13 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on her birthday that year, with slight updates since. Today would be Betsey’s 17th birthday.
My wife baked her a cake. I bought a few balloons and ordered flowers for her grave.
Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.
Today our grief for you is fresh.
[In today’s Washington Post]
Among those killed in the demonstrations was Moroni Lopez, a 22-year-old English student and former Mormon missionary. He had joined the protests after watching footage of police roughing up protesters. (more…)
The Governing Ones is one of the more unusual and interesting conference talks I’ve read. Still chewing on it, to be honest.
Brother Bradford starts with the principle that priesthood is a government. The rights of the priesthood are rights to govern. (more…)
A wolf found that a local lion frequently took the wolf’s kills. The wolf would patiently stalk and hunt and kill, only to have the lion drive him off before he had eaten more than a bite or two.
The wolf brooded on this injustice but could think of no other remedy than to avoid the lion in his hunting. But this often meant hunting in areas with less game, and still resulted with the lion driving the wolf off more than the wolf would like.
The wolf then hit on a clever plan. Instead of avoiding the lion, he would hunt only where the lion was. Over time, the lion would become dependent on the wolf’s hunting and would be unable to survive on his own. The wolf would then flee and the lion would starve.
The wolf then set about his plan and was well on his way to success when he himself died of starvation.
Moral: Your plans always affect yourself.
Comment: The wolf’s plan is clever in its way and could probably be the basis for a fable that illustrates the folly of becoming too dependent. Yet this fable makes what seems to me to be a more important point. Too many plans fail because they see the world as static. Even very smart and experienced people make plans of this kind. In the fable, one way the wolf’s plan could fail would be the lion figuring out the danger of dependency and hunting on his own occasionally just to keep his skills up. The wolf would have no way of preventing it. But an even graver error, and one that has a moral dimension, is that people forget that they themselves will be changed by their plans.
The Lovely One brought up the idea that Jacob getting the birthright from Isaac by deception was a type of us and Christ. We inherit all that our father hath by assuming our older brother’s identity just like Isaac. Of course what Jacob did was squirrelly and we were discussing whether even the unsavory could be types of Christ. So I brought up Laban. He is a type of Christ too, though wicked.
Bing! The light bulb went on.
What if we’ve missed the complete meaning of the Armor of God scripture this whole time? (more…)
We are in the post-prandial stage of General Conference. (more…)
From a letter three weeks ago to a missionary son:
“More than most church responsibilities, everyone has an opinion what missionaries should be doing. ‘Every member a mission president.’ That’s not altogether without reason, as missionaries have a lot of authority. Though you will serve in the Melchizedek priesthood for the rest of your life, this is probably the only time who will bear the title ‘Elder.’ After that, the authority will be dormant, like the apostles in the quorum of the twelve who are all ordained and sustained as prophets, but only the church president exercises that ordination to the church and the world.”
In the Los Alamos Ward around 1992, a man whose face I remember, but not his name, was in our priesthood opening exercises for the first time, and when called upon, he introduced himself as a new move-in with his family. He was asked from the pulpit, “Elder or high priest?”, and hamming it up a bit, with self-pity he answered, “Neither, I’m a Seventy.” Brother Chamberlin, the ward’s last remaining refugee from the stake Seventies Quorum disbanded in ’86, turned and extended his arms in a gesture of embrace. “Welcome, brother.”
Another reminder of the past, from the 1986 instructions concerning discontinued stake Seventies quorums: “In the event that a stake seventies quorum operated a project or owned property, the stake presidency should, after prayerful consideration, submit its recommendation to the First Presidency concerning the disposition of such projects or properties.” A local quorum that operated a project or owned property? It was a different time, a different world.
How Rhodes Scholars think: “At the time of this interview, he [Gerrit Gong] was the assistant to the president of Brigham Young University in Utah, focusing on planning and assessment. He is now a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” (link)
I recently came to the surprising realization that there are important commonalities between the religious principles of Jordan Peterson and those of the Mormon Transhumanists. Surprising to me, at least, because I really like Jordan Peterson and find Mormon Transhumanism repellent. (more…)
My mother tells me that when I was a little fella, I would spend the late afternoon standing on the couch looking out the window for my father to come home. When he did, I would quickly sit down and act like I was absorbed in a picture book. But he was never fooled. In he’d come and we’d wrestle.
Kids waiting for you to come home is one of the pleasures in life. They are so eager. Its mostly the younger ones, though the older ones sometimes rush over with news they’ve been busting to tell you. (more…)
One of the missionaries in our ward said she really likes a Mormon group called the Nashville Tribute Band. Her favorite song was one called “Apostles“:
I could criticize the song, but it does have the strange power of cheap music. And the song has a heck of a situation: a last meeting of the New Testament Apostles before they go out across the world never to see each other again. (more…)
God appears to Moses, and then when He leaves, the devil.
The devil appeared to Joseph Smith, and then God.
Feast, then famine. Famine, then feast.
Christmas is over. Here’s my favorite thing of this year’s season
There’s often a bit of melancholy at Christmas. Have you ever noticed how many Christmas songs are touched with a little bit of sadness? “Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow.” Depression is just grey, but you have to be truly merry for real melancholy. (more…)
Our world is at war. Every year the forces of dark grind away. Every year the Lord of the Armies of Light, Santa Claus by name, sallies forth and reverses much or all of their inroads.
The deadliest weapon in the arsenal of Light is their mirth. Their laughter slays. They are fiercely, immensely jolly.
The Castles of Christmas are their unbreachable redoubt. They return there every year to regroup and rest where they cannot be touched.
It is said that the castles have one weakness. If ever the merry laughter ceases, the walls will be breached.
But it hasn’t happened yet. Because Santa Claus and the other men of Christmas have a secret.
They know that at the heart of the Castles, there is a land where a Child is in a manger under a starry sky. And that land can never be breached. There is no weakness, no trick, no eventuality, that can take that refuge away.
When the reverses are piling up and the War of Christmas is going grim, Santa and his men begin to think about the great surprise that the dark will have when they breach the Castles, and the hilarious anticipation of that surprise makes them break out in great ringing laughter.
The boy is father to the man. In honor of the feast of St. Stephen’s, here is Bruce C. at his drollest. I laughed, and not just because a few weeks ago in choir I was bellowing out “Good people all, this ChristmasTIDE” because damn the wrecker who published our choral music with it spelled “time.” Or because I remembered last year the same choir director, bless her longsuffering heart, trying to hide her grin while I gave a harangue on where the comma should be in “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.” Or the year before that . . .
Anyway, read the whole thing. If you don’t laugh, a pox on you and no wassail.
