After a lengthy delay, we return with more Isaiah!

As I mentioned in the previous post, chapters 40 & 41:1-20 are the gospel proclaimed, to Israel. In the next post, this will be extended to the Gentiles. But this has more depth than you might guess at first glance. The central part of this chiasmus askes the question, Do you really understand, or believe the Doctrine of the Creation? Then we look at future events (it would have been future events for the people of Isaiah’s time) and ask, Do you still believe God is in control? Let’s look at this in more detail.

Three Voices of Comfort (40:1-11)
* The Voice of him that crieth in the wilderness  (40:3-5)
* What shall I cry? All flesh is grass (40:6-8)
* O Zion that bringeth good tidings… say unto the cities of Judah, Behold! Your God!  (40:9-11)

The Lord is a Creator, who rules his Creation (40:12-31)
The Lord is the Ruler of history and of the world  (41:1-7)

Three Examples of Comfort (41:8-20)
* I will help thee (41:8-13)
* From worm to harvesting mountains (41:14-16)
* Needy sustained in the desert (41:17-20)

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Success is dangerous, but good.

Elder Bednar this conference taught that success is a challenge.  Our choices can make it a curse.

He was talking about the Book of Mormon, and of course this is a very Book of Mormon viewpoint.  The promised land is blessed and cursed and the blessing and the cursing are the same.  At one level, the blessing and the cursing are that here the people will get what they deserve.  At an even deeper level, the blessing and the cursing are that any little bit of righteousness will get rewarded with success, and our choices too often make success into a curse.

Whether we live in the promised land or not, I believe we Saints have the same blessing and cursing.  If we try, we will often succeed–but that’s dangerous.

Many of us try to avoid the danger.  Probably we shouldn’t.  Elder Bednar’s point isn’t that success is bad.  It’s that success is a challenge.

Success with humility is godliness.

My brain is trying to be subversive again.  I bear it with patience.

A few days ago I was studying in 3rd Nephi when the brain popped up to say that Christ’s injunction not to contend sure hits differently when you realize he had just finished destroying the 2/3s of the population that his audience would have needed to contend with.  Hard filter = “no contention!”  From that perspective saying contention is of the devil is like saying wickedness or opposition is of the devil, or the Gadianton robbers were of the devil (which they were).

I don’t 100% agree.  There’s some truth to it, but this last conference had several messages about avoiding contention that shows it goes beyond just the narrow confines of the in-group.  What I do think is that many of us, including me, spend a lot of time thinking about hard task of avoiding contention in the abstract with people who are our opponents or even in the scriptural language our “enemies,” while we are failing at the easy task within the in-group: not being contentious with the people in our family or ward.    I’m not sure that being civil across big partisan divides matters too much if you are quarrelsome and nasty to your kids or your cousins or the Sunday School 1st counselor.

We are corrupt.

We are so corrupt and we are ripening for destruction.

We are anxiously busy killing ourselves.

This drug may have some real benefits, but I have utterly lost confidence in so-called medical experts.

Something that I think might help a lot of people from President Nelson’s talk.

(Paraphrasing from my notes)– The desire and the struggle to end sin is itself the end of sin.  The rest is God’s timing.

That blighter Fink-Nottle won the Scripture Prize with his sleeves positively bursting with lists of the Kings of Judah–absolutely!–and on the strength of it they are making him the candidate to stand for MP in the local hustings and the Telegraph has consulting testing integrity experts who say that his blasted skullduggery doesn’t qualify as cheating.  It makes a common man of the people like Bertram Wooster dashed shirty.  I mean to say, one rule for the toffs and another for a hard-working blue collar fellow like yours truly!

So argues a team of Spanish researchers in a splashy new documentary.

Reasons for skepticism:

• “splashy new documentary”
• There appears to be some uncertainty about whether the remains they tested are Columbus’ or not
• They haven’t released their data
• In Spain this probably qualifies as a subversive result and people love subversive results so much these days that they throw skepticism and integrity out the window

That said, it could be true.

I had a peculiar nightmare a few days ago.

