It started out with me musing about teaching even young children about budgeting and maybe trade-offs.

Imagine a young mother sitting at a table doing some budgeting by a woodstove.  The clear sunlight of winter streams in through the window.  She’s doing it partly in paper and pencil so her children can see and experience her doing it.  Having them learn about budgeting is important to her.

She gets an idea.

She calls over her little girl.  The child is maybe 3 to 4, maybe even 5.  The mother takes out some wooden blocks of different colors and labels them, including maybe with little drawings.  She uses some long plain blocks to create a square.

“Here,” she said, “let’s play the the Big Person Game.”  The kid is excited.  The mother explains that the square is the money they have to spend each month, the blocks have to fit inside it.  Any blocks that cannot fit they cannot use.  Fitting blocks is something the child does, so she understands.  Then the mother lays down some blocks.  “Here’s paying for the house, here’s a block for the lights and the electricity, here’s a block for the car, here’s the basic food we need, here’s some clothes.”  Then, as the mother designed, she shows the child there is a little space left and shows the child some blocks that could fit into it.  Ice cream, maybe.  Toys.  A trip to the ocean.  Small things that are discretionary where letting the child have some say can do no harm and possibly good.

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Here’s some perspective on Nephite chronology.  All I have done is take the events of Nephite history from the perspective of a Nephite at the time of Christ’s coming to the Americas and how far in the past it would have felt by relating it to events in our past from the perspective of 2024.  I am just following the standard chronology in the Book of Mormon notes.

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A modern day parable of the refiner’s fire:

If you treat wood so that it partially destroys the inner structure, then subject it to heat, and pressure, it ends up stronger than steel.

Can literally stop bullets.

There is a very interesting shift from the kings to the judges that  involves a shift in religious authority and an outbreak of religious entrepreneurialism.  Grant hardy’s ethnic breakdown thesis may be correct but I think it obscures more than it reveals.

Nephite modernity; Lessons from Nephite history ; Nephite civilization cycles

Let’s take a look at some more of the interesting questions and insights from this period.

• Did Abinadi have authority?

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Thereby have some entertained angels unawares.

For me, the best application of this scripture is to be open to reproofs from people who aren’t just echoing Great and Spacious Building propaganda.

All criticisms gratefully accepted.

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A man in Elders Quorum volunteered he was cleaning up after his kids.  The way he cleaned up their chicken mcnuggets is he popped them in his mouth.  An hour old, they were disgusting.  He says he craves fresh chicken mcnuggets, they are a real temptation for him, but no wonder they sit so heavy on his stomach.  Once they are no longer hot, he can taste how nasty they are.

Sin, he said, is chicken mcnuggets.

A passed-out drunk woke up in a field at night.  There was a UFO landed near him and a few aliens gaggling around.  One of them was looking at him.

”Hey!  Hey!” the drunk yelled. “What’s it all for?  Why are you here?”

“Yes,” the alien said.  “We are collectors. ”

The drunk’s expression cleared.  “Oh, hey, collectors.  Art!  I know art.  The Mona Lisa!  You should collect the Mona Lisa.  Hey!”

The alien looked blank. “What is this Mona Lisa?  We collect art creations of great worth.”  He proudly showed the drunk a child’s refrigerator drawing.

“Jesus loves this boy, and the boy loves this art.  Isn’t it wonderful to have something that will last forever?”

Catholics believe that the sacrament literally becomes the body of Christ in a sense. I used to think that belief was grotesque. Just as every drop of water you drink is probably dinosaur pee, it would mean the communicant was — pardon me for being vulgar here — pooping out Christ. But the3 grotesqueness of that image is just a hangover from the false sectarian belief that the body and its functions are lesser. All that is really grotesque in Christianity comes from the Incarnation, where God Himself stunk into his nappy when he was a baby and squatted to poop when he was an adult.

Now I think that if I were a Catholic, I would relish the image of God slowly filling up the world as he was sluffed off from my skin, sweat from my pores, emptied from my bladder, and evacuated from bowels and nostrils. Bled from my hurts. Shed from my tears. Puffed out with my breath. I would be in awe that through me God was slowly making the world into divine flesh.

I would not give a hang about transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, but this I would care a lot about.

I’m not Catholic. So lets bring this idea home. Let’s talk about substantiation.

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I stumbled across a lesser known form of service recently.

