The Sublime Roundabout

The plates of Nephi were small and the method of inscribing them on the plates was very cumbersome. Thus Nephi, in handing off the plates to Jacob, instructs him to touch lightly the history of the people but to engrave the heads of important things - like prophecies, preaching, or miracles - on the plates. I wonder about my own journal writing. Am I too into my own history? Do I spend so much time on mundane matters of little consequence? Or do I more appropriately give reasonable background and context for my stories and personal testimonies? I hope I do the latter. I want to be remembered as someone who loved the Lord. I want people to know that I had a testimony of the truthfulness of things. There are many things I have come to know are true. And I want people to know how and why I know they are true. I want to be remembered as someone who loved the scriptures. I want my love for the scriptures to be passed down from me to my children and to future generations that may come. I hop...

Some of the greatest doctrines ever given From our Father above who lives in Heaven Are written so simply and pure And the simplest of all is to endure We trudge through this existence each day And suffer what reverses come our way We fight with despair and trial and sin And are often tempted to just give in But God has not left us by ourselves Nor placed our lives upon His shelves To be glanced at on occasion But reaches us with the Spirit's persuasion He tells us that we must pray to Him To love Him and forsake all sin In humbling ourselves in this way He promises to be with us through our days He also tells us that we must feast Upon His word - daily, at least For therein can we find the power That will sustain us hour by hour We may feel that we are alone and weak We dare not pray or ask or seek We doubt ourselves and our poor state We fear, we fail, we learn to hate But these things are not from God Who raises us from this mortal sod To a higher sphere of love and grace And ho...

I once asked my father why more people did not join our Church. Clearly, we have the most pure gospel. We have a living prophet to guide us. We have more testimonies of the divinity of Christ. We teach that we can have a personal relationship with God and that He will speak to/with us. We are given opportunities to lead and serve. We are given blessings that are available no where else, and we extend these blessings and opportunities to everyone, including our ancestors. We have a Church that encompasses ALL truth, not just what we know now or may know in the future. And we are given the chance to enter covenants that will seal our families together for the eternities in the Celestial Kingdom of our Father. If our religion, our gospel represents such an amazing path to joy in this life and exaltation in the life to come, why don't people flock to our Church now? My dad said that I should think about it this way: imagine you like to eat hot dogs. They are good. They fill you up. The...

We have been warned repeatedly that the last days would be perilous. I'm afraid that we are firmly bogged down in these perilous times. There is much in the world that is firmly in the control of the Adversary. But the promises to those who will repent are strong and reliable. If we will come to rely on the Lord and His mighty arm, we will be OK regardless of everything else that's going on in the world. We will overcome. The Adversary's methods have become refined of late. Gone are the visible idols of Baal and Moloch. Gone are the golden calves and the marbled halls built to a pantheon of gods. Gone are the very obvious devilish and damning practices - they were designed to deceive the weak and they worked for a season. Now he seeks to deceive the strong and he must change tactics. Now we have Satan whispering in people's ears that there is no Satan. He tells people that a little sin is OK - God loves us and will save all of us! How can we doubt God's love?!? He t...

Is seeing really believing? I wonder. We live in an age of visual manipulation. Photoshop, clever video editing, and computer generated images can make anything seem real, from things that are mundane to things that are unbelievable. Virtual wars can be fought, treasures won, women enhanced, men made to do strange and miraculous things... We also live in an age of information manipulation (say that 10x fast!). People distort truths or report selectively in an effort to deceive or to promote a certain agenda. Surely this has been happening since the dawn of time, but it seems to be more prevalent now - perhaps because our individual access to information is greater now than it has ever been. I recently visited a friends home. He had purchased a set of encyclopedias dated 1975. He got them mainly as a curiosity and to fill up space on his bookshelf - they make your bookshelf look more scholarly! I perused the "A" volume and was interested to note that asbestos was listed. Follo...

What would you do for a dollar? For a million dollars? For a comfortable and convenient lifestyle? What if you could do it all in the name of God? In the name of Him who gave everything for peace and lived His life in poverty? What would you do? Would you say you had been called by God Himself to bring a message of prosperity? Would you say that you could forgive sins if the donation plate is full? Would you say that the work suffers because people are not paying enough tithing? Would you preach peace and love in a time when you should be preaching repentance and fear of the Lord, all in the name of receiving more money - in fear of your potential loss of income? Would you adapt your sermons to accommodate those whose chosen lifestyles are expressly repugnant to the Son of Man in an effort to appeal to a wider audience? Would you relax your morals and standards to the point where good becomes evil and evil good? There is much good that is done by other churches around the world. I woul...

The purpose of the Book of Mormon is to testify of Christ and bring souls to Him. Who can deny this who have read the book and pondered it's sacred import? My life has been blessed and I have come to know Christ through reading this holy book. I know that Christ lives and loves us. I know He is our Savior and Redeemer. I know that through His merits alone we are saved from an eternity of misery and woe. I know that He died for us. I know He lives for us, advocating our cause before the throne of the Almighty. He is the author and finisher of our faith. He is the Master, the Son of God, the great Jehovah. Blessed and praised be His Holy Name forever and ever! To Him be all glory, honor, and majesty to an eternal day! It is the atonement of Christ - His suffering and subsequent victory - that makes all of this possible. His grace is sufficient for all after all we can do. And make no mistake - we must do all in our power. But through Him and by Him we can and will overcome. I love H...

