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Hi Comp, My son is in a similar position as your son, and I am a little late in viewing this thread. My son was out 9 months when he returned home due to Covid. He was originally serving in Mexico. In the beginning I told my wife that come January if he hasn't been reassigned back to Mexico then he will most likely stay where he is currently serving. Come January my son was still in his current serving area, while missionaries he was on the plane with going home are now back in their original mission. In January, the moment my wife told me that he was starting to show some despondency -- which is perfectly normal and understandable. I sent him an email specifying the reasoning I think he has remained, and it is really simple. Think about missionaries when it first started. Any missionary with less than 6 months (I think it was 6 months) were sent home, there mission ended. I believe it is the same. All the missionaries that are now back in their original mission have more than 6 months. My son has less than six months at that time. It is more profitable (not necessarily money, but more as time and service of missionary). If a missionary has less than six months is it more wise to keep them where they are -- the answer is yes. I'm sorry for your son, it is heart breaking for these young men/women. My son was just getting into the language, he was so looking forward to going back to Mexico. Remember, the Church did give the option to wait and then be reassigned back to their original mission. My son, didn't want to wait, and with not waiting came the possibility of not going back. He is now good, he understands, and is working where he stands. Wish the best for your son, especially in overcoming any form of despondency and disappointment, which is all too real for someone in that circumstance.

Orson Pratt

@JohnsonJones have you considered that many of us who made our decisions to not receive mRNA spike protein vaccines under emergency use authorizations made those decisions long before President Nelson spoke on the subject? And have you also considered that many of us regularly exercise and maintain good health habits, have worn our masks, have continued to take, or started to take vitamin D, have avoided large groups and visits with family, have used disinfectant religiously (no pun intended), etc., And don't these things count toward "Do[ing] all [we] can to bring COVID numbers down in your area so that your temple opportunities can increase."? While I respect your viewpoint, I do not understand your seemingly singular focus on interpreting President Nelson's recommendation for vaccination as a mandate that divides the faithful from the goats. I respectfully ask some questions to ponder - 1. Do we need to get the same exact vaccine as President Nelson in order to be exactly obedient? Surely to be fully obedient we would need to take no other COVID vaccine other than the one he took right? Or is there room for interpretation on which vaccine to receive and when to receive it? 2. Since President Nelson did not specify which COVID vaccine to receive, is it OK if those people who have already contracted COVID and enjoy a natural vaccinated state with active antibodies to not receive an additional vaccine? Or is there room for interpretation in this example as well? 3. Are people that have significant co-morbidities such as obesity, but who get a COVID shot, more obedient that the healthy person who chooses not to get a COVID shot at this time? Or is there room for interpretation in this example too? I love President Nelson, and I am so grateful for all he has done in his lifetime to serve Jesus Christ and His Church. I'm grateful he has spoken on this issue, even if I have chosen to patiently wait. I respect his medical career and knowledge and I feel from a public relations standpoint that he has absolutely done the right thing. But I also have no doubt that if we sat down and discussed the matter together he would completely and lovingly respect my choice. Will I be able to serve another foreign mission without the COVID shot? Not presently. But it's OK if I serve state-side. Is it possible that Church policy may change and I will no longer be able to serve in the Temple without having the COVID vaccine? Yes, it's possible. And if that happens I will serve in other places. And is it possible that this may all go away just like the original SARS virus did and we go back to normal and COVID vaccines are no longer required? Of course, so I'm not sure why we need to panic, criticize, or goad others into our viewpoints. In 2000 my younger brother died from leukemia. I watched him suffer through long, intense, and grueling pain for many months prior to his graduation from this life. He made a personal choice to receive those treatments despite a very small chance of success. I would have chosen differently, and yet both decisions would have been right. Imagine that?

It seems to me that there are two kings of mass shootings taking place in our society. One is the result of terrorism and the other are mental health issues. I think the greater problem of the two seem to be much more towards the mental health issues. I am not suggesting that mental health is the issue or that we should be concerned about those that require mental assistance. But I am concerned that the public is not getting the information needed to move towards a solution. What I think is missing is a couple of critical areas. The first is a medication history. I would like to know if any prescribed medications are contributing or connected to the problem. Not just while a person is on certain medications but if they go off certain medications when performing acts of assault. I would also like to know if there was a possibility of mixing prescription drugs with non-prescription drugs as well as the general use of non-prescription drugs. The problem is that there are laws that prevent the disclosure of medical history. These laws were primarily passed to keep individuals infected with various inflictions (AIDS) from being publicly discriminated against. Perhaps it is time to loosen HIPAA restrictions - both following mass shootings situations as well as preventing them. The Traveler

The tattoo sure looks more like Dumbledore than Pratt to me.

Well, we already knew that. That goes without saying.

Back to primary for you, young man!

