Some conventional Christians do not like the principle of self-reliance.  They think it impugns our dependence on God.  Others accept it, but as a temporal worldly principle only, like life insurance or brushing your teeth.

It is, however, a principle of the restored Gospel.

The difficulty goes away when we realize that self-reliance isn’t a statement of what our relationship with God is.  Its a statement of how God wants to teach us.  Self-reliance is an educational principle.  Self-reliance doesn’t mean God isn’t your father.  It means he is a father who wants his children to grow up.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning session of the October 1991 General Conference

What is Self-Reliance?
Anyone or Anything Except the Lord

In a certain country there was a city that had a crown without a king and a throne without a monarch.  Elders ruled the place until a king should come.  The people were not just waiting, no.  Because in fact there was a test.  From time to time the elders would approach a likely candidate and test him to see if he was the new king.  The details of the test were not generally known, but the people did know the test was administered from time to time, though so far no candidate had been successful.  It was not known exactly what criteria the elders used.  They seemed to pay particular attention to the gleaming athletes in the gymnasia, but there were other ways too.  Again, the details were not generally known.

There was a man in that place who one day wondered why the king should not be him?  He was already fit but now he dedicated himself to athleticism and beauty.    He was frequently seen in the gymnasium, gleaming with olive oil, wrestling in the nude or hurling a discus or running.  He grew stronger and swifter and more handsome.  The people began to glory in him and as he did he felt the taste of kingship coming stronger over him.  But still no call from the elders came, so one day he went to them. (more…)

Beauty is always experienced as rare, even when it is common.  When you cease to experience it as rare, you cease to experience it as beauty.

Mortality is what allows eternal beings who have passed through it to eternally experience each moment of beauty forever as unique and rare.  Entropy, the decay and passing of all things mortal, is a device to defeat entropy–there is not anything and not even the least bit of savor of anything that is ever lost, not even a little.  It grows and grows.  You experience the moment of beauty forever and also continue on experiencing the experience and experiencing the sharing of the experience and contemplating it from new angles in light of your other experience and the manifold experiences that worlds and people without end bring to you, and the experience grows and grows and grows.

There is beauty all around.  It is no poetry to say that in your commonplace actions you are a knight errant or a princess.  You do not need to change your scene to live in the grand manner.  Who you are is already enough.

I recently read a talk by President Hinckley from what doesn’t seem like so long ago.  But I guess it is now.  The talk is Our Solemn Responsibilities.

For me the talk was like a switching yard.  It started a number of different trains of thoughts. (more…)

I don’t understand the reason Joseph Smith didn’t retranslate the 116 lost pages.  Since we are reading D&C 10 today, it is probably time to take the problem off the shelf for another look.

You wise ones, your thoughts would be much appreciated. (more…)

The Lovely One dreamed the Church announced it was taking down all the angel Moronis on the temples to replace the trumpet with a sword.

Then this morning we read this verse in D&C 6.

 Behold, I am God; give heed unto my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow; therefore give heed unto my words.

See also Hebrews 4:12.

So I guess we are gearing up for the long haul by getting healthy and happy.

Every doctor in the land has their own brand of health advice.  Much of it, I am convinced, bad. The studies are mostly bad and all contradict each other.

I have my own views on health.  But in this post, I am just going to tell you what I know from my own experience.  It may not apply to you.  I am not going to tell you everything I do or believe, because some of it I believe works but the effects are not obvious enough to be sure.

I will say that feeling healthy is  much better than not.

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Here is a problem that happens in marriages and other relationships.  It comes from well-intentioned people being well-intentioned.

You want one thing and you have reason to believe your spouse wants another.  Happens all the time.  But you are well-intentioned.  So you come up with a compromise in your mind.  You mentally give up part of what you want.  It feels like a real sacrifice to you.  After all, you want the whole thing.  It is a real nice thing you are doing for your spouse.

Eventually you get around to telling your spouse, or more likely you execute your compromise.  Your spouse gets mad.  And you feel betrayed.  This is the compromise!  Your spouse is rejecting even the compromise.  So intransigent. Don’t they see your sacrifice?

But there are reasons your spouse feels that way.  They don’t know about your sacrifice and by this point it will feel otiose and manipulative to tell them.  It wasn’t their compromise.  Quite possibly  your compromise wasn’t fair.  Human nature is that we rate our own interests higher even when we are trying not to.  Quite possibly your compromise misunderstood what was actually important to them about what they wanted.  But even if the compromise was completely fair, its your compromise.  You can’t skip the part where you counsel together.  The process is important.  I’m not just saying that your spouse will feel like they are being cut out of the discussion, though that too.  I mean that your spouse hasn’t had time to assimilate that there is a split in goals and hasn’t had time to assimilate the need to hash something out.

