By chance three young men met at the beginning of the Path, the one true Path that runs east of the Moon and west of the Sun, the Path whose entrance is hidden and narrow.

Each marveled that he had found the Path and marveled that fate had sent him companions with which to travel it.

“Are you like me, gentlemen?”  the dark-haired one said.  “I found the path by reading old books and discovering the lies that modern scholars told.  I asked the questions they avoided and traced the logical implications that they refused to even acknowledge.  The gap in the leaves that leads here was hard to find, but it was there, and they said it was not.  So I walked through it.  Was it the same with you?”

“No!” the freckled one said brightly.  “One night I heard music.  I got up from my bed and followed it to a dark crossroads, where a voice from the wood told me to always follow signs and  my heart.  I rush in without thinking about the consequences, because I know it will be all right.  Today I saw a dove flying and it shone like it was purest gold.  A crow larger than I have ever seen rose up and attacked it.  I was angry, and called on the powers that be to drive off this crow, because the dove was fair and beautiful.  When I did, an eagle swooped down and struck the crow.  The dove flew on and I followed it here.”

The third one with yellow hair looked curiously at them both.  “I am here,” he said slowly, “because my grandfather and my father walked this path when they were my age.  They told me to come.  They showed me the way.”

The freckled one laughed.  “I love how different our stories are.  We should become companions on this Path.  It is obviously meant to be.”

The dark-haired one nodded.  “Mutual aid and taking advantage of unexpected good fortune such as this are policies that maximize expected value in outcomes.  It is not probable that our presence here at the same time is coincidence.”

The other boy agreed.  “Like my father and grandfather always said, ‘Journey with friends, you’ll all win your ends.'”

Then, because it felt right, because it was customary, because an understanding of evolved human nature suggested it would have positive effects on the primitive subconscious, they clasped hands and swore fellowship.

In today’s marketplace—yes, in your own neighborhood, town, and cities—scheming, deceiving promoters are making available to gullible purchasers all kinds of enticing offers. We are sorry to report thousands within our ranks are being duped by the glib tongues of those who offer and solicit in whispers. “Once in a lifetime opportunities” and “Just for you” approaches are unusual no more. Such offerings and deals should be avoided like a plague.

I believe the Lord wants us to become alarmed and concerned when we see the wicked and unscrupulous taking unfair advantage of the weak and uninformed. No Latter-day Saint should exploit another man’s situation, manipulate, lie, steal, cheat, or deceive. Our responsibility is to assist each other in avoiding involvements that can be devastating to our welfare.

-Elder Marvin J. Ashton, from his talk “Give with Wisdom that They may Receive with Dignity”

I’ve seen any number of people express the regret that the brightest minds in our generation are devoted to inventing subtler financial manipulations and more addictive online ad platforms. (more…)

We live in a vast charnel house, a morgue, a knacker’s yard . . .  Dead people, dead animals, odd ends of decaying meat are just laying around, heaped up there, rotting here, a stray piece rolled into that corner.  Its easy to get sick.  A little cut can swell into a great putrid infection.  A little carelessness with your food, you can be puking for  a week.  Its easy to die.

If you want to thrive, you have wear masks at all times, have to be careful where you step, have to follow careful rituals, can’t afford to slack off.  You and your whole house.  You can’t do it by yourself.  Every one with painstaking care when they are outside, at all times.  Everyone following the most stringent procedures when they come back inside the House.

But not enough do it.  Too many live diseased, crippled, and high-mortality lives.  It is difficult not to.  It is very difficult.  And there are agitators who wander through the decay without mask or glove, proclaiming their freedom.  No one else can shout as loud as they can, as they wear no mask.  No one can easily refute their lies that careful living is joyless, because the joy is in the Houses, and no one can go to one, not really, until they have joined it and are washed and cleaned and passed through quarantine.

The strict rules of hygiene are hard, but now with the agitators they are harder.  We can be mocked and attacked for our masks and our gloves.

Some of us wonder why we have be so extreme.  (Those of us are getting the infections and dying off.) Some Houses wonder if they could not spread the word of hygiene better if they weren’t so rigid about it. Masks and washing and stuff appears so alien, we need a hygiene that speaks to today’s youth. After all, the message of hygiene is ultimately a message of health and hope, not despair and grimness. So these Houses wash without washing and ward off disease without warding it off, and perish.

A friend of mine … asked his son what he wanted to be, whom he would want to be like. His son named a member of the ward who lived nearby, a man he had admired for some time. Don drove his son to where the man lived.

As they sat in their automobile in front of his home, they observed the man’s possessions and his way of life. They also discussed his kindness and generosity, his good name and integrity. They discussed the price their neighbor had paid to become what he was: the years of hard work, the schooling and training required, the sacrifices made, the challenges encountered. The affluence and seeming ease with which he now lived had come about as the result of diligent toil toward his righteous goals and the blessings of the Lord.

The son selected other men whom he deemed models of successful and righteous living and learned from a wise father the stories of their lives.

-thus Rex d. Pinegar.  What an excellent model.  Young men in the church should be spending their time with older men.  The primary good of a camp out is usually the conversations over the campfire or while hiking.  It is really surprising how little the young know about the lives of their elders and how much they like to hear those stories when given a chance.

This is a talk I gave at Church.  I had a blast.

The Book of Mormon is for our times.  We all know about the Great and Spacious Building that Lehi saw.  It was towering up in the air and full of people with fancy clothes pointing and laughing and it had no foundation.  It made lots of people lose their way because they were ashamed or wanted to get to it.

The Book of Mormon is for our times.  It means that in our times we have to worry about bullying and mocking from prominent people, about trying to be high status, and fashions.  So let’s talk about that. (more…)

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.

Comments closed to keep the comments all in one place.

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…)

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.

Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? or naked, and clothed thee?

Joseph and Mary would not have asked this question.  They knew when they had done this for Jesus.  They did it in Bethlehem.

Jesus’ helplessness as a little baby made their care for him meaningful.

And because what is done to any is as if done to Christ–“inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren,” he says, and he experiences all of our woes and, I believe, our joys alongside us–our care for our own little children is meaningful to Him also.

People who act need things and people to be acted upon in order for their actions to be meaningful.  These can be the helpless, like infants.  At the other end of the scale, the fully adult and fully divine risen Jesus, full of power, is also someone to be acted upon.  All our actions act upon him, therefore all our acts our meaningful.

It is interesting that our lives seem to go full circle.  The most helpless and the most powerful both occupy something of a similar role in our lives.

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom.”

“Jesus, Lord at his birth.”

“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Once upon a time there was a kingdom so orderly that its laws and institutions had all sorts of branchings and variations, like a healthy, growing tree.

One of those odd little variations was the Christmas King. (more…)