Thereby have some entertained angels unawares.
For me, the best application of this scripture is to be open to reproofs from people who aren’t just echoing Great and Spacious Building propaganda.
All criticisms gratefully accepted.
On the sweetness…
In your unusually quiet family ward sacrament, one young fellow abruptly stands on the bench and gives just one bellow.
one does not drive sin out of his life; he crowds it out with love of God and neighbor. Our lives do not then depend on the principle of avoiding sin, which is a tiresome job, but on living constantly in the climate of Divine Love.
— Fulton Sheen
Amen. For me the principle discovery of our work with virtue sets was the difference between sin avoidance and holiness seeking. Not away from, but towards.
I noticed some interesting teaching in passing about the afterlife.
After a period in which the disobedient suffer for their sins, which suffering prepares them for what is to follow, all will be resurrected and proceed to the Final Judgment of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In a word, purgatory. I had never heard this before. Spirit prison is a place of suffering? Check. But I hadn’t put it together that the suffering is preparatory
The Great and Spacious Building has no foundations because he stove them in.
We all know that a perfect love casts out all fear.
That fear is the opposite of love is one of those deep insights that has become a truism. So much so that I found it in a Steven Pressfield historical novel on Thermopylae. He attributed it to Greek rationality, at least in the book. Spartan men discussing the nature of things in a mini agora every night as they marched north. I’m sure he knows its actual source.
The Scripture does not say love though. It says a perfect love. (more…)
The father is the adult biological stage of the human male. You could say the same of the mother too, but there it’s more obvious. What we all know happens with women happens with men also. There are literally physiological changes and mental neurological developments that occur when you become a father to your first child.
As long as there is a primary program, the Church will not fall.
humans like AI hallucinate all the time, but have (sometimes rapid) iterative correxion by contact with reality
-an LDS friend
Once upon a time, a youth fell in with an older companion. Soon they came to a fork.
Where are you bound? The older man said. To heaven, the youth replied cheerfully. The Road to Heaven lies on your left said the old man. It is where I am going myself.
Surely not, the youth replied. I don’t believe you because the road to the right looks more pleasant and I will go there because I will go there and nothing you say can stop me. But the youth would not meet his companion’s eye.
So they parted ways. The roads ran parallel, and soon a crack between them became a crevice became a deep canyon. Although the two travelers could still see each other and even, if they shouted, converse.
After a time, the road that the youth was on turned away and bent down towards swamp and obscurity. I was a fool, the youth said. I knew. I knew better. I deliberately chose bad, the youth said, and he wept.
The older man across the way yelled. It will be difficult, he shouted, but I see a way down. Cross, then climb up this side! I will help you! I will shout out advice about handholds. And when you come up, I will reach down and pull you up.
The youth sat down in the road and, lamenting, poured dust over his head.
What are you doing? The older man said. Sorrowing for my sins and chastising myself, said the youth.
And yet, said the man on the other side , you are no closer to getting on the road to heaven.
Thoughts: What is repentance? I literally believe it to be desire. Repentance is deliberate change in the desired better direction. Everything else one can say about repentance is window dressing. That is why Elder Bednar says repentance is not a fix for the plan, repentance is the plan. Sorrow is godly sorrow if you change. Sorrow, no matter how genuine, is not repentance if you do not change. Godly sorrow is desiring something better and working toward it.
A young person of my acquaintance, who may or may not be headed in the marriage direction, asked me what things I wish I’d known before marriage. Interesting question. Tough question. Here is what I came up with.
My wife adds
6. Your spouse is crazy insecure. Everyone is. Much reassurance needed.
I don’t think this advice is for everyone. For some people, maybe the opposite of what I’m saying may be what they need. But this is what I wish *I* had known before marriage.
What about you?
A fourteen-year old boy is speaking church. He shows his broken wrist. “I broke it diving back to first base,” he said. “I was safe,” he adds.
“Now I can’t play baseball. Or my cello. Or”–he hangs his head–“play video games.”
“I was bored so I’ve just been sleeping a lot.” Pause. “I didn’t know seminary was so spiritual!”
JG Friend Bobdaduck had something wise to say about virtues.
there’s a virtue we have a sense of in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because we reference it often, but we don’t have a concise word for it, so I’m not sure we realize we reference it so often, but I think its fair to say Latter-Day Saints have a more attuned conscience about this, which is the virtue of stewardship, or lineage, or of “magnifying your calling”, or of “multiplying your talents”
Brother Giraud-Carrier quoted C.S. Lewis in the Weight of Glory.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
The shallow understanding of this is that therefore those things–nations, cultures, arts, civilization–don’t matter. The true understanding is that they do matter, because they matter to you.
There will always be an America because there will always be Americans.
What a wonderful truth. If you hold on to your divine family, in turn everything you hold on to will last forever. The formal sealing power is ultimately just a recognition of who and what you love.
I have a beautiful vision of our nations and their peculiarities being the way they are, be it America or some shantytown in the third world, because the incomparable bright angel who guides that nation remembers far off his childhood when he was a mortal with fast cars on the open road, or happy kids playing at football between the shacks.
