J. Stapley put up an excellent post the other day asking “Why would prophets leave revelations unwritten?” In it he outlined the sacred visitation President Lorenzo Snow had in the Salt Lake temple from the Lord Jesus Christ. In that interview the Lord gave President Snow very clear and explicit instructions regarding the reorganization of the first presidency. But President Snow never wrote this experience down or shared it with the whole church. We only have knowledge of it because he told some of his descendants of the story and long after his death they revealed it to the church at large. The question is: Why did he choose to keep this experience to himself? (more…)

In the Fall of ’91 I was freshly home from my mission and a transfer student at BYU. I had a couple of items high on my list of priorities: One was to find a smart, funny, gorgeous girlfriend and the other was to start a rock band. (The latter presumably would add to the success of the former.) I succeeded at both by my first month. You know the hottie girlfriend I found as Kristen J and the band I started was called Sam I Am. (more…)

I just bought 72 glasses for $5. Yeah, you heard me, 72 GLASSES-FIVE DOLLARS! Ok, they have Spaghetti Palace written on them and red, white, and green stripes circling the top but they were only 7 cents each. How can you beat that? If you haven’t guessed, I love bargains. It’s not necessarily a good thing with me it’s probably more like a crazy thing. As I’ve said before, we all have our “special needs”. (more…)

7 There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;
8 We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.
(D&C 131:7-8)

In Mormonism we believe all will be resurrected in to physical bodies. Such resurrected beings have to live somewhere in the physical Universe. Where do you suppose that will be? (more…)

Earlier in the year my 3 year old son almost died. My husband and I wrote several posts on it at the time so I’m sure some of you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t; my son fell into our pool during a pool party unnoticed by me or the other parent watching. The timing is unknown but not long after he fell in I got a huge prompting to look for my son. Geoff heard my calls for Quinn and ran out to the pool where he saw him floating face down. He pulled him out, we did CPR on him and he was then flown in a helicopter to the Pediatric NICU at a local hospital. He made a full recovery in a very short time, was released to come home, and has since lived a very normal 3 year old boy kind of life (except now he is an awesome swimmer). (more…)

I’ve been planning to report on how my gig in San Diego went, but I was sort of looking for an angle. When Jeffrey Giliam questioned the reason we have to go through a veil of forgetfulness when we come to earth in the comments of another post I decided I might try to kill two birds with one stone. (more…)

(Part 2 of 2)

After recently bashing the Parable of the Bicycle I figured it was only fair that I expose myself to some bashing in return. Here is an attempt at another analogy that I am formulating basically on the fly. (more…)

Not surprisingly, my comments on the flaws of the now-famous “Parable of the Bicycle” started a discussion of the atonement and what it does or does not do for us. The primary point I was trying to make in that post was that while the atonement frees us from a permanent death and from paying for all of our own sins ourselves, it does not change our natures for us. Only one thing changes our natures and that is our repentance. Our repentance (or changing for the better) is as much enabled by our free agency as it is by the Atonement. (A short discussion of this point was also going on over at Nine Moons). So if ongoing repentance and change is required for us to become like God it seems that the obvious next point should be that it will take a lot more time than this single mortal probation to accomplish that Herculean task. I have my preference on how I think we are given sufficient time to in the eternities, but that is not the point I want to discuss here. I want to focus on how much of exaltation is a result of our works throughout the eternity and how much of it comes from the atonement. (more…)

I once had a next door neighbor who was quite a colorful woman, and that’s putting it nicely. She was in her eighties and still going strong due to her daily health regimen. She would walk every where she went and wouldn’t eat any foods that had sugar in them. Actually, she only ate sugar-free pumpkin pie, a recipe she had developed herself, and her skin was an alarming orange color as a result. (more…)

In the comments of my last post there was some discussion of faith vs. works. Mormons have always been accused of being too works-focused by other Christians. They like to say things like: “Sorry guys, your works don’t save, Jesus does. Works are how we serve Jesus; they are pathetically puny compared to the gift of the atonement, which cannot be earned.” Interestingly, some Mormons like to say these very same things. (more…)

When I was a newlywed and in my final year of college I did an internship at the state mental hospital. Once or twice during my internship we had to do these emergency drills where we all had to pretend we had an earthquake, or there was a nuclear holocaust, or some other such fun event. We had to go to our posts and pretend that we were doing the particular duty we had been assigned. Usually Dave from the janitorial staff had to pretend he was dead from a bonk on the head and we all had to figure out how we could survive with out him. (more…)