We saw it for the first time a few days ago, on John M.’s recommendation.  It is a gem.  We will see it again.  Highly recommended.

I was thinking about a science fiction story I read in my teens.  Enemy aliens make the sun go out somehow.  A young man and his mother struggle on in an apartment building.  The story lovingly details all the shifts and jury-rigs he has to do to keep the warmth in, to keep the warmth going, to chip off blocks of frozen atmosphere and thaw them.  There is an implausible happy ending, or at least I thought it was implausible when I read it at age 12.

They say that science killed poetry.  They have a point.  But there is a potential for poetry there also.  One could try to create an image of bitter cold, building up the images word by word.  But none of it would be quite as effective as this story going step by step what these lone survivors had to do to survive.  In memory its as good as or even better than To Build a Fire.

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An ape scraped together some education and a chalkboard.  RULES, he wrote on it.

RULE NUMBER ONE: SHARE YOUR FOOD

He called the animals together and showed them the rule.  The lion had his doubts, but the ape reminded him that even kings were beneath the law.  By way of teaching the rule by example, the ape helped himself to generous samples of every animal’s food.

Later the ape gathered some tender shoots and was munching on them.  A number of animals who liked that sort of food gathered round for their share.  But “ah,” said the pe, and led them back to the chalkboard clearing.  There, written clearly under Rule Number One, was the following:

EXCEPTION ONE: Unless the Food is a Luxury.

Sharing is for necessities, the Ape explained.  Tender shoots are a delicacy, not a necessity.

The monkey objected, “you ate  most of my banana.   That wasn’t a necessity.”

“Oh, they are for apes,” the ape replied.  “But in any case . . .”  He turned to the chalkboard and wrote a new exception.

EXCEPTION TWO:  Unless the Food Requires Effort to Prepare.

“I had to dig for these tender shoots,” the ape explained.

“And I had to climb the tree for the bananas and you made me peel it for you!” was the monkey’s hot reply.

“I feel sorry for you, friend,” the ape said.  “But Exception Two didn’t exist back then.”

Moral:  the rules created by rule manipulators aren’t real rules.  The explanations they make aren’t real explanations.

Right or wrong, understandable or unforgivable, awesome or awful, the events of yesterday and the reaction today both represent escalations.

The political doom spiral continues.

Yesterday was the last day of Christmas.  We kept the lights on for one last night.

One Christmas Eve years ago after the kids went to bed I sat up a model train around the perimeter of the tree.  One of my girls woke up around 3 AM, went out, and ran the train around and around for an hour or so before she went back to bed.  If you ask her, that is one of her most magical Christmas memories.  The dark, quiet night.  The lights on the tree.  The train going round and round.

There is a feeling somehow that the train is going somewhere.  What if, after it went around enough times, the air changed and the room opened up and there was another space there where your whole family living and gone were waiting for you?  It feels like there is a barrier that can somehow be broken through.

Christmas is like that.  We are on repeat from year to year, but not just on repeat.  We are headed somewhere.

President Hinckley said that marriage was beautiful (giving his due to its difficulties) and then had this to say about divorce

Some of you within the sound of my voice could recount family sorrows in your own experience. But among the greatest of tragedies, and I think the most common, is divorce. It has become as a great scourge. The most recent issue of the World Almanac says that in the United States during the twelve months ending with March 1990, an estimated 2,423,000 couples married. During this same period, an estimated 1,177,000 couples divorced. (See The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1991, New York: World Almanac, 1990, p. 834.)

This means that in the United States almost one divorce occurred for every two marriages.

Those are only figures written on the pages of a book. But behind them lies more of betrayal, more of sorrow, more of neglect and poverty and struggle than the human mind can imagine.

We live and have lived in a country that is free for many practical purposes.  The downside is that to date the greatest persecutions inflicted upon us as a people have been inflicted by ourselves.  True, we live in a society that encourages and facilitates divorce.  But no one made us do it.

I sometimes wish we excommunicated for more divorces, though that would not cure the ugliness that led to the divorce in the first place.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning Session of the April 1991 General Conference

Marriage is an Eternal Concept

The way to draw closer

I was reading D&C 1 and felt a General Conference Doggerel coming on.

Lord, I come to you with but 10 sins

Or if you press me, how ’bout just one sin?

A faint little sin, like it hardly had been.

And the Good Lord said, divide it by ten.

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