I will cause the heavens to shake for your good

-thus D&C 35:24.  Not every disaster is a catastrophe.  Built up corruption needs brought back down.  But even for we good who have built well, sometimes our cottages need cleared to make room for mansions.

Save yourselves from this untoward generation, and come forth out of the fire, hating even the garments spotted with the flesh.

-thus D&C 36:6.  Don’t read “flesh” as a fancy way of saying iniquity.  Read it as flesh.  These clothes are soiled with the putrefaction of corpses.  You are fleeing the charnel house  (funny how that reads on the other side of the corona–how many people have we found out believe we should fear not that which kills the soul, but rather that which kills occasionally the body).

Ye hear of wars in far countries, and you say that there will soon be great wars in far countries, but ye know not the hearts of men in your own land.

-thus D&C 38:29

His Majesty is feeling much better.

(more…)

A young Saint’s basic model of revelation looks like a circle between a person and God. Prayers go up, answers come down. The answers will be from the Holy Ghost if its a question, or simply blessings if the prayer is a request.

This is a good model of revelation to have.

A Saint who pays attention in Church will develop a fuller model of revelation.

They still pray but also realize they need to be “studying it out in their mind” with the help of the scriptures and also proposing solutions to the Lord.  They also realize that some of their answers will come through the Holy Ghost, or through dreams, or visions.  But they also realize some answers will come through the prophets and apostles, the current ones and the former ones whose answers got written down into scripture, and who are engaging the Lord the same way they are.

This is a good model.

We can add to it.

(more…)

The greatest of all achievements that we can attain in our long and challenging journey through immortality is when our claim to discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ reaches the stage where we can say, with all honesty, His ways are our ways and His thoughts our thoughts.

–thus Brother Shimabukuro

We have higher goals. That is the reason we are different.

Other posts from the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1992 General Conference

 
Marilyn Nielson Resurrection is another creation

Someday a poet will arise. He will take each work from the 19th through 21st centuries and lovingly consider what in them poisons men’s minds and what in them points to the greatness of mankind. He will, like a surgeon, alter each work delicately, subtly, to remove the story elements which are unworthy. Each arc will be replaced with one closer to the true Story behind each work, a clearer and cleaner vision, the mirror darkly a little more polished.

-a prophecy from the ether

The poet will pray each time. Angels and Christ and the authors themselves will talk to him.

Everyone wants to know the secret of Dr. G’s Hyperreal Fat Camp.  Why is it so wildly successful?

Let me peel back the curtain a little bit.  Let’s take a peek at  a hyperreal part of the hyperreal first day.

After orientation and other preliminaries, the inductees are taken into a pitch black room.

The room is strewn with furniture and other obstacles. (more…)

This advice is framed as weight loss advice.  It’s actually advice for life.   It was the message of General Conference.

If you want to lose weight, don’t start tomorrow. Don’t start today. Start yesterday. Start last year. Start framing your life as a continuous series of learning experiences rather than a fragmented series of failures.

-thus twitterling @realJohn_Taylor

The difference between a hero who comes out of nowhere to overcome all odds and a loser who pathetically stumbles from disaster to disaster is whether they get up that last time they fell.  That is it.

You have feared men and have not trusted in me to strengthen you, like you ought to have.    Your thoughts have been in the things of earth more than in the things that are of me, your creator, and in the ministry to which you have been called; and you have not paid attention to my Spirit, nor to those who have been placed over you, but those who have persuaded you are people I did not send.

-my paraphrase of D&C 30:1.  I struck me with more force in Spanish than in English.

My daughter did something neat this conference.  She wrote down all the things she laughed at and all the good stories.

There were some good stories and some deeply moving ones, like  Sister Aburto and Elder Palmer’s experiences with their siblings dying.

I wasn’t trying to write any type of note in particular, but as usual I seem to have gone for memorable phrases and pithy aphorisms

(more…)

The tomb is empty.

All tombs will be.

That is their telos.

Say what you hear.

Among other things, I am looking for insight on how to be more than I am and how to lead my family to greatness in time and eternity.

I also hope to spend some time at the foot of the cross with some of the speakers, this being Easter weekend.

The ruler of that land was called the Tiger King.  He lived in great luxury and had utter sway from harvest to harvest.

When the harvest was in, he stepped down.  The time for choosing who would next wear the Tiger Crown came.

The choosing went like this.  They had a certain large field where they held a combat.  The last man standing among all the aspirants took the Tiger Crown for the next year.  But this was no ordinary combat.  Each man had to be mounted on a tiger.  Either his own, or one that would be provided.

More men were laid low by their own tiger then by another’s blows. (more…)

A great bear came out of his winter cave to see the sun rising pink over the still snow-patched fields and meadows.  The bare trees were dark against that brilliant light.  The bear was overwhelmed and had what he felt was a vision of true insight.  “Beauty is good,” he said to himself.

He painstakingly set to etch patterns in each claw using his other claws and gentle patient nibbles with his great jaw.  It took a long time.  The changes were subtle.  But when he was done he was an ordinary bear in all other respects, but each claw was truly beautiful.

In his rejoicing, he lifted a great log and tossed it, and felt the joy and glory of his strength.  “Strength is good,” he said to himself, and then improved his strength in the ways that even bears can do.  When he felt himself to be truly strong, even for a great bear, and with his claws truly beautiful, he went forth slashing and destroying.  He knocked down and ripped and tore and left broken trees and dying animals and dead men and women in his wake and horrible death and corruption.  In that way he became the first ogre and the grandfather of all that kind.

Moral:  Beware isolated beauty.  Beware isolated truth.

There once was a man who was born to be a womanizer.  Without trying he grew up tall and remarkably handsome.  He had a natural talent for mixing sympathy and teasing, with a lot of interest and empathy for woman but also had a kind of untouchable and remote inner core–social dynamite.  He had catholic tastes in girls and was attracted to sex.  He even–please don’t judge him, it just happened–had a sort of sixth sense for someone’s inner vulnerabilities that could be exploited.  All in all, he would have been a superlative womanizer and he knew it.  Fortunately for him, he grew up a follower of Christ.  Though he knew he could womanize and saw the appeal of doing something that he was very good at, it didn’t work with the burning vision God gave him of leading a beloved wife and children and grandchildren into the eternities.   A natural talent for womanizing doesn’t just turn into a natural talent for being a husband, it turns out.  There were bumps along the way.  Sometimes when he thought of the great gift he had been born with, he had to laugh.

[Editor’s note:  yes, this is weird even by our standards.  Dunno, it just came to me]

Any institution will get loaded down with extras over time.  Its people will then have to pare back.

The paring back can go too far.

You can lose redundancy.  You have cored and cored until if the one pillar left in your building falls, the whole thing falls.

You can also lose actual core functions.  No one institution can do anything itself, so any corporate body trying to focus on its ‘core’ will inevitably cut out some things that matter but that in theory should be available from outside.  No sheep rancher puts ‘provide daylight’ on his priority tasks list.  But daylight is a priority.

If there are needful things that cannot be provided outside the institution, they must be provided in some way.  If you are in the desert, irrigation is a core farm function.

* * *

Us: Rites of passage for men aren’t a core function for the Church of Christ, it shouldn’t get in the way of proselyting, which is core.  Let that be provided elsewhere.

Elsewhere:  Howling social wasteland

One way of understanding recent history in the Church is that the institution is no longer doing everything that has to be done, which means members must step in to do them.  If the Church keeps doing it until the members do their own, the members will never do their own.  So the Church just . . . stops.

Marriage is a core function.  It is indispensable.  Which means that getting the man-woman thing right is needful.  Without it, down we go.

That’s why we spend so much time working at the man-woman thing here.  Not because its so much fun.  Because its so important.  We try out different ideas, kick them around, try to work a bit in the space that the Church isn ‘t.  Some of you don’t like it.  Let me ask you: if not us, who?