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.

A fun stem winder

https://xcancel.com/DouthatNYT/status/1898813621381243082#m

Atheists used to be villains. Now they are just sad.

More Isaiah for the interested student!

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It’s the last verse that gets me every time.  Lyrics here. (more…)

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

-Tennyson

Oh, I say, how many shekels would a Starship set back Bertram W.?  They are dashed sleek, I mean to say, what!  A take-off from one’s chic flat with a touchdown at the Drones would be just the thing to avoid the hoi polloi.

Lent starts today.

Over the years I have had zero desire to participate in it.

Yet a couple of weeks ago when President Oaks released his video about Easter and the Easter season I have the impression that my family should try to observe Lent.  I shook the impression off.  I did not have a great desire to do something that seemed cringe and larpy.

A day or two later I was talking to my daughter and son-in-law and they said that they had been watching the video and had the impression that we as a family should participate in Lent.

So that’s what we’re doing.

The things we are giving up range from cheese to procrastination

We’re also trying to make it into not just a negative observance but also a positive observance by having one member of the extended family post a spiritual thought to the family chat each day.

What the Lord says about Himself clears up what righteous dominion in D&C 121 is.  It’s a verse found in D&C 15 and 16.

I speak unto you with sharpness and with power, for mine arm is over all the earth.

What caught my eye is the word sharpness.  There is a much-discussed verse in D&C 121 that uses the same term.

Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost

The whole passage is describing the ideal authority and its very winsome, he’s full of love, he doesn’t push people around, etc., but then there is this about reproving betimes with sharpness.  A number of Saints have manfully striven to argue that sharpness means something other than speaking cuttingly, but these attempts have run up against the brute fact that speaking sharply means what it means in English.

D&C 15 and 16 tie it all together though.

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This is another installment of the Junior Ganymede’s focus on sections of the D&C that you have already stopped thinking about.

Saturday my daughter introduced us to a pen-and-paper game called Racetrack.  You accelerate out of the starting position but have to brake and turn to navigate curves.  A lot of fun!  If you don’t brake and turn enough, you crash.  The simple rules here.  But make those curves, or else you will crash!

As were were playing, it seemed to me that we were also playing a game about repentance and revelation.

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This morning I selected at random a podcast interview with Dana Gioia. I have enjoyed Mr. Gioia’s thought, language, and voice before and expected I would again. This instance exceeded my hopes, and it surprised me with how moving I found it, and I thought I should share it. I suggest listening to three minutes of his poem starting at 49:32 until 52:28 to test if the hour may be of worth to you. It left me thinking about what it means to be sealed to the dead and considering what I should be doing to maintain that a living bond.

EconTalk, Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death, and Mortality
On Spotify

God does not despise weakness at all.  What he despises is the refusal to become strong.

There once was a little wolf who had a little crooked tail.

The wolf was born that way.  The other wolves  mocked it mercilessly for having a lamb’s tail.  But there was a compensation.   With its little crooked tail, and the aid of a sheepskin and some flour, the wolf was able to do a wonderful imitation of a sheep.  It could get right down into the flock.

This being the one thing it was good at, the wolf really leaned into its strength.  It studied up on sheep, spent hours and days mingled with them, getting to know their ways.  It its own way, the wolf came to love the sheep.  It even came to think itself as a sheep.  Down in its heart, where it counted.

It still ate sheep, of course.  What, did you want it to starve?

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There once was a fertile valley surrounded by high mountains.  The valley had its villages and a few towns and was a very pleasant place.  No one had ever left the valley because of the tall mountains that surrounded it and through some geographical oddity, beyond the mountains desert in all directions.

But if you laboriously scaled the right peak, and had rested your eyes, and the visibility was right, you could see that there was an end to the desert and something beyond.  Perhaps even towns and cities.

One day a man in the valley announced his intention to cross the mountains and the desert to the other side.  He set about planning his journey and making the equipment he would need to get there.

Not long after, he had a knock on his door in the evening.   When he opened it, he saw a delegation of men there.  They asked to speak to him, he invited them in.

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