what we had previously discussed, I said, “hidden codes!”

The rest of the story…

I use both WordPerfect (WP) and Microsoft Word. I prefer WP. I am more experienced at using WP, but far from proficient. I have never taken a class in keyboarding or WP, and never read a manual on WP. I discovered and picked things up along the way. Working on my thesis I had several lessons driven home, hard. Two of the biggest were the importance of sharpening your saw and understanding “reveal codes. ”

Sharpen your saw is an obvious one. Had I stopped to sharpen my saw I could have saved my whole summer! Two years ago when I worked on my 5 Pillar, I typed up a 130 page document. I struggled with “full justification” of margins, shifting pages, not knowing how to collate several documents into one, and have the page numbers consecutive. Instead of seeking help from a friend that used to work on WordPerfect for Novell I muddled through and had a less than stellar presentation and a lot of frustration.

Over the course of graduate school, I finally discovered how to renumber pages, or so I thought. By the last month of my thesis I was spending eight, then twelve, then eighteen hour days. I was working with an enormous document, images, page numbers, columns, and margin justification. As I cut and paste, shifting the order of things, my WP was having a conniption fit, and little did I realize that all it was doing was following orders. Operator error was the problem. Sometimes we are so close to the problem that we cannot see what the problem is. Sometimes we may feel like we are in a “Catch 22,” like living with an old car. Where is the fine line between doing your own repairs and limping along and throwing in the towel, to save money and time by purchasing a newer car. My husband had a degree in Electronic Technology and had worked for Hewlett Packard for 12 1/2 years. One day after seeing me struggle he suggested I contact Candace and see if she could look into the codes. I gave him a blank look and said, “What codes?” Roger said, “Hidden Codes.” He said that someone could look at the codes and see what I did to cause the problem. I was clueless! Well, I was not a happy camper. I had given the best part of the summer to a computer night mare, and I wanted it to be the computer’s fault, not mine.

I had developed each chapter in a separate file. I had consolidated the files into one. Then I shifted the order of chapters and even the order of paragraphs. As I made changes, page numbers would be missing so I would add them. Pages would shift. Margins started migrating. As the visual look began to change, I would struggle endlessly to add spaces and manually move everything where I wanted it, so it looked good. It took two long days. I thought I had triumphed. I scanned each page, everything was there, but some of the margins would not cooperate. I hit save and then printed. As I went thought the pages, they did not cooperate. Page numbers were missing. Pages again shifted. But I had been so careful and visually checked everything before I printed. I even retyped it into a new file. That worked! Until I had to make changes. I did not know how to make a computer generated table of contents, so I made a manual one. I was going nuts and the deadline came and went. I must say, the extra days gave me time to think. I made some powerful content changes.

I finally called my friend. She came over. She was my WP ezer! (helper) She went to the tool bar and clicked on “View” and then “Reveal Codes.” We laughed and chatted as she discovered the source of my misery. Each keys stroke leaves a code. When I hit print it prints from the code. When I put something into pdf. format, it is saved to the code. I had no idea that the page I was looking at and the code were different. As she removed the extraneous codes left over from shifting and moving things where I wanted them, WP began to settle down, lines expanded neatly to fit fully justified margins. She showed me what to look for, how to remove it, and how to prevent it. She also demonstrated a computer generated Table of Contents. BEA-U-TI-FUL!!!! I now type everything with “reveal codes” open so I can see.

Now the lesson: We all have hidden codes in us, some good, some not so good. There are codes left over from the natural man, the culture we live in, the media, the tapes we play in our mind about who we are and what we cannot do…lots and lots of codes. As we struggle to make our lives appear a certain way, we may be very sincere, but some how the hidden codes get in the way. We can never justify ourselves. God is our ezer kenegdo. He can show us where those hidden codes are and which ones need to be removed, and how to avoid them in the future. As we remove them from our life, our life expands abundantly and He justifies us fully, and we are beautiful, a masterpiece in His hands. If our relationships are struggling, perhaps there are hidden codes that need to be removed!

His Divine Design, our Spiritual DNA is there, in all of us. However, through the choices we make we have added extraneous codes. Once these extra codes are gone the Divine code can be fully expressed.

So, what can get between us in our marriage and family relationships or even our relationship with God? The hidden codes, of course!

That is the end of Donna's post for that day.

Here's video of Stephanie Nielson's, from yesterday's post, family on the Today Show: