From a fellow whose name I didn’t catch on Saturday morning (Captcher?) — the Jonah-esque story about the Nigerian stake president who tried to escape his calling by going on a trip, only to have the conference rescheduled and a near-fatal accident.

Saturday afternoon, another speaker whose name I didn’t catch, right before Elder Gong — the story about being worried about all the good things in his life he might lose if he went on a mission but he did.  “And that young woman, she married one of my good friends.”

Sunday morning, Ringwood — the story about the guy awkwardly bearing his testimony of Joseph Smith at an evangelical revival because he didn’t realize he was in the wrong church.  And rescuing someone else there because of it.  I’d like to think that my great many awkward acts and bumbles were actually part of some divine mercy to someone else who was around.

These stories all make me think that the divinity has a sense of humor, and not of the particularly safe kind either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xoTWeitx0nk%3Fauto_play%3Dtrue

Lyrics here, since the singing is as authentically muddy as any ol’ congregation on any given Sunday.

I don’t think it quite worked, but I admire the ambition.  I’m glad they tried.

What might have worked, same song, same lyrics–would be a liturgical chant affect instead of a congregational hymn affect.

With apologies to Mansfield.

Miracles are happening.

One day, really vividly, I thought of the names and faces of a couple I used to home teach maybe 20 years ago when we lived where they do.  They live a thousand miles from here.  I had had no contact with them since we moved.  It took me a bit but I enjoyed this blast from the past and slowly dredged up my memories of them.  The next day they called.  They were so thrilled that I recalled them so easily and so well.

The day after Betsey’s death day,  a person who used to be very important to her, some people we know here mentioned that the person was visiting them.  We didn’t know they knew each other at all, the way they do know each other turns out to be totally strange, because out here we are thousands of miles from those old stomping grounds.  Our friends reintroduced us.  I was moved and my wife in particular was very moved, and our kids got to put names and faces to stories we tell them about their older sister who died before most of them were born.

The heavens are silent when I pray to know the One Weird Trick to vast unearned wealth (I have prayed this, yes).  But they hear the tender wishes of the heart.

My daughter recently recommended to me Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (The Anne of Green Gables woman).  She thought I’d like the bit about the 12-year old girl bustling about to run her own little household.

What I discovered is that its an idyll.  And hat tip to friend E.C. who pegged Montgomery as an excellent idyll writer.

Idylls are hard, of course, because where does the drama come from if people are happy and the land is green?

In this book her technique was interesting.   There is an over arching drama about the girl’s parents.  It’s played lightly, but its there, and it gives you the plot.  There is also the daily challenges of the girl figuring out how to run a household on her own.  Quotidian challenges–the plum pudding that doesn’t quite work–would be a normal technique for a cozy domestic idyll.  But here Montgomery plays them very lightly.  They are just mentioned in passing and not given much in the way of arc.

The main thing Montgomery does is to start the girl in a bad situation and then to go on for pages and pages and pages about how bad it is.  She’s with her grandmother who’s awful, so awful that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief.  It all seems tedious.  But then when the girl makes it to the idyll, it all seems interesting by way of implied contrast to the now off-stage horrors.  It works quite well.

Some interesting parallels to the plan of happiness and why we needed a messy mortal experience before our own eternal idyll.

I was on the road. Enclosed car with soft heated air. Podcast piped into my ears. Cruise control and lane guides on. Too dark to see anything other than headlights. I realized that I was as about as disconnected from anything real as it as possible to be. There are worse horrors than being comfy, but still . . .

So as the highway cut through the hills, I pulled off a short winding way and got out in the cold air to be under the stars.

That is the perfect place to end, the virtuouso literary touch. Except as I walked in the dark there in the hills, an unmoored fear came over me and I scurried back, thumping over the wooden bridge on the path with a sound that felt like it would wake trolls.

I was often the guy who blatantly ignored the mask mandates. I got a real kick in walking through a sea of masks with my grinning face grinning, daring somebody to say something about.  But also sometimes I just forgot.

A few days ago the masks around here just evaporated. Mandates gone overnight.

The strangest thing happened. All of a sudden I started feeling weird not having a mask on in public settings.  The brain’s little alarm goes off every time I’m about to go through a door and I have to remind myself we’re all done with that now, and me long before now.

I can’t account for it.

I just now realized that the word wholesome means “whole”-some.  I love wholesome things.  But I also love things being integrated together, integrity through time, integrity across relationships.  Maybe they are one and the same.

StC recently took us to task, somewhat feistily, for grumbling a bit too much.

I said something extremely funny in response, because I’m a funny guy, and some of our friends pushed back on him a bit.

