Posts tagged tumblrstake

Have you gone through the Gospel Classics collection yet?

jie-lin:

Does anyone have any favorite talks? Ones you think are absolute must-reads, especially for investigators? I’ve been trying to make my way through talks the internet tells me are particularly important and/or famous, but there are just so many!

This morning I read Jeffrey R. Holland’s “The Other Prodigal” and it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m sure all of you have read it, but if not…. please do yourselves a favor and do so! It’s the kind of thing everyone should read.

There is no more awesome in-my-lifetime temple announcement than the Rome Italy one, thanks to President Monson’s reaction to the reaction of the assembly (here’s the video.)

I say this, BTW, as someone who was actually at the announcement of the first temple to be built in Ohio since Kirtland (and that was my first-ever in-person talk from any general authority.)

Good luck!  If you have trouble concentrating or getting through it (which can definitely happen,) try reading along with the MP3s. (zip file link)

scriptures:

If I read 37 pages a day I will be able to read the Book of Mormon cover to cover by my birthday! Operation scripture study starts today (:

It’s about modesty, in the sense of “keeping your minds, hearts, and eyes on what’s actually important, rather than on showing off/drawing attention to yourself/etc.”  There’s a bit of “respect the gifts your Father gave you” and some “conform to traditional lifestyle strictures” in there, but I definitely think this has more to do with the ostentatiousness factor than anything else.

At least, as far as I can tell; the “conform to traditionalism” thing was born specifically as a response to the deliberate ostentatiousness of the counterculture in the 1950s and beyond, which is where things like “let’s dye our hair blue” really got started in the US.  

This response is also behind the facial hair rules: wearing a beard became a symbol of the counterculture, which also advocated free love, walking around naked, taking copious amounts of drugs, mouthing off to your parents, forcibly occupying academic offices when you disagree with the administration, and about fifty other things that are to varying degrees quite clearly against pretty obvious commandments.

orcarina-of-time:

honestly it bothers me so much how my university won’t let me dye my hair different “unnatural” colors

like really? what is the harm of getting blue hair extensions?

i’ve had colored hair since age 14 and i haven’t felt like i’m breaking any commandments or something

in all seriousness i don’t understand the logic

When I was in YW/YSA, people constantly had trouble coming up with ideas for activities.  Based on posts here on Tumblr, on various blogs, on Facebook, and on email lists, I’m pretty sure this is still a problem.

At the same time, I promise you all that every ward and stake has desperately lonely, ill, unhappy, etc., members, who could really benefit from just a little bit of attention from these auxiliaries and organizations that can’t seem to figure out what to do with themselves for two hours on a Wednesday evening, or how to entertain themselves at the YSA FHE, or what have you.

This constitutes, in my opinion, a tragic situation.

At the very least, please consider an activity consisting of planning future service to those in need: answering questions like who needs our help, what kind of help do they need, what kinds of things can we do for them, and who should we coordinate with.

This, BTW, is what the original Relief Society did: they spent their meetings and activities figuring out how to help people, and actually helping them.  I don’t think we should ask less of ourselves in this age of “I really don’t want to do another Modest Fashion Show, we’ve done two this year already.”

Read more …

I totally was halfway through writing a sentence very much like “And, Daddy, the less you make snide and unsupportable cracks about my church being intolerant or unwelcoming to outsiders, the less I will respond to such cracks with three paragraphs of well-documented details about how welcoming and tolerant we really are.”

And then I deleted it before hitting “send” on the email.

I admittedly left the huge honking paragraphs full of well-documented details about how the church actually works, though.  And I’m kind of mostly not sorry.

(He seriously implied that, of all the church-owned places ON EARTH, the Family History Library in downtown SLC might not let him see things he might need, on the grounds that he’s, and I am quoting here, “a heathen.”  UGH.)

At least, at the speed the Church reader guy read them (which is kind of slow.)

Anyway, if you listened to them continuously during a regular 40-hour workweek, you’d be done in a month.  I listened to the scriptures continuously at that job for maybe… three months?  It’s sort of astounding how little I remember of the text of Psalms and Proverbs, given that.

(Admittedly, I only went through the OT once, at most - I listened to the Book of Mormon at least two or three times.)

This happens to me every single time I listen to the scriptures on MP3.  There was a job I had where I listened to them 8 hours a day (HIGHLY recommended way to get through the Old Testament, BTW,) and I couldn’t say “no” to any question without trying to say “verily, I say unto you, nay.”

mbilmey:

okay, it’s late at night and for some reason my writing started to sound like something from the scriptures

like

“that he might speak to all and be heard”

and

“and was taken and cast into prison”