***

I dreamed that about ten years older than I now am, I was called to be the prophet.  I felt a suffocating weight of responsibility.  I decided I needed to be healthy and vigorous throughout the term of the calling so I determined that in a year’s time and every year thereafter I would swim to the California shore from an island off the coast (in my dream, Catalina Island).  This resolution would make sure I kept up with exercise and health even in the middle of the day to day press of the job, and it would also mean that when I became absolutely too frail to do my duties, I would free up the office for someone else, by dieing.

I dreamed I did my first swim.  It was hard and desperate, but I made it.

Same thing the next year and for many more years.  It was never easy.

Finally I was getting well on in years, 80s or 90s, something like that, and feeble.  I had a feeling I might not make it this time.  I start out swimming.  There’s a boat trailing along with my wife and some Church people.  The water is cold and choppy.  Waves keep slapping me in the face.  I am so cold.  The sky is gray.  About half way through I can’t go further on, I start going under, the water is all around me filling my mouth, I can’t see, I can’t breathe, and a hand reaches down and grabs my arm.  I convulsively grab back.  They hoist me out of the water onto the boat.  We then proceed to the shore.  I am hunched over under a blanket and brooding.  I realize that my plan was stupid all along.  Of course if I were drowning someone would try to rescue me.  And in the extremity of drowning, of course I would take the help.

We are camped out along the California beach that night.  I sneak off and steal a rowboat.  I row across to the island.  It is very dark, no lights, no stars.  I slide into the black water and start shivering immediately.  I start to swim.  It hurts so bad, I am at my last strength almost immediately.  About 1/3 of the way across, I drown.  I can’t breathe, I can only barely twitch my limbs, I am sinking under, the water swirls around me, I am going under under under

..    and then I woke up gasping.

It gives me the shivers writing about it now.

I was a stern practitioner of the religion of Doubt, and almost nothing could dissuade me from it. In my teens I focused my doubt on the things of the Right: the religious traditions, the various hierarchies, and (especially!) the vestigial prohibitions on certain hedonic pursuits. Later I extended Doubt into the sacred ground of the left as well: the believability of Science, the evilness of white people, the awfulness of the past…

You can probably see where the next step was taking me. For better or for worse, doubt performs poorly in recursion. And so I began to doubt it.

-a tiny excerpt from the Depths of Crackpot Illogic, by our friend Sol

His list of things he was looking for in a church is meaningful to me, especially 1, 2, 4, and 7, and 8 only slightly behind.

On the sweetness

You have a new missionary speak.  Brand new.  He is terrified.  He reads his talk, eyes glued on the page.  He starts with jokes.  Very deadpan, since his eyes are glued to the page.  It somehow makes them very funny. Your bishop is shaking with laughter.

Then he gets to the serious part.  He is testifying and pouring out his soul to the wooden stand and the piece of typed paper on it.  He still can’t raise his eyes.  It moves you.

You betcher I’m blame fool whoopin’ and hollerin’

Ascension

Splashdown

Return to tower  (If you only click one link, click this one)

Implications

Here

I was doodling about Elder Bednar’s talk in a free moment.  The doodles showed me something about  the relationship pride has to despair.

To recap, Elder Bednar’s talk suggested to me that one aspect of pride is a fixation on present circumstances whereas humility recognizes that the future is uncertain.  More specifically, pride refuses to believe that the present can change or refuses to do what is necessary to change it.

The difference between pride and despair is only one of degree.

These are two simple examples of pride and despair.  The proud man or woman is doing well and is certain it will always be that way because they deserve it.  The despairing is doing poorly and refuses to  believe that can ever change.

Here are some more complicated examples.

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So many things only make sense when you consider the time factor.
Elder Bednar’s talk on Saturday is an example.  He illuminated what humility truly is for us mortals.

He said that humility is awareness that you can fail.   Which is different from demeaning yourself.

(All thoughts after this are my own, Elder Bednar bears no fault for them.)

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Here’s a general conference retrospective for t he October 2024 semiannual.

I personally received less inspiration than normal but what I did receive was directly aimed at the concerns I brought in.

What you get here isn’t the inspiration.  It’s notes, some of them idiosyncratic and none the produce of mature reflection.

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