Which is fair enough.

What I do want to say, though, is that there is never a bad time to be reminded to be more faithful to the kingdom and the prophets.  StC, his comments, and others like him are always welcome here.

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Working together as a family and having fun while you work is one of the peaks of human existence.

Watering each other and the plants.

Singing while washing the dishes.

Making charcoal for your garden and deciding among you to see if you could make a charcoal cardboard crown for no good reason.

Its a synthesis of virtues.

Getting there is not just a matter of will.  It takes a fair amount of slogging and sloth and labor without much fun and fun without labor.  The Plan of Salvation in microcosm.

By the way —

Slog + Sloth = Boredom

The LO was researching some Hebrew for her Isaiah studies.  She said that is was interesting that the same word-core that means strength or power also means hold or grip.

I thought about the iron rod.

“Hold to the rod.”  We think that implies commitment and it does.  Maybe it also implies that we are strong, and therefore able to hold on strongly.

There are two different ways of holding the rod in Lehi’s vision.

The first group

they did press forward through the mist of darkness, ^aclinging to the rod of iron, even until they did come forth and partake of the ^bfruit of the tree.

This group all make it to the tree and all fall away under the mocking of the great and spacious building.  “Clinging” is not, it would seem, a good thing.

The other group does not fall away.  They are the ones who

did press their way forward, continually holding fast to the rod of iron, until they came forth and fell down and partook of the fruit of the tree.

I would be very interested in hearing what you think the difference is between the clingers and the ones who hold fast.

My thought–its tenuous but it feels right to me–is that the hold fasters have some strength and purpose in themselves.  We are all weak, but those who hold fast have used the savior’s lifeline to become less weak.

The clingers, fear of the darkness motivated them, but once they got to the tree and the darkness wasn’t obviously present, they had no real purpose of themselves and fell under the sway of the Great and Spacious Building’s values.

One of life’s little pleasures is getting up extra early–maybe you have work, maybe you just have projects–and sneaking around to get dressed and ready in the dark so you can let your loved one’s sleep a little longer.

Maybe I enjoy it so much because I only succeed about half the time.  The other half– sneak, sneak, oops, oof, crash, bang, clatter clatter clatter BOOM.

The glory

The infinite magnificence

Of small things.

-thus P.E.

Can we all just settle on one adjective for Noah, and can we all agree that adjective should be Noachide?  What a great word.

***

I had this vague memory reading Genesis 9 last week of a Jewish tradition regarding the Noachide covenant applying to everyone, not just Jews.

I looked it up.  Sure enough.

The Seven Laws of Noah

Its interesting to compare them to the Ten Commandments.

Also interesting–they don’t seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the actual commandments found in Genesis 9.  I’m sure they have reasons for them if only I bothered to look them up.

But what interests me are the actual commandment God gave Noah.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about that bit in Moses 1 where God “covers” Moses with his glory so Moses can bear His presence and have a vision of the infinities and the eternities.

It reminds me of that Atonement metaphor where you are short on a debt and God covers the difference.  God becomes your partner.

Sometimes people get upset that God wants them to repent and grow, because that stuff can be kinda miserable.  Why would a loving God expect me to change, they say?

But when you think of how God covers for your inadequacies it puts a different complexion on the question.

The real question is, why would a loving God want to enter into a partnership with somebody who doesn’t contribute anything and doesn’t want to?  Who doesn’t even contribute the widow’s mite of desiring to please Him and trying to please Him?

Friend of the JG Tom Stringham has a pithy essay on what a working dating culture looks like (it looks like our dating culture, still, some).

Latter-Day Saint Sexual Ethics Work

***

Which reminds me.  I love seeing Gentiles gradually reinventing gospel truths about sex and family.  Though rarely do they have the hardihood to go all the way.  That has been happening lately.

There’s Peechy Keenan, Operation Marriage Material 

Then there’s some young edgy people’s manifesto on modern dating I saw a link to.  And there’s an exhaustive article analyzing beauty that I ran across somewhere.

Besides the bit where they work their way into heresy on the Sexual Revolution, all three had some dating advice which I will pass on and save you the trouble of reading the articles yourself.

The best dating advice still is, of course,

Don’t be fat.  Be not fat.  Be someone people like to be around.

But that isn’t all.  A lot here is basic, but reminders never hurt.  None of these advice pieces are the gospel, not the gospel of dating nor the gospel of salvation and eternal life, and shouldn’t be taken as such.  Some of it may be bad advice.

It is interesting to see how much of good dating advice applies after marriage (answer: quite a bit).

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