The day after the bishop authorized and requested that men and youth of the priesthood provide the sacrament of the holy meal to their own families there was another e-mail. The second was from the elders’ quorum president reminding his quorum where in the scriptures we will find the prayers. That was all the prompting I needed.
A website by a temple fan gives a chronology of the initial dedications of the 167 current temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, plus the Kirtland temple and the first Nauvoo temple. Twelve of those were carried out by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles instead of a member of the quorum of the First Presidency:
Nauvoo by Orson Hyde (1846)
Manti by Lorenzo Snow (1888)
Regina by Boyd Packer (1999)
Brigham City by Boyd Packer (2012)
Sapporo by Russell Nelson (2016)
Provo City Center by Dallin Oaks (2016)
Star Valley by David Bednar (2016)
Kinshasa by Dale Renlund (2019)
Fortaleza by Ulisses Soares (2019)
Port-au-Prince by David Bednar (2019)
Lisbon by Neil Anderson (2019)
Arequipa by Ulisses Soares (2019)
It’s a curious pattern. (more…)
During the year my wife was dying, there were a few Killers songs that ran around my mind. Some of them came unbidden, and others I sought out. There are two events in Brandon Flowers’ (Killers vocalist) life that connect to the songs I will mention below. The first was the death of his mother Jean Barlow Flowers (1945-2010). The second was more recent manifestation of mental illness in Flowers’ wife Tana. Even with songs that are mostly unconnected to the listener’s circumstances, there will be lines and snippets that can be stolen to other purpose. So, sit down and hear five songs that I snatched or that snatched me.
This should make MC smile. I saw a stack of these on a table in the foyer of a neighboring stake center. They are a robust bunch in that stake. Three years ago, I wrangled an invitation for my son and myself to join with them for the 184 and a half mile bike ride of the C&O canal towpath that their young men do every four years.
THE ART OF WAR
Strategies for Overcoming Adversity in Your Life
Seneca Stake High Adventure
Aug. 1-3, 2019
THURSDAY
How do you get there from here?
Can you counsel with your “presidency” to accomplish a task?
The Spirit – The greatest weapon in your arsenal
REMEMBER THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, ONLY LESSONS
FRIDAY
Target practice
Can you work as a team to achieve your goal?
Will you become a casualty of the Adversary?
“Every battle is won BEFORE it is fought.” Sun Tzu
SATURDAY
Service – Immunization techniques against the tools of the Adversary
(Click on the photo for a larger picture.)
My wife, Elizabeth Pack Mansfield, died last fall eleven months after receiving a diagnosis that the pain in her spine was due to metastasized kidney cancer. A few weeks before her death she wrote letters to me and each of the children, but months before that she began a second letter for our only daughter, now 10, to receive when she is older:
January 25, 2018 1:42 am-August 23, 2:02pm
Dear Miriam,
The Holy Ghost has let me know that I need to write a letter to you about being a mother. I hope to be alive while you are a mother—but especially if I am not, I need to share some truths and thoughts with you.
My own decision to become a mother went something like this– (more…)
The entire Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered in Rome, together with the Church’s First Presidency. Why? What did they wish to communicate with this meeting? To whom?
Also, I have never before seen a group portrait of these two quorums posing together. I have disliked the abreviation “Q15” that some use, mostly their detractors, but maybe I am behind the times. (Mormon Newsroom link)
Virgin Galactic jumped ahead a couple weeks to start a year with tantalizing possibilities for manned space flight. Spaceship Two reached the 50-mile height that the FAA considers high enough to count as “space.” The last time an American rocket lofted men that high was 2011, the last launch of the Atlantis.
Blue Origin announced in October that it will crew a capsule on a similarly sub-orbital trajectory atop its New Shepard in the first half of 2019. Boeing and SpaceX are both on NASA’s schedule to perform manned demonstration flights in the summer of their new orbital capsules. Those projections are close enough ahead to have some potential correlation with future reality. After years of anticipation and many, many adjustments of the projected timelines, this could be the year. How many of the four will have launched before the close of 2019? How many will have launched paying customers, private individuals not associated with the companies or government space agencies in 2020?
[In the Washington Post sports news]
As his free agency heats up, Bryce Harper begins ‘social media fast’
Don’t bother looking to Bryce Harper’s social media accounts for clues about what the free agent outfielder makes of the reaction to the 10-year, $300 million deal the Nationals reportedly offered him in September. At least not for the next week. (more…)
Last month one of our commenters, COB, opined at this site concerning our coming pattern of Sunday worship:
When something is good, and helpful, you want more of it. When it’s not helpful, you want less of it. We have God specifically telling us that church time is more harmful than helpful. [. . .] If what we need is actually LESS time together, then the membership itself is actually not only not helping each other but potentially harmful.
When I read those words, it called to mind a time not long ago, when my wife came home from the Relief Society meeting feeling underserved. (more…)
What began in late summer of last year as an odd feeling in Mrs. Mansfield’s upper back and progressively became more painful was identified on November 10 as metastasized renal cell carcinoma. It has been a long year, feeling more like three, which stretching out was good in many ways and nightmarish in others. After eleven months from diagnosis, and twenty-four years from wedding, it looks like a few days of life remain.
An experience of this sort brings up various observations and musings. One from last night was about “mutual admiration societies.” It’s a phrase that mocks little circles of two flattering one another. On the other hand, these past few weeks it has been an uplifting thing to sit by as a couple of admirable people feel it is a good time to express their respect for one another.
A new hobby of mine is occasionally reading trial reports on the treatments prescribed to my wife. In those studies two important measures are progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). The first is the number of months until cancer ceases to be arrested by treatment and resumes growing and spreading, and the second is the number of months until death. So it is that such reports will contain sentences such as the one that today caught my mind: (more…)
[In today’s Washington Post]
Among those killed in the demonstrations was Moroni Lopez, a 22-year-old English student and former Mormon missionary. He had joined the protests after watching footage of police roughing up protesters. (more…)
From a letter three weeks ago to a missionary son:
“More than most church responsibilities, everyone has an opinion what missionaries should be doing. ‘Every member a mission president.’ That’s not altogether without reason, as missionaries have a lot of authority. Though you will serve in the Melchizedek priesthood for the rest of your life, this is probably the only time who will bear the title ‘Elder.’ After that, the authority will be dormant, like the apostles in the quorum of the twelve who are all ordained and sustained as prophets, but only the church president exercises that ordination to the church and the world.”
In the Los Alamos Ward around 1992, a man whose face I remember, but not his name, was in our priesthood opening exercises for the first time, and when called upon, he introduced himself as a new move-in with his family. He was asked from the pulpit, “Elder or high priest?”, and hamming it up a bit, with self-pity he answered, “Neither, I’m a Seventy.” Brother Chamberlin, the ward’s last remaining refugee from the stake Seventies Quorum disbanded in ’86, turned and extended his arms in a gesture of embrace. “Welcome, brother.”
Another reminder of the past, from the 1986 instructions concerning discontinued stake Seventies quorums: “In the event that a stake seventies quorum operated a project or owned property, the stake presidency should, after prayerful consideration, submit its recommendation to the First Presidency concerning the disposition of such projects or properties.” A local quorum that operated a project or owned property? It was a different time, a different world.