Lucifer is fallen. Lucifer is, of course, one of the names we give the adversary of our souls. He is also referred to as Satan (from the Hebrew shaitan meaning adversary or accuser), the devil (from the Latin diabolus which is from the Greek diabolos meaning slanderer) or various and sundry other names. I like the above mentioned things - as Lucifer, he was near to God and an angel of light who was cast out of our Father's presence for rebellion; and as the Satan or the devil, he is the main destroyer of our peace and confidence and liberty. He is miserable, and seeks that we all shall be miserable like him. It is against him that we fight on a daily basis - not some unseen or unknown entity, but against a very real and personal being who was in the presence of our Father and was cast out. It was the great battle in Heaven before we came here that was fought between Michael and his angels and the devil and his. The description is instructive: Revelation Chapter 12 - 7 And there was...

Malachi gets quoted for saying that the hearts of the children will turn to their fathers (ancestors). Joseph Smith said that Moroni quoted the verse differently, stating that the hearts of the children will turn to the promises made to their fathers. What are these promises? Abraham was promised incredible things. He was promised that if he lived worthy he would have posterity like the sands of the sea, and that in his seed the entire world would be blessed. We usually think of this as meaning through the gospel and the spreading of the missionary work. I think that's true, but I also think that it is literally true, too. Through the power and authority of the Priesthood, worthy members of the Church can bless others, which blessings are literal and not figurative. Abraham was also known as the friend of God. I can think of no greater blessing that may be attained or sought in this life. How did Abraham qualify for these blessings? Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son for ...

Destruction is immanent. What a great name! I think I'm going to change my name. You can call be "Hash" for short... ;-) So who cares about the political warnings given to ignorant and unreceptive leaders 3000 years ago? Are they of any relevance to us today? Why bother studying them? Is destruction any less immanent now than it was for Jerusalem? Are we not facing the same kinds of concerns and issues today that they faced then? Are there lessons that can be learned from the situation? The answer seems to lie in the fact that all of these things are cyclical - the names change, and the scale of operations changes, but the lessons and the applicability remains the same. We are a people who tend to want to trust each other more than we want to trust God. Which is ironic, because God is really the only one worthy of our complete trust. But it's true - Stalin trusted Hitler, Chamberlain trusted Hitler, the Cambodians trusted Pol Pot, etc, etc, etc. The point of all of th...

There was an old Indian Chief who had three wives. He loved his wives, and to prove it, he gave them each a special animal hide on which to sleep. The first he gave a bear hide, the second he gave an elk hide, and the third wife got a hippopotamus hide. The first two wives wanted nothing to do with this ridiculous hide and the squaw who sat on it, so they moved their hides to the opposite side of the tepee... In due course, sons were born to each of these women. The son of the squaw of the bear hide joined the son of the squaw of the elk hide in tormenting the other young man. Eventually, this poor picked on young man complained to his mother. His mother, enraged, thrashed the other two young men severely... The moral: The squaw of the hippopotamus hide is equal to the sons of the squaws of the opposite hides. (Thanks for that one, grandpa! It always makes me smile!)

Isaiah had the rare privilege of seeing God on His Throne. Immediately he speaks of his unworthiness. I can relate to that. I almost always feel unworthy of the presence of the Lord. I feel His presence in many ways in my life, the blessings I have received from Him are immeasurable. But I am grateful and humbled by His attention... Isaiah receives a commission from the Lord to go forth and share the gospel. He is told to make people's hearts heavy and ears deaf and eyes blind. I wonder about this. It seems that conversion to the Lord, which is the object and design of the work of His servants, is not a logical, empirical thing. We cannot quantify the Spirit. It is real, and it is discernible. But it is not something you can measure or really even describe. The feelings have been likened to a burning in the bosom, or a still small voice, or a warm, fuzzy feeling. All of this are accurate, but incomplete. When my spirit, that eternal side of my nature, the "me" in me, feel...

For some reason this simile has always made me smile. It's not in a particularly cheerful section of the Book of Mormon: Isaiah's warnings about excessive lifestyles and living continue to ring true and valid to this day. But the idea that there are "round tires like the moon" that will be taken away, thus removing the arrogance and pride from the daughters of Zion... Remember, the daughters of Zion are the daughters of the covenant. They are those who are supposed to be righteous and really to know better than to adorn themselves in this way. But it appears that even the best among us are susceptible to the siren call of worldliness. This seems to be a major concern for Isaiah. He mentions that through the skillful labors of his own hands, man has created for himself a substitute for the real God, which is the LORD (Christ). Jeremiah, speaking some 200 years later, comes to the same conclusion, pointing out that it is the worship of idols (and all that that implies) ...

One of the recurring themes of the Book of Mormon is the idea that the land in which we live is a choice land above all other lands. Growing up, this was a source of pride to me - hey, I'm an American and proud to be one! Now that I am more seasoned, I realize that it's the LAND that is blessed, and that the people on the land are blessed only if they will follow the God of this land, who is Christ. And since Christ is God of the entire universe, it seems just a little spurious to me to think that those in other lands who choose to follow Christ are not blessed equally. Having married someone from another country my eyes are open to that in ways that they were not before. And having spent time in a country that generally likes the United States and yet has some significant issues with the foreign policies and things that we are doing here was also very eye-opening. Couple of things to note: 1. The land is blessed to be a land of freedom and superiority, conditioned on if the pe...