The current topic in this thread tells me something about myself. Because I volunteered for a phase 3 trial and got the vaccine in August, that means I am so obviously superiorly righteous, that I was doing with the prophet urged before he even urged it. Therefore, I am more righteous than everyone else here. I am also at least twice as humble as everyone else.

Hey, we were just happy we got you to wear a shirt at all. You spent so much time trying to convince us you were righteous with your tattoos…

Who indeed? George Rose: he also played Alfie Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady. (I bet he was great, though I've only ever seen the movie version with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison*.) This clip has him in, together with Tony Azito as the police sergeant. I love his reaction every time his men start melting away at the thought of meeting the pirates! Pirates of Penzance - When the Foeman bares his Steel (Tarantara) - YouTube * I'm told that Rex Harrison was something of a git in real life, which disappoints me because I've always loved his screen persona. Audrey Hepburn is my all-time goddess. I used to have a huge poster of her on the wall over my desk at work.

I love that musical, but I'm not remembering the police sergeant. I do remember the Modern Major General, though. Who can forget him?

This confuses me. Wouldn't the prophets counsel at least lead to reconsidering your decision? Honestly, it seems to me that most members who are deciding not to get the vaccine did this. They didn't like the CDC/WHO/etc guidelines and the government mandates. They made up their minds to fight against those, and that choice can now be in conflict with following church leaders. I'm not saying this is every case or even any of them, but it's the impression I get from most. I can fully get behind this. The vaccine isn't the only thing we can to do reduce the spread.

Thank you so much

Thank you for your love and prayers, truly. I came here because there's no one I want to talk to about it in person, at this time. And you have been very kind and helpful. Thank you for trying to understand. When it comes to details about the hard time he's had, I either don't actually know anything myself or don't want to share personal info about him. It feels too vulnerable to post publicly, so I was hoping to keep it vague. Thanks again.

Seems like such l/r confusion with the word "pirate" was at the heart of the backstory for The Pirates of Penzance.

Heh... I was studying and praying about the vaccine before our Prophet said anything. I had reservations. Our Prophet said what he said and showed his example. And that answered my study part and I signed up to get vaccinated. But my prayers did not end, having made my choice I took it to the Lord, saying if this be right, great then it will happen. If it is not, then stop me. The Lord answered that prayer by stopping me. I do not present this as an answer for any one else on this issue. Personal revelation is just that, personal. It could be simply a timing issue that caused him to stop me, I do not know, am still working on figuring that out. But I get really tired of self righteous blowhards, who think to judge my faithfulness or willingness to obey the Lord and his Prophet because I am not doing what they think I should be doing.

Another good article, from therapist Jeff Bennion: It is helpful for us to remember what therapists can do and what they can’t do. After all the ongoing abuses committed by the profession, after exposures of fraudulent research, and foundational studies retracted for failure to replicate, it is long past time we show a little intellectual humility in our “expert” pronouncements. It’s my job to help the client on the couch get better. It’s not my job as a therapist to tell “the Patriarchy,” or the Church, how they’re wrong and that its doctrines, beliefs, and practices must change. It’s also profoundly disempowering to tell our clients, as Helfer and others seem prone to do, that they don’t need to change, but that the rest of the world does. We do our best work when we help clients build resilience and deal with the world as it is. While both clients and therapists can be agents of change in the world at large, our own healing cannot be held hostage waiting for 16 million Latter-day Saints to agree with us, not to mention most of the non-western world.

One of the main scientific models of prediction is called Chaos Theory. The problem with chaos theory predictions (modeling) is that the model will only respond based on known and included parameters. If there is any unknown parameter, even a seemingly insignificant parameter - the results are uncertain. This uncertainty is sometimes called the butterfly effect. But even such considerations are not necessarily conclusive. It all boils down to - we do not know what we do not know. We often think in terms of cause and effect or black and white. But doing so often introduces contradictions. It is my personal belief that a contradiction only means that we do not have all the necessary data. Your global temperature verses number of pirates is a possible example in that the number of pirates may not be a cause of increasing global temperatures but increasing global temperatures may be a contributing cause of piracy. The same could apply to violent pyrography. Another way of looking at this is the concept of treating a symptom instead of the cause. But then - with the example of a headache - treating the symptom may be an acceptable temporary solution. Though it is quite obvious that the reason for the headache was not the absents of medication - aspirin or whatever. Getting back to the op of this thread - are we alive? We are now getting back to the basics of knowledge. It has been suggested that there are different kinds of knowledge - and I personally align my thinking to such. It seems to me that there are at least two kinds of knowledge empirical and spiritual. Empirical is the easy kind to define and some have concluded that it is the only kind. I admit that such arguments are quite sound but the problem is demonstrated by this thread - obviously something is missing. I believe the other kind of knowledge is spiritual. The nature of spiritual knowledge is most difficult to define. Examples are concepts of justice, freedom, liberty and even right verses wrong. Though we deal (sometimes poorly) with "spiritual" issues that seem to defy conclusive definitions we all still hold to them - especially in social settings. Perhaps the dealing with uncertainty is a primary factor that defines life - or perhaps what is intelligent life. The Traveler

