Eler Christofferson has a simple, logical way of thinking about how God can love us unconditionally but also love us for the good we do and are.

Love despite vs. Love for.

Unconditional love is love despite our faults.  Conditional love for is love for our successes.  Love despite vs. love for.  God has both.

The good man rejoices in being loved despite and longs to be loved for.

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I was telling someone about a dream.  I and some men and boys were clustered around on a dirt track in the woods.  At the point we were, there was a trail heading up the side of the mountain.  I think we were talking about heading up it, or getting ready to do so.

Along up the track comes a horseman with a horse that is really wild, just flat out running and bucking and swerving around.  Its eyes were wide and white.  We all back off to the sides to let the man and his out of control horse through.  Some back up against the slope on the one side of the dirt track and the rest of us back into the grassy verge on the other side.  But this is all happening very fast, you must not imagine that we have made a very big lane between us, most of us have just had time for a step or two.  I should also mention that on my side of the track–the side opposite the slope–there is a low lying ‘disc’ made of several grey limestones placed together.  They aren’t very tightly placed, there is plenty of grass growing up between the cracks.  It looks a bit like a low lying altar, but it isn’t anything of the kind.  The Forest Service put it there for something or other.

As the horse gallops by it grabs my shirt near my collar in its teeth and tries to drag me off.  I grab the stones, the horse is being pulled in a curve now, and then the dream ended.

“That sound’s significant,” she said (I disagree).  “Let me tell you another dream I think was significant,” she says  (I agree, and I think you will too once you hear it).

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There is an old saying on alcohol’s effects on male lust that I will not repeat since I cannot vouch for its accuracy (he said, modestly alluding to his laudable lifetime adherence to the Word of Wisdom).

There isn’t a similar saying about depression.  There should be, and it goes like this.

Depression gives you the insight, but takes away the ability to act on the insight.

Certain levels of depression really do give you extra insight into the world.  Depressing insight, usually, but not always.  It doesn’t help you much, because the depression also stops you from doing anything about the insight.  There you still sit.

I believe that I held on to some of my depression for longer than I needed to because I loved the extra insights.

But everything is all tied together.  The insight came at a cost that gradually got too high.  That’s one reason  I’m sceptical of the latest techie trend to use LSD or mushrooms or whatever as a way of generating insight.  The implicit notion is that you have a box labeled insight and the LSD will stay safely inside that box, not leaking out into character and aspirations and motivation and vigor.  It won’t.

Denethor and the palantir is a symbol of depression.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, then, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

-thus Wendell Berry

Happy Last Day of Christmas to everyone, great or small.

Odd thing.  This is been one of the happiest Christmases I can remember.  But also one where I am having less melancholy that is is ending than is usual.

Professor Hugh Nibley once noted that the kingdom of God cannot endure if it indulges even the smallest sin: “The slightest taint of corruption means that the other world would be neither incorruptible nor eternal. The tiniest flaw in a building, institution, code, or character will inevitably prove fatal in the long run of eternity.”

(from Elder Christofferson)

It follows, conversely, if an incident does not prove fatal in the long run of eternity, it was not a sin.

Some wonder why God would punish people.  The answer is that it’s a kind of celestial engineering.  Sin making you unfit for eternity isn’t a consequence.  Its the definition of sin.  That’s what it is.  If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be sin.

I want to be careful because I am going to say something a tiny bit shocking.  It is true but not in every sense.  It is that sins you repent of are not even sins at all, anymore, because once you repent of them they won’t stop you from pursuing your course.

It’s as if doing something wicked in mortality isn’t yet sin.  It’s Schrodinger’s sin.  Whether it was sin or not remains to be determined by whether you repent of it later.

Like most Christmases, this Christmas we made an experimental ice cream.  Eggnog ice cream.   It was such a hit that we made some more batches for relatives.  I am now dreaming of a yellowish Christmas.

We made up the recipe ourselves.  Here it is.

This recipe is meant for a standard 6 quart ice cream freezer.

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A 12-year old girl is crying.  She says to her father,  “I don’t want to grow up.  I like being a kid.”

A man is crying.  He says to his wife, “I don’t want them to grow up.  I like being a dad.”

I dreamed there was this family that moved up to the hills for the peace and quiet.  By choice they had no phones nor internet.  Instead in the evenings they would sing and the girls in the family would play the violin and cello.  There they would sit in the twilight playing the music.

Then I had a sense that somehow they were my family, this was my home, and the music would be there waiting for me when I came on home.

And then I dreamed that this place was the place Joseph and Mary were headed for the nativity and they were somehow also going home when they went there.  I saw a tired man and a tired woman on a donkey headed up a country road to a white house where they would be welcome in.  They were close enough now to catch a hint of the music of the strings and to see the dim figures on the porch.

There is of course a meaningful arc to Jesus own life.

The innocent baby

The atoning sacrifice

the triumphant resurrected king

For this reason we celebrate Christmas.  It is the beginning.

But sometimes I wonder if the real significance of the Christmas story isn’t Mary?  There is something heroic in a supremely womanly way about her role.

Down, down, down.  From here.

Bonneville County is Idaho Falls.

Here is an interesting contrast.  I just picked whatever years came up first on a search.

1979 LDS Statistical Report

Members  4,439,000

Children of Record 107,000

24 children per 1,000

(Children of record is the number of babies blessed, which means its the birthrate among people who still have some connection to the Church.)

1986 LDS Statistical Report

Members  6,170,000

Children of Record 93,000

15 children per 1,000

2019 LDS Statistical Report

Members  16,565,000

Children of Record 94,000

6 children per 1,000

2020 LDS Statistical Report

Members 16,660,000

Children of Record 65,540

3 children per 1,000

What strikes me is that we have fewer children now than we did in the late 70s with a quarter of the Saints.

Not my own insight, but someone said that hookup culture is clearly a forerunner to ‘you will own nothing and you will be (un)happy’

And porn and easy divorce culture and  . . .

The reason why swearing in this way is bad is because it is a lie.

Strong recommend.

Summary: swearing is usually a very emotionally loaded form of lieing.

Whereas cursing someone is angry and aggressive.

Me: Swearing can be done to comic effect.  That isn’t a lie.  But it does degrade the linguistic commons.  It takes the power from the swearing.  Ironically, it is people like us who conspicuously avoid those words who give them their remaining power.

Mississippi has a law that mostly bans aborting babies after the 15th week of pregnancy.  The Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments about it yesterday.

How the voting and logrolling among the justices will go I have no idea.

Jens and the Pond is my favorite story, bar none, from conference.

Jens of Denmark prays daily to live the gospel and notice promptings from the Holy Ghost. He has learned to act quickly when he feels directed by the Spirit.

Jens shared the following: (more…)