Last night I had a dream.

There were dozens of youth handcart treks that all converged in the same place.  Once they had arrived at the same mountain valley, under the direction of their leaders they joined together to build a temple out of rammed earth and long straight pine logs.  The earth they dug from the soil there, the logs they cut themselves.

In the way of dreams, when it was done it was a conventional temple inside but also was just one big hall where the whole group could meet.  They all gathered in and some of the Brethren came and sealed them all together as friends.

I didn’t say anything publicly out of respect, so you will have to take my word for it, but after President Nelson died I have been praying a lot to the Lord that now that we have temples a-buildin’ that need fillin’ He would direct the next prophet to tackle babies and families.

I was stunned.

My daughter said her roommates in Rexburg were talking about what President Oaks said.  The consensus was that they had been thinking of four to five kids, but were now thinking maybe 8.

I love the ambition.

Sixty Million Saints. . .

Six Hundred Million Saints. . .

Or to repurpose the old slogan folks used when people were complaining that the Church had too much money,

Make It a Billion.

Enjoy your day with family, the Word, and the communion of the Saints.

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If at some point in the next two days you want to share some insight or some feeling with friends, here you have friends.

There seems to be a natural virtuous cycle where we

Build more temples

=> More temple attendance

=> More temple weddings

=> More kids, more happy families

=> More need for temples

But somewhere along the way it seems to have broken down

Honesty and dishonesty are obviously the opposite of each other.  But I  keep thinking about what virtue dishonesty distorts?  Optimism?  Hope?  Faith?

On the sweetness…

A very obese man who joined a few years back–he was in and out of jail at the time, has made a remarkable turn-around–gives his very first lesson in church Sunday for Elders Quorum.  He is very nervous, especially since the Prophet had just died.  He struggles to talk about what President Nelson has meant to him.  His sincerity and goodness shines through.  The Spirit is present.

Afterwards, you and he and a couple of others are standing on the church porch, watching the rain.  You talk about President Nelson.  You talk about the dead in Michigan.  These are heavy topics.  After a pause you ask him what he thought about his first lesson.

“It was good,” he says.  There is a short pause.  “When you feel the Spirit, it feels like floating on a cushion of air,” he says.

One of our congregations has been shot at in Michigan and the building set on fire.  There are preliminary reports of several victims.

There is never a good way to die but being found at church on Sunday is a good way to live.

We are used to hearing about this sort of thing from the saints overseas.  But now America’s long vacation from history appears to be on hiatus.  I, and notably president Nelson, are very optimistic about what the future is going to hold, but we may have rough waters until we cross to the other side

Russell M. Nelson was released from his call as President and as a mortal yesterday.

He was a doer and a changer.  The two-hour block and everything that went along with it such as no priesthood opening exercises and limiting announcements, Come Follow Me, getting rid of “Mormon,” emphasizing “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” encouragement for Saints to form study groups and to engage in private gospel efforts, a temple-building spree, revising the hymn book and even how we do music, multiple serious revisions to the endowment and other aspects of temple worship, democratizing the act of witnessing ordinances, no more priesthood session and women’s session, gawky youth broadcasts, the first church-wide social media fast… the list goes on. (more…)

My grandpa smoked a pipe.  It smelled good, and it was my grandpa, so I have always had an association between pipe smoking and solid old fashioned worth.

But lately I and the Lovely One have been watching a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie of a weekend.  Frothy and fun.  They are obviously meant to be young, fashionable concoctions, with the dressmaker for Rogers getting top billing in the credits and the two of them embodying hip young style.

Which includes a pipe.  In almost every movie, there’s a scene where Astaire mosies around with a pipe artfully casually dangling from his lips, obviously just full of being young and cool.

Those movies came out when my grandfather was a young man.

It is disorienting to find that all my life my old grandfather was still that young dashing man from the 30s on the inside.  He grew old and gruff and gray and crotchety but somewhere in his soul it was still 1938 and the stars were out and here was this stylish young man, full of beans, making his way under the night stars towards the sound of of the big band orchestra.

It’s a meme these days that men are the romantic sex and women are the practical one.

Like many claims about men and women, it  seems true and not true.

I see guys have romantic ideas and am romantic myself in a lot of more-or-less masculine ways whereas their women and my wife are practical about them.

“Well, yes dear, I do think a custom, wearable suit of armor embossed with the family arms  you just created would be nice.  But the dishwasher needs replaced and we don’t have anyone to polish the suit…”

And vice versa.

And in my own life, we are sometimes romantic-practical or practical-romantic in other areas that don’t line up exactly masculine or feminine.

Sorting it out becomes more difficult because there is often not a lot of daylight between “[Men/women] are romantic while [Women/men] are practical” and “I, a [man/woman] want to be romantic about a specific [woman/man,] but [she/he] is practical about me.”

I don’t claim it is specifically by divine design, but  a clever solution to the problem of having unity with someone different from yourself is having some areas where they are different from you in the ways that you are different from them in other areas.  That way you are both different from them–you have something to unite–but you understand how you are different and where they are coming from–uniting is possible.

Where is Poet Head when we need him?

A bearded pilgrim without a pilgrimage was walking down a path when it forked.

He looked down the path to the one side and thought, “who knows, if I take this path I may end up coming to a village that needs a carpenter like me.  I settle down, marry a nice bouncy lass, have a brood of kids, rollick in the harvest festivals in the autumn, grumble about the scarce food with everyone else in the spring… and then when I am old, I will lie in my bed dying and think, was this all, what of the drums and bugles and clash of arms, what happened to the greatness I could have achieved?”

He looked down the path to the other side and thought, “who knows, if I take this path I may end up coming to a town where there is a sergeant taking recruits at the drumhead.  I will enlist, perform prodigies of valor, and due to  my strength and cunning and the casualties of war become an officer and a captain and a colonel.  Then I will throw off the strictures of my corrupt government, seize rule myself with my loyal men at my back, and then turn to the liberation of all the nearby countries till I am crowned emperor on the edge of the endless sea with all the known world at my feet behind me–and then when I am old, I will lie in bed dying and think, was this worth it, I left so much behind, what it is like to tell tales to your apple-cheeked children around the fire while the winter wind howls outside?”

Another man came down the path.  At the fork, he found a bearded pilgrim laying stretched out on the ground, arms stretched out desperately reaching as far as he could, one down each path.

A  knowledge of truth is essential to salvation.  What is truth?  Let’s check D&C 93, starting around verse 24.

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Father Time in his wisdom made me too old to be interested in Charlie Kirk.  I had heard of him, that’s it.  But some of my kids I found out are fans and my daughters in Utah County had gotten out of work/class and were on their way to his event at UVU yesterday when we got the news.  Perhaps for that reason, it has affected me a lot more than I would have thought.

https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1964469113352573401

https://xcancel.com/charliekirk11/status/1964469113352573401

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