Friend, your son was not called to go see the world and gain valuable personal experience sure to result in endless entertaining anecdotes and sacrament meeting talk fodder for the rest of his life. Your son was called by an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ to be Christ's representative to a dying world—to preach the Good News of his atonement, which brings us redemption, salvation, and even eternal life. I really think that both you and he are focusing on the wrong things. Again, I'm not without sympathy. But at some point, a man who would follow the Good Shepherd has to drop his preconceptions and personal demands, and simply kneel in submission before Christ. I'll go where you want me to go, dear Lord, over mountain, or plain, or sea. I'll say what you want me to say, dear Lord; I'll be what you want me to be. The lack of contact from your stake president about your son's emotional condition seems strange to me. You might consider having a serious conversation with your stake president to find out what's going on there. As for communication with the mission president, that occasionally occurs when a missionary is having trouble, but in general it does not. I don't believe my parents ever spoke with any of my three mission presidents at any time. I have been where you are now. In the end, your son needs to know that it's his decision and that you will support and love him in any case. But your son probably needs to hear your encouragement and your faith that things will turn out for the best. Let me get a little bit personal here. My three oldest sons have all served missions, two domestically and one in a distant country. Unlike their father, who loved his mission and breezed through it largely untouched by anything really bad (and, perhaps not coincidentally, largely ineffective in preaching the gospel), all three of those sons had real struggles. All three seriously considered coming home. One even received medication and counseling for depression while in the field. All three ended up staying, even the one whose mission president unfairly and wrongly misjudged his character—and, to be fair, who apologized to his face when he finished his mission. I think that none of the three looks back on his mission with fondness as a fun or exciting experience, but all three look back with satisfaction at the good work they accomplished and the lives they helped, both of their investigators and of their companions. I believe all three are grateful for their experiences, even though it cost them tens of thousands of their own dollars and put them two years behind in their educational and professional efforts. From the experiences of my sons, I have become convinced that it's entirely possible to struggle during your mission, to have hard and even traumatic experiences, to have to grit your teeth and endure much of the time, and still come off your mission a better, stronger, more whole man than you were when you went out. For what it's worth.

That actually can have a pretty large effect on whether they get assigned to certain locations or not.

One of the latest mass shootings hit VERY close to home for me- metaphorically and literally. The shooter lived within a quarter mile of me, I delivered newspapers to his house growing up, he was on the same sports team as my husband (years removed in time), my best friend drove the shooter's bus to events, the shooting place was within a mile of my grandma's house at her grocery store (obviously I've been there too). I listened to all of the "let's defund the police!" local news last summer, and now an officer is dead and many others. I... have a lot of thoughts on this, which I will have to figure out how to write down later today. No, the reaction shouldn't be "DC needs tighter gun control!"- such really seems to be ignoring the very real pain the local community is feeling. These aren't about the need for more regulation, they aren't about race, they aren't about drugs, they.... they're about real people really really hurting, before and after.

Oh indeed. If you ever want to know if someone talking about gun control is serious and worth listening to, ask them how their proposals will help things in St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. If they do not have a ready answer, you can tell they are idea-heavy and information-light. Zeal without knowledge is useless at least, dangerous and destructive at most.

I just read this recently. Many Americans have lost sight of the truth that righteousness is the one indispensable ingredient to liberty. Perhaps as never before in our history is our nation collectively deserving of the indictment pronounced by Abraham Lincoln in these words: “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. “It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the Offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness . . . Yes, I repeat, righteousness is an indispensable ingredient to liberty. Virtuous people elect wise and good representatives. Good representatives make good laws and then wisely administer them. This tends to preserve righteousness. An unvirtuous citizenry tend to elect representatives who will pander to their covetous lustings. The burden of self-government is a great responsibility. It calls for restraint, righteousness, responsibility, and reliance upon God. It is a truism from the Lord that “when the wicked rule the people mourn.” (Doc. & Cov. 98:9.) -- The Constitution — A Glorious Standard, Ezra Taft Benson, 1976 April General Conference

In my research I have found these shootings are extremely rare and sensationalized by the mainstream media. It is no secret they want our 2nd Amendment liberties gone sp they can exert more unrighteous authority on us. Secret combinations are at work in our highest parts of our government trying to implement tyranny on the general population at the present time. These people would like to control all private property in the United States. This is difficult to do when the general population is armed with firearms especially long guns.

I've been researching mass shooting incidents in the US for decades now. What I keep finding is that in the vast majority of cases, not only was the shooter mentally ill, there were warning signs that were ignored. Bell Tower Sniper? He himself wrote in his journal that something was wrong with him, but he refused to get help. Turns out he had a massive brain tumