One small prayer for a boy, Elder Asay says, referring to the 1st vision, one great prayer for mankind.

The moon landings were great.  They almost seem greater because we receded and can’t do them anymore.  But in reality they would have been greater if they were a beachhead.  If they led to hundreds of other footsteps, workers’ footsteps, settlers’ footsteps, fathers’ and mothers’ footsteps, babies’ footsteps . . . .

The great glory of Joseph’s prayer is that millions can and do follow his footsteps.

You can soar.  You can reach what is out there.  You can span the heavens.

Until the Eagle has landed, and Christ welcomes you home.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning session of the April 1990 General Conference

Marilyn Nielson A harvest of mercy

One of our missions is to recover the central place and meaning of glory in the gospel.

To that end, this popular article on the classical Greek concept of thumos.

Awhile back we all read the Boys in the Boat and went through an enthusiasm for it.    Around then we made a rare trip to the sea and I and the oldest daughter went on a little kayaking tour.  The rest of the tour paddled on sedately after the guide.  We ignored the guide and kept dashing off on sprints, pretending to be the boys in the boat.  We took turns being the coxun.  “Ten big ones!” we’d yell then we’d row as hard as we could for the indicated count.

We saw a whale surface within 10 yards of us.  We saw some dolphins not much further off.

That was several years ago.

But she was excited to tell me Monday that the Boys in the Boat was mentioned in the women’s session of General Conference.

Monday night I had an incredibly short dream.

I was sitting in a right-hand pew part way back in a church with a center aisle.  We were for some reason having a movie Protestant-style wedding; my daughter was the radiant bride.

As she got to the front my enthusiasm got to me and I yelled out, “ten big ones!”  She gave a dazzling smile.

I’m reading a trash novel right now.  The Hero leads a band of faceless peasants through hordes and hordes of orcs/zombies/monsters, hack, hack, slash.  Sometimes the peasants die.  But sometimes  a light turns on within, they become endowed with power, and they also become heroes, with names and character and participation in the story.

Your trash novel, the Spirit whispers, is truer to life than great novels.

Brigham Young:

that act alone will ensure C. Allen Huntington, George W. Grant, and David P. Kimball an everlasting salvation in the Celestial Kingdom of God, worlds without end.

So let us now speak of Tanner Lund.

(more…)

The old mansion on the edge of the woods rambled on and on.  Room after room after room.  Passage after passage.

It was said to be haunted.

It was said to lead to treasures if you went in far enough.

It was said that deep in, it led to other times and other places.

One boy went exploring far in and came to a peculiar double door.  The door was ornate and carved round about.  It led to what looked to be a large dark hall.  Not a passageway.  A hall in the old manorial sense.  But it was hard to see because the room was nearly pitch black.  There may have been, the boy was almost certain he saw, a gleam far off.  Some intuition told him that through the hall was the way to marvels.

But it was nearly pitch black and as he progressed a little way he discovered it was full of obstacles.  Things  lying on the ground, furniture, whatever it was, he kept tripping and falling.  Worse, he didn’t know where the other side was.  But Determination.  Grit.  Willpower.  He pressed on.  When he fell too  many times, he groped his way back to the opening doors–thankfully he’d left them open–and fell again and tried again.  Over and over, because Never Give Up.  He might still be there today, except along came another boy.  That boy had brought a light.

Comment: This is a story about a lot of things, but one thing it is about is grace.  Or revelation, which is a form of grace.  Only the Light will get you through.

The enchantment in the world returns with the night.  It is dark, the moon has not yet risen, and in the cool grass and the cool air you push your daughter on the swing that hangs from the shade tree.

A time of joy, a time of power.

Please comment after sessions.

A man who read stacks of books needed a new bookshelf.  After some thought, he found the a space for the shelves on one end of a room.  They fit perfectly.  He put the shelves up and filled them with books.

But he had put them up in front of cupboards, which he could no longer get to.

Moral: Think about the problems you could be creating, not just the problem you are trying to solve.

I think faith is a virtue about the past. (more…)

“On the count of three,” the Mexican  magician announced, “I will disappear!”

“Uno.”

“Dos.”

But then–poof–he vanished without a trace.

My brain woke me up just before 3 AM, telling me that just as inertia was produced by the sum of mass in the universe (Mach’s principle), justice was the sum of agency in the universe.  Gee, thanks, brainy.

My brain is like a cat.  It drops dead birds at my feet for my approval.

A castle builder decided to get really analytical.

“Statistics show,” he said, “that 95% of the part of the castle defenders use in combat is the top 5 feet.  But the lower parts of the castle are the great majority of the time and the expense of building.”

He mused.

“Think of how much more effective I can build if I skip straight to the only useful part instead of being blinkered by hidebound traditionalism.  I will call it The Castle in the Air ™!”

Moral: Numbers are no substitute for wisdom.

One of the most interesting parts of a virtue chart is where we explore the synthesis of apparently opposed virtues.

Here is something I came up with that unfortunately I did not have the time to do the build-up for. The end result just came to me, I’ll have to try to reverse engineer it later.

But in short, it seems to me that there are virtues related to the past, the present, and the future. And that integration is the synthesis of them.

(more…)

My daughter dreamed she heard a song on the radio. They were singing,
“I am a cloud and I’m blowing away. My heart is a cloud and I want it to stay.”
***
One of the sister missionaries in our ward dreamed recently that she was going to be sent to X town with X missionary (that she didn’t know, but had heard us talk about) as a trainer for other sister missionaries. She had the dream several times and told us about it. Two days ago, her Mission President called to send her to X town with X missionary as a trainer for other sister missionaries.
***
I dreamed that the hubbub in the marketplace slowly died and the crowd slowly parted. Over the heads of the crowd you could see five flags approaching. Eventually the crowd parted enough that you could see five crippled and injured men slowly carrying their flags forward to the king who was seated on his throne at the end of the market plaza. The backstory, which I knew in the way of dreams, was that months before the king had sent 5 regiments out to deal with invading orcs or some such. They had fought in running battle after running battle. As one flagbearer was killed they passed on to the next until this was all that was left–their last fight had been just the five of them using their flags as pikes. They were returning to report they had won. They had stopped at a stream outside the city to clean up as best they could and the senior one told them to “make a show, make a show. This is for all of them.”

In my dream, the king came down from his throne crying and threw off his crown and his robe.

We all have a vague notion of where we seem to be headed, but its different when its detailed out in black and white.

Of what use will guns be when the Regime can, say, cut us off from access to credit? Covid has accustomed us to buying and selling electronically as our ordinary means of exchange. I don’t know about you, but almost all of the transactions I do now are by card; some stores will only accept cards, as a health measure, or because they don’t have enough coins to make change. What happens when that becomes mandatory, and all our purchases can be tracked? When the Regime can cut us off from access to our money by the flip of a switch, because it could tell from our smartphone’s GPS data that we went to a dissenting church on Sunday, or bought a book that had been forbidden?

–thus Rod Dreher today

What is needed now, he thinks, is honesty and fellowship.

Only in small communities could people feel free.