I’ve been thinking a lot about that bit in Moses 1 where God “covers” Moses with his glory so Moses can bear His presence and have a vision of the infinities and the eternities.

It reminds me of that Atonement metaphor where you are short on a debt and God covers the difference.  God becomes your partner.

Sometimes people get upset that God wants them to repent and grow, because that stuff can be kinda miserable.  Why would a loving God expect me to change, they say?

But when you think of how God covers for your inadequacies it puts a different complexion on the question.

The real question is, why would a loving God want to enter into a partnership with somebody who doesn’t contribute anything and doesn’t want to?  Who doesn’t even contribute the widow’s mite of desiring to please Him and trying to please Him?

Recent Norway law makes “hate” speech against homosexuality or transsexuality illegal, even in private.  Sentences range up to three years.

A Finnish Member of Parliament is currently on trial for quoting the Bible on homosexuality.

This month Canada has made it a crime to urge someone to repent of homosexual sexual desire, or even, at least that’s how the law is worded, of their sexual  behavior.  A majority of influential Americans see that and think we should do the same.

Your worldview needs to accommodate the fact that many decisionmakers and influential people generally despise you and your beliefs and will punish them if they can.

Two (rare) articles about the crisis at the southern border.  Rare because its largely ignored.  We need a word that means the same as memory-holed but in real time.

The government is importing illegal aliens into the interior

Border Patrol Agents Get Angry in a Meeting with DHS Secretary

A guy was running along, started imagining he was chasing a boar, and his pace and stamina both picked up.

Can run much faster & longer if i visualize running down an animal, & boar works best

Deer doesn't work, the stride is wrong, loping instead of running

I think also has to do with imagining the smell of the meat? Fast & dangerous but also clearly a prey animal

— Bennett's Phylactery (@extradeadjcb) January 22, 2022

After reading, that night I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.  I pictured a fire in a dark room.  Red coals, black log resting on top (black because the only light is from the coals behind and underneath it, and little flickers of flame here and there.  I instantly felt tension and bad posture leave my body.  I felt snug.  I thought, ‘wow, that’s cool,’ and then I was out.

Human Frailty with thy Secret Woes!

Friend of the JG Tom Stringham has a pithy essay on what a working dating culture looks like (it looks like our dating culture, still, some).

Latter-Day Saint Sexual Ethics Work

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Which reminds me.  I love seeing Gentiles gradually reinventing gospel truths about sex and family.  Though rarely do they have the hardihood to go all the way.  That has been happening lately.

There’s Peechy Keenan, Operation Marriage Material 

Then there’s some young edgy people’s manifesto on modern dating I saw a link to.  And there’s an exhaustive article analyzing beauty that I ran across somewhere.

Besides the bit where they work their way into heresy on the Sexual Revolution, all three had some dating advice which I will pass on and save you the trouble of reading the articles yourself.

The best dating advice still is, of course,

Don’t be fat.  Be not fat.  Be someone people like to be around.

But that isn’t all.  A lot here is basic, but reminders never hurt.  None of these advice pieces are the gospel, not the gospel of dating nor the gospel of salvation and eternal life, and shouldn’t be taken as such.  Some of it may be bad advice.

It is interesting to see how much of good dating advice applies after marriage (answer: quite a bit).

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And it came to pass that there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people.

-4th Nephi

I always assumed this meant they loved God so much that they lived in peace with each other.

But “of” in English is a slippery word.  It can mean love for God, like I assumed.  It can also mean love from God, or more precisely, God’s love, the love that God possesses.

I like that second understanding better.  They possessed what God possessed, as heirs and joint heirs.

I wonder how the phrase gets translated in languages where they have precision prepositions?

This was a very hard article to read.  My poise and composure did not make it.

There are real graves.

You recall that they discovered a MASS GRAVE of HUNDREDS of INDIAN school KIDS at an old time boarding school for Indians in Canada.  In consequence there was a 15-minute (or whatever they use to measure time up there) hate against Christians.

They burned churches.

It now turns out–prepare to be ASTOUNDED–there weren’t dead Indian kids, or dead kids, or dead anyone.  MASS GRAVES except for the technicality that there were no corpses.

Some speculate that ground penetrating radar may have been picking up on tree roots.

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Last night I visited Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

They greeted me in the forest clearing in front of the rocks where they live.

Folks believe they live in trees or something, so I should say a little more about their dwelling place.

It’s a big heaped up jumble of rocks.  Boulders, really.  The average rock is about the size of a man.  I had plenty of time to compare as the merry men loved to leap up and down the rocks like mountain goats.

It’s a big jumble of rocks.  It is more than five men high.  I know, because I and some of the merry men decided for fun to measure it.  We got a chain of men standing on each other’s shoulders five-men high before we came tumbling down to be caught by the men waiting around below.  But the top man was still overtopped by the jumble.

They showed me inside.

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Eler Christofferson has a simple, logical way of thinking about how God can love us unconditionally but also love us for the good we do and are.

Love despite vs. Love for.

Unconditional love is love despite our faults.  Conditional love for is love for our successes.  Love despite vs. love for.  God has both.

The good man rejoices in being loved despite and longs to be loved for.

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It came to me that beauty and glory are the same thing.

Or aspects of the same thing.

Perhaps one is feminine tinged and one is masculine tinged.

But still the same basic thing.

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I was telling someone about a dream.  I and some men and boys were clustered around on a dirt track in the woods.  At the point we were, there was a trail heading up the side of the mountain.  I think we were talking about heading up it, or getting ready to do so.

Along up the track comes a horseman with a horse that is really wild, just flat out running and bucking and swerving around.  Its eyes were wide and white.  We all back off to the sides to let the man and his out of control horse through.  Some back up against the slope on the one side of the dirt track and the rest of us back into the grassy verge on the other side.  But this is all happening very fast, you must not imagine that we have made a very big lane between us, most of us have just had time for a step or two.  I should also mention that on my side of the track–the side opposite the slope–there is a low lying ‘disc’ made of several grey limestones placed together.  They aren’t very tightly placed, there is plenty of grass growing up between the cracks.  It looks a bit like a low lying altar, but it isn’t anything of the kind.  The Forest Service put it there for something or other.

As the horse gallops by it grabs my shirt near my collar in its teeth and tries to drag me off.  I grab the stones, the horse is being pulled in a curve now, and then the dream ended.

“That sound’s significant,” she said (I disagree).  “Let me tell you another dream I think was significant,” she says  (I agree, and I think you will too once you hear it).

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There is an old saying on alcohol’s effects on male lust that I will not repeat since I cannot vouch for its accuracy (he said, modestly alluding to his laudable lifetime adherence to the Word of Wisdom).

There isn’t a similar saying about depression.  There should be, and it goes like this.

Depression gives you the insight, but takes away the ability to act on the insight.

Certain levels of depression really do give you extra insight into the world.  Depressing insight, usually, but not always.  It doesn’t help you much, because the depression also stops you from doing anything about the insight.  There you still sit.

I believe that I held on to some of my depression for longer than I needed to because I loved the extra insights.

But everything is all tied together.  The insight came at a cost that gradually got too high.  That’s one reason  I’m sceptical of the latest techie trend to use LSD or mushrooms or whatever as a way of generating insight.  The implicit notion is that you have a box labeled insight and the LSD will stay safely inside that box, not leaking out into character and aspirations and motivation and vigor.  It won’t.

Denethor and the palantir is a symbol of depression.

Despite the no-doubt temporary inflation and supply embarrassments, we here at the JG are pleased to announce that we are providing the same product you love at the price you have become accustomed to.*

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