I accidentally came across this old draft post.  It was the title and nothing else.  The subject was interesting but I couldn’t tell whether I was for it or against it.

I guess it depends on what kinds of attacks we are talking about, and also and extremely importantly, whether the person doing the attacking is in fact more Christian.

Christ can attack me all he wants for being less Christian than He is (and He sometimes does, though not usually) and its all for the good.

People tied up in knots that I don’t have opinions about whether Christ broke his eggs at the big end or the little end, not so much.

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Milton’s Satan got it wrong.  These were not his choices.

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The earliest General Conference reference is 2007, in a talk by Elaine Dalton.  She is quoting an article Elder Holland wrote for the 2006 Ensign.

2007 Sis. Dalton was quoting Elder Holland
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2007/04/stay-on-the-path?lang=eng

2006 Elder Holland https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2006/10/what-i-wish-every-new-member-knew-and-every-longtime-member-remembered?lang=eng#p16

References to the covenant path seem to pick up around then.

Google Ngram

The earliest reference in BYU speeches is to Sister Wixom in 2013
The Covenant Path | Rosemary M. Wixom | BYU Speeches

A date-limited google search suggests a bunch of results prior to 2006, but at least the first page of results were actually from dates much later.

The phrase doesn’t appear in the Journal of Discourses that I can tell.

I have a weird  hobby.  You could call my hobby political theory or political philosophy if you wanted to make it sound classy.   I am interested in what power actually is in a simple, fundamental level.  No brilliant theories to announce yet, but what I have concluded is that Joseph Smith had some intense level of insight that the modern world, and even me and the church, haven’t caught up to yet.  The way love interacts with power.  Everyone else goes wrong by separating them.

One of the brethren at a recent stake conference made an interesting connection between Mary and Martha–and snowballs–and social media.  Of course we all remember Martha being busy about needful things, but neglecting the most important thing.    He then told a story about snowball fighting with his young son.  His son was a small and very energetic target.  Hard to hit.  So the man decided to pick up two snowballs.  One he lobbed in a high, slow arc.  His boy stood transfixed, eyes on the snowball, making sure he was edged out of the way–but meanwhile, the man threw a snowball directly at him.  Smack!  The boy was only 6, so the tactic worked over and over and over.  He did a funny little gesture on the stand, bobbing his head up and down as if repeatedly watching the arc of the snowball.  And when he had all our attention with the gesture, he suddenly added swiping his finger up and down along with the head, as if scrolling.  Social media does the same, he said.  It fixates our attention on what outside forces want us to be fixated on.

Instead, look to Christ.

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I have two kids who have got into a contentious mode with each other.  They fight a lot, and when they do their personality falls away.  All that is left for the time being is the contention.  They cease to be fully-realized humans.

For them, contention is a chain.

And what I’m wondering is, is that just because they are kids, or is it just easier to see in them because they are kids.

I will frankly admit that I was in the stickiest of wickets.  I was dashed tight around the collar, if you take my meaning.  But it’s always darkest before Jeeves solves the problem, as the poet guy says.

Due to an unfortunate concatentation of circs, I found myself engaged to a female specimen and was much afeared that my, ah, existing fiancee would take objection were the tea to be spilled to her about the fiancee of the second part.  But just when the good ship Bertram was being tossed like nothing on this sea of troubles, out pops good ol’ Jeeves who explained to the young person that his Master was a dashing young man about town, gallant, handsome, and always inadvertently getting engaged to the opposite sex, merely as deep cover for being an incel.  One can scarcely credit it, but apparently the gal in question was led to believe that my chic W1 flat is located in my mother’s basement.  Dashed improbable, it seems to me, but Jeeves assures me that this particular fiction was the crowning fiction, the fiction that broke the engagement’s back and set me free.

These incel chappies seem to be rather disliked.

Elder McConkie’s parable of the debtor explains how justice and mercy are reconciled in that great sacrifice.  The parable doesn’t get much into *why* the third party agrees to pay off the debts.  Love, obviously, but that’s not the focus.

On Sunday we had a really excellent talk about repentance and it got me thinking about the motives of the third party in that parable, as a stand-in for the Savior.  What if the Savior pays my debts because I am in a partnership with him and the goals of the partnership will fail without me–viz, making me as Himself.  In other words, what if He bails me out for love because he sees great potential in me?

So here’s the parable of the movie actor.

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Once there were sharks that were avidly intellectual.  They discussed ideas constantly.  They would swim a thousand miles to hear a new thinker.  Perhaps because they were sharks, they didn’t fit our idea that scholars must be weak.  They were active and something like daredevils.  They loved stunts.

And because they were sharks, they were blood-thirsty and hungry all the time.  They killed and ate and killed and ate with great gusto.  They would argue some point of scholarship, dive down into a school of fish gnashing and rending and slaughtering, swirl up out of the blood cloud to make an additional point that occurred to them, then dive back down.

I went looking for information on how to be speedy.  Everything I found was published by turtles.  They called themselves Rabbitologists.  They had swanky conferences and journals and everything.

At first glance, this is a generic screed against idol worship. But the points he makes are deeper than you might initially realize. Every point he makes applies every bit as much to us as it did to people making idols from stones and stumps. If anything, it applies to us even more.

So, as you read this section, think about how this would apply to us.

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Here’s another installment of the JG series on Learning About Scriptures that Everyone is Done Learning About.  Specifically D&C 19-22.

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When I first heard this phrase, I thought it seemed boring and anticlimactic. But as I have often experienced, the Lord hides many pearls, speaking in serious understatement. So we only see the depths, if we take them very seriously.

The Lord uses the term Covenants to describe not only the ordinances we receive, but also teachings and doctrine. I am increasingly seeing greater depths in Pres Nelson’s use of the term. The Covenant Path is not simply Repentance and Baptism. Not simply anyway.

Two things I have heard recently give me much to ponder.

“Our covenants are not merely transactional; they are transformational. Through my covenants I receive sanctifying, strengthening power of Jesus Christ, which allows me to become a new person, to forgive what seems unforgivable, to overcome the impossible.”

Joaquin E. Costa

Covenants create the kind of relationship that allows God to mold and change us over time and lift us to become more like the Savior, drawing us closer and closer to Him and our Father and eventually preparing us to enter Their presence.

Sis. J Annette Dennis

Today is the anniversary of my little daughter’s death, many years ago.  You can hear more about her in the Betsey Pearl tab above.

We are in the run up to Easter, and so my thoughts today are not just on the resurrection of the body, or of my body, but of the restoration of the bodies of my loved ones.  The Restoration doctrines of sealing and family are not really new additions to the gospel of atonement and resurrection; rather they are just working out its implications.

Christ was resurrected in the flesh to be with his friends in the flesh.  I look forward to that Resurrection to.  Not to be a body alone in the world, but to walk and talk with my friends, to hold my wife, to hold my little Betsey.

The corporal resurrection is a corporate resurrection.  It is not the resurrection of the dead we want, but the resurrection of our dead, and ultimately they are all ours.  But today there is one of that number who I am looking forward to seeing more than others.

I have not had any dreams for months.  Its eerie.  Regular friends of the JG know that I am a frequent experiencer of peculiar, meaningful dreams.  But not for many months.  I don’t know how to account for it and what it means.

At the same time, I have been subject to an almost frantic flood of business and project ideas, far more than I could handle in a lifetime.  This has always been a bit of an issue with me but in recent months its doubled and trebled.

It’s like my personality has abruptly changed.   Its similar  to the experience I think I mentioned here but cannot find right now where I repented of something and a big chunk of my personality, apparently unrelated, just fell away.  It’s wrenching.