You taste the fruit of the tree and for one impossible moment the sweetness explodes in your mouth.
For one impossible moment you have the knowledge of paradise and you still live in it.
You have never not been on the cliff’s edge leaping.
Plans make heaven roll with laughter.
There is no control, only the deed and submission to the deed.
The conventional approach is to get help when your marriage has trouble. But why worry about your marriage when its awesome? Its already awesome.
Wrong.
When your marriage is awesome is precisely when you should be working to make your marriage better. You are that close.
The conventional approach seems to me to like a horticulturist with plenty of tips on how not to fall off the ladder, but nothing more, as if being on the ladder were the summum bonum. It is not. Stretch out to the edge of your fingertips to pick the fruit.
On the sweetness . . .
The man who prays at Church looks nervous. “Dear kind graceful heavenly father . . . “
A young man had remarkable spiritual experiences and was very happy. But one morning he woke up and found that he just didn’t believe. There may have been reasons for it–he thought of some himself–but he eventually decided that if ti was possible for a mood like to come on to you, everything you experienced was just moods, including the spiritual experiences.
Does the Garden of Eden story tell us anything about the types of social pressures that men and women are most vulnerable to? Eve was hit by general social pressure and an appeal to increase her status, whereas what got Adam was a pretty woman and/or domestic appeals.
Does that generalize? Dunno.
Yes, I know there are profound doctrinal truths and mythopoetic insights to be garnered from the Garden of Eden story, but I happened not to be thinking about any of those. I happened to be thinking about this instead. So sorry. Our normal insight suppliers have experienced 48% YoY cost increases, so we are offering these substitutes instead. ICantBelieveItsNotInsight!
Hebrews 10 contrasts Christ with the Judaic priests. They have to sacrifice every year, whereas Christ did it once. The argument is that Christ’s sacrifice was obviously more effective. Are you really sin free if you keep sinning and need a new atoning sacrifice every year?
The yearly atoning sacrifice makes sense from the childish view of sin that it’s a question of debits and credits with the sacrifice periodically topping off your account. This forensic view is not totally wrong but it is badly incomplete.
Hebrews 10 talks about how the Mosaic sacrifice was meant to compensate for violations of the law but Christ’s sacrifice makes you holy. The New Perspective on sin is that it is primarily a state of being. It is who you are. Sins are a reflection of your inward weakness and malice, and pay the price of your existing sins all you wish, if the inside of the vessel is not cleansed, you are still in sin.
Christ pays your debts, to be sure, but only incidentally. He spends freely to do something much more difficult and lasting–to make you the kind of person who is not a debtor. We might extend Elder Packer’s old (and good!) LDS parable of the debtor in this way:
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.
