A fairly young person today referred to “Music and the Broken Word.”
“Burying your talents?”
https://xcancel.com/CaitlinJustini/status/2042701493766418873#m
My youngest said, “what’s wrong with frogs?” It’s a good question. I don’t know. The quantities I guess. Many such cases.
Tiny Egyptians or colossal frogs
The Bible says that God hardened Pharoah’s heart. The JST says that Pharoah hardened his own heart. I think they are both right. Pharoah’s heart was neither hard nor soft until God caused him to be given the hard choice, over and over and over until Pharoah’s heart was what it was. He does this with all of us. He will either harden your heart, or soften it–the choice is yours.
Pharoah has a real lack of integrity. He lies, sure, but I mean that in the fuller sense of the word. He is not whole across time. He wants relief and makes promises to get it, but once the relief happens he is unable to integrate himself with the way he felt the day before, so he goes back on the promises, and the cycle starts again until the awful end. The Pharoah and the plagues are a perfect parable for sin. (His over all approach to the Hebrews shows the same lack of wholeness. He apparently wants to get rid of them–hence the edict to kill the baby boys–and apparently doesn’t value their labor–or else why would he set them to making bricks without straw, which is more difficult but also valueless; but then when Moses repeatedly gives him perfect opportunities to get rid of them the Pharoah is desperate to hold on to them.)
I don’t understand why Moses keeps asking just for permission to go into the wilderness to make sacrifices, with the implication that he and the Hebrews will then return. This seems to be a lie, but why?
Exodus 7:
The Lovely One and were talking about King Noah’s people–they fled leaving their women and children behind at one point–at another point they sent their daughters out to meet with a hostile army–and the only conclusion we came to is that they seemed to have no concept of chivalry. There is possible counter evidence, like the text of the Title of Liberty, but it still seems to be true.
Now, many say that chivalry is a Western invention, and though I don’t entirely believe that to be true, I guess there’s something to it.
Which means your primary experience in reading the Old Testament and also the Book of Mormon, when running across something hard to understand, is a sense of the eerie and of awe: that people can be so different from you; that they are nonetheless objects of God’s justice and mercy.
Shoot, you should probably take the same position for anything pre-1940. We should take C.S. Lewis seriously when he says he grew up in a different world than the one he died in.
My pain and suffering for Lent list was meant to be theoretical and contemplative, but post-Easter they all seem to be piling up on me. Allergies asthma fatigue injuries-from-fatigue. I feel silly asking for a blessing for hayfever but I may gotta.
https://x.com/DataSciFact/status/2040193480006263023
An Answer: Elder Renlund’s story about his dog lady was an answer to a prayer I have been praying for a long time. Too many balls.
An Easter Egg: Elder Andersen quoting an altered version of the quote from Chariots of Fire which is itself an altered version of Isaiah was an easter egg to me–I have spent the last week memorizing it.
A Theme: Not spread out over conference at all, but in the last session four talks in a row referenced the sealing power and the Kirtland temple.
A Contrast: the hymns covered the gamut, but quite a few of them had a militant and triumphalist air. Even the children’s song Tell Me the Stories of Jesus ended with Jesus is King! Jesus is King! Which the arrangement emphasized. In constrast, the talks were patient, loving, meek, and inviting. The whole, put together, was transcendent.
Our Easter page is up.
Singing in the Easter Quartet and Easter in Picture and Words are both particularly recommended.
The Word made flesh.
Good Friday. In the dark of the night past, all pain and suffering.
In the light of this afternoon, death.
This night, the earth pains in childbirth. God is being born.
A heart full of reverence for the great and conquering sacrifice.
The wrenching agony, the intense effort, sweat and pain, haggard, the ripping, the need to push. Do or die. Cry after cry after cry.
The oncoming black, the world fades, memory fades, the eyes close but they long since ceased to see, darkness, nothing.
You are afraid to die. You think on it sometimes. The final helplessness. We say we know what comes after but we don’t. It looms at the end. Even the Savior wept. It is horrible.