A new train engineer was learning about his duties and his assigned route.

“first,” he was told, ” there’s a long slope down.  You can coast, gathering speed.”

“Next,” he was told, “there is a long flat stretch.  You can coast for a while on the speed from the slope and then you will continue to chug along under your own power.”

“Sounds easy,” the fresh-faced engineer said, ” so what’s the problem?”

“The problem is the switch.  When you come barreling down the slope and are abruptly pulled up by the flats.”

I’m not sure what a good word would be for the vicious or imperfect form of Spirit.  Pride?  The ultimate unmoored egoism?

Here’s the synthesis chart. (more…)

We are driving across some of the flat, open parts of the country so trains are on my mind.  You can see them coming from a long way off.

Hence this parable.

There once was a newly-built train.  At the switching station, it looked out on its first track all the way across the gleaming plain to the distant white city in the far, far horizon.  The train was full of enthusiasm.  “I am going to roll on all the way to that city!”  it said.

An old worn-down train nearby wearily set about tempering the new train’s expectations.  “You have no idea how far that city really is,” the train said.  “Nor how difficult it is.  You feel good now, but wait until you are trying to get your wheels to turn in sand.  Or in swamp, heavens, oh man, swamp.”

“Why would I do that?” the new train said cheerfully.  “I will simply stay on the track.”

The older train was aghast.  “Stay on the tracks!  Are you crazy?  Live a little!”

I am tempted to read this promise in the Word of Wisdom as an easter egg prophecy that the Word of Wisdom would one day be included in the temple recommend interview.

And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones;

-thus D&C 89:18

My belief is that it is verse 11–

Eat fruits and herbs only in season

–and verse 17–

Which states that specific grains are meant for specific species and implies that low alcohol beers might be okay.

I don’t talk about them either because I don’t have any idea what they mean.  I sometimes think the word of wisdom was given, this is not a joke I really do think this, to curious of our addiction for finding answers to all our questions in the scriptures instead of relying on modern prophets and modern revelation.

The word of wisdom in the doctrine of covenants in a sense is not the real word of wisdom.

I turned to the scripture citation index to see if it matched my view about what parts of the word of wisdom don’t get discussed.

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The sage came to a structure–a thing he had never seen before–and decided to explore its use.  First he tried clinging to the ceiling, but this was hard and inconvenient.  Second he tried the floor.  Though less difficult, it was still uncomfortable and there were ants.  Rejecting these two extremes, he then spied a table.  Clinging to its underside, from time to time able to rest his buttocks on the ground when his grip grew weak, but able to lift himself off the floor when the ants bothered him and his buttocks grew stiff, the sage was satisfied that he had found the right way to dwell.

And there, clinging to the underside of a table, we leave our virtuous sage.

One of the smart person “well ackshully’s” is that the word apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world.  It means revelation.

?????????? (apokálupsis): “unveiling” or “uncovering”

It’s just that the Apocalypse of John turns out to be, well, apocalyptic, so the meaning in English has become what it is.

But this apparently random linguistic drift is either a remarkable coincidence or has divine providence behind it. (more…)

God is in the light and is the light, He is in and  moves the planets and the stars, and space and time.  That is essentially what D&C 88:7-13 says.  One implication is that we will at some point discover we have already dwelt in the presence of God.  See D&C 88:50.  Each Kingdom of Glory has the presence one one member of the Godhead because it has to in order to function.

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Probably better without the colors.

Opinions, please.

The phrase keeps running through my mind,

Virtue is the perfection of vice.

True for some purposes, I think.

We haven’t talked about JG Virtue Sets in almost exactly a year.  The reason is simple and probably surprising.  I stopped being able to make a visual model that I liked the look of and somehow not being able to portray it in a way the eye liked stopped me thinking about them altogether.  You will notice there is no chart in that post from a year ago.

The reasons are two-fold.  First, I switched computers and lost my old standard chart in the switch.  Second,  I tried to complicate the chart to make it more “accurate,” which progressively made it uglier.

As a reminder, here is an example of our old standard chart.

I really liked it and still do (except for the cross-hatch lines).  But after realizing that one pair of the virtues and vices were ‘cool’ and the other pair ‘hot’ I grew dissatisfied with a chart that portrayed both virtues as blue (a cool color) and both vices as red (a hot color).  I tried to redo the chart to be  more accurate and the result was ugly.

An example of the “more accurate.”

I also started trying to include the syntheses of the virtues (or vices) in the diagram.  I never found a good look for it.

A synthesis diagram (from here).  The color in the middle is off,  the color in the upper left diamond is bad, and the shape in the middle is off.  It looks like graffiti.

However, I was recently re-reading some of WJT’s work on JG virtue sets and was inspired by the look of his charts.

Classical simplicity with classical colors for virtues and vices.

Even better, very easy to recreate.  I’m playing around with some versions of it and would like to hear what you think.

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Here is how it went at Sunday School last week.

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I had a powerful spiritual experience this morning that I am sharing with all and sundry, because I believe it doesn’t just have to apply to me.

My wife had been woken up in the night with a verse from Isaiah.  She has stocked her mind with Isaiah and the Spirit often uses his words to speak to her.

The phrase that kept coming to her was truth lieth in the streets. (more…)

Our Friend WJT has discovered something true and important that sheds a lot of light on D&C 19.  He has found a number of scriptures that refer to things that are “endless,” “eternal,” or “forever,” but that God then ends.

The idea is that ‘endless’ can  mean ‘something that by its nature will never end despite man’s best efforts’–but God can exceed our best efforts.

Read the whole thing, including the comments.

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