Through an odd set of circumstances I ended up doing a thing for several days where the circumstances were configured for me to be both an authority and to have charisma.  For a wonder, I didn’t flub it.

But my only real model for that kind of role is church, so I put on my church personality, which includes asking how people are doing by name and all that sort of thing.  A little pastoral counsel mixed in with the other presentations I was doing, that kind of stuff.

To my surprise, it really touched people.  It was moving to them.  Having an authority figure interested in them felt good.

Now that I’m back on my normal bland track, situation-derived authority and charisma gone like the snow, I have reflected on that experience.  And on other experiences I have had when I was on the receiving end.  When some person of character and authority and charm took an interest in me and pushed through my usual seesawing between wariness and fangirlishness to really make a connection.  It felt so good.  And at key junctures, changed the direction of my life.

I had a boss like that one time.  Everyone who worked there was unnaturally productive and agreed that the office felt like heaven.

These experiences have also been common for me inside the home, both now and when I was young.

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On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your daughter comes to you. She says, I read your post on how I’m spoiled rotten. (She never reads your posts.) She says, it was funny. You’re funny, daddy. Will you play with me?

You play with her.

None can know how difficult it is to enter into the kingdom of heaven, but those who have tried—tried hard, and have not ceased to try. . . . Demands unknown before are continually being made upon the Christian: it is the ever fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the Spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger; when he finds the mountain he has so long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose glory-crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach—then is there hope for him; proof there is then that he has been climbing, for he beholds the yet unclimbed; he sees what he could not see before; if he knows little of what he is, he knows something of what he is not.

— thus George MacDonald

We are all supposed to be a little amused at the fundy types who won’t drink cokes because tea and coffee have caffeine.

(Actually there’s no bad reason to not drink coke.)

The fundy approach is assuming there is a general principle behind the specific rules from the Word of Wisdom, trying to figure out what the Word of Wisdom general principle, and then applying it generally.

That’s their logic with caffeine. They reason that coffee and tea should be avoided because they contain lots of addictive caffeine and therefore maybe we should avoid other products with high levels of caffeine. And we are supposed to think this is stupid and low class. How ignorant to think that the commandments are unknowable and arbitrary. How nekulturny to trying to be an agent instead of just doing exactly what they are told and only what they are told. How pharisaical.

Whereas the Pharisees were doing something in the opposite direction. Putting a hedge about the law means making extra sure you try not to violate any arbitrary commandment. Generalizing means assuming they aren’t arbitrary.

The reality is that treating the commandments as arbitrary and unknowable is stagnant and small. Whether its in big areas like sex roles or the male priesthood or in little things like coffee and tea.

The real problem with the fundy approach is they don’t generalize enough. Instead of just looking at coffee and tea they should be looking at the entire thing. (more…)

The Dark was rising. It spread its influence over the land. It captured institutions, customs, lands — it put more and more peoples into its thrall.

When this had happened before, each time a Champion had arisen. Blessed with power and light from the Great God of Light and War and Justice, the Champion led the people with his blazing sword in driving back the lords of the Dark.

But this time no Champion came. One by one the peoples fell into the hands of the Dark powers.

Finally, of all the free peoples all that was left was a little band of a few hundred gathered around a hill to where they had been driven, awaiting the final assault of the Dark hordes in the morning.

They would fight and die.

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I keep discovering that all my most bouncin’ ideas turn out to be pale echoes of stuff already found in the scriptures.

For instance, the home as a fortress from which we sally out to wreak havoc on the devil.

Proclaim it abroad.  You are the knights of the spiritual feudalism.  The vikings have been looting the spiritual landscape unchecked.  Have been.  But now you are erecting extraordinary fortifications of the soul, such castles as the world has not seen, from which you sally.  Beat the drums, counsel together, your family is going to war.

Against the current

Comrades on the wall

I sat down to read D&C 88 because I like the verses about establishing a house of order, and God chuckled.
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The light of truth. The light of Christ. He is the light of the sun and the power thereof. He is the light of the moon and the power thereof. He is the light of the stars and the power thereof. The earth also, and the power thereof. The light in all things, even the power of God which sitteth upon the throne.

-thus D&C 88:5-13.

Now, one might say truthfully that glory = power plus light. Righteous power = power plus light. But the scriptures say that you cannot even really separate the two concepts. Power without light is ultimately not actually power. Light without power is ultimately not actually light.