How many people have you killed?
Disclaimer: the following is the middlebrow blog version of a ghost story. Not intended for brooding purposes.
Years gone by my first little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on the birthday she never quite made it to that year.
Today you would be 23.
Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.
We put flowers on your grave.
It’s another photo album birthday for us. I don’t know how birthdays go where you are.
Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.
General Conference Retrospective
Elder Gong talks about being buried in your own temple clothes. One of the not yet entirely lost customs of the old Church was making your own temple clothes and then laying out your dead in theirs. These little acts are very meaningful.
Brother Dushku had the Spirit make a powerful impression on him by one day telling him to sit down and shut up. It is one of his treasured spiritual experiences.
My point is that there are many ways to receive heavenly rays of testimony. These are just a few, of course. They may not be dramatic, but all of them form part of our testimonies.
Brothers and sisters, I have not seen a pillar of light, but, like you, I have experienced many divine rays. Over the years, I’ve tried to treasure such experiences. I find that as I do, I recognize and remember even more of them. Here are some examples from my own life. They may not be very impressive to some, but they are precious to me.
I remember being a rowdy teenager at a baptism. As the meeting was about to begin, I felt the Spirit urge me to sit down and be reverent. I sat down and stayed quiet the rest of the meeting.
My own treasure house contains many such. I have also been blessed that way.
General Conference Retrospective
Elder Holland quoted G.K. Chesterton on gratitude.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
— thus G. K. Chesterton
General Conference retrospective
(The title is with apologies to Elder Holland, whose talk Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet is still the best talk for listening to on a Sunday while making dinner)
In marriage and business there is a concept called commingling of assets. At its fullest, the idea is that you have two nominally separate people or entities but they are so mixed up with each other that you can’t really sort out where one ends and the other begins. Legally the court will then throw up its hand and declare them to be one entity. Its not just that their assets now belong to both. For legal purposes, they are one entity.
General Conference Retrospective
Here’s a juxtaposition
Elder Kearon, God’s Intent is to Bring You Home
My wife and I were visiting another country for various Church assignments, I woke up early one morning and looked blearily outside our hotel window. Down below on the busy street, I saw that a roadblock had been set up with a policeman stationed nearby to turn cars around as they reached the barrier. At first, only a few cars traveled along the road and were turned back. But as time went by and traffic increased, queues of cars began to build up.
From the window above, I watched as the policeman seemed to take satisfaction in his power to block the flow of traffic and turn people away. In fact, he seemed to develop a spring in his step, as if he might start doing a little jig, as each car approached the barrier. If a driver got frustrated about the roadblock, the policeman did not appear helpful or sympathetic. He just shook his head repeatedly and pointed in the opposite direction.
I’m poking around old LDS statistical reports, conference by conference.
There is a period during the 90s when we don’t report new children of record at all.
Conversely, I found there was a period when we actually had a section called Social Statistics, where we broke out the birthrate, the marriage rate, and the death rate. Fascinating.
Here’s an example from 1981:
|
Birthrate per thousand |
28.1 |
|
Number of persons married per thousand |
12.2 |
|
Death rate per thousand |
3.9 |
Not to be depressing or anything, but that birthrate is is about 6 times higher than our current one. Dooooooom, he dirged. Dooooom! Partly because the of the baby boomer bulge, to be fair. I wouldn’t be surprised if the marriage rate was also higher than now, though who knows.
Those were good statistics to keep.
General Conference Retrospective
In a wonderful talk about the temple, Elder Andersen told about a young man testifying to the Heber City Planning Commission about the proposed new temple. “I am hoping to be married in this temple,” he said. It moved me.
General Conference Retrospective
Elder Soares refers to being home-centered, church-supported, and temple-bound. Catchy phrase. Let’s consider it a little.
The temple is a heavenly ascent rite that culminates in being welcomed to heaven and then taking your place as king and queen in doing his work. So temple-bound ultimately means ‘heaven-bound.’
Home-centered, church-supported, heaven-bound.
Temple-bound also means marriage-bound and therefore making-a-home bound, and there we come full circle.
Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s 2023 LDS Birth Update.
Like Mansfield pointed out, the summary of our data and rough analytical methods is either we have comically low activity rates, comically low birth rates, or a combination of low activity and low birth rates.
My guess is that our actual TFR is around 2.4 – 2.7, since we seem to track Gentile TFR with a plus one.
Let’s see what that implies for our activity rates as a rough and ready plausibility check.
All impressions idiosyncratic or your money back.
Guaranteed to be too ill-written to have been generated by ChatGPT
From Daughter Number One
I had a dream last night. In the dream I was someone who resented and didn’t understand commandments. The stated purpose of the dream was to teach me why the commandments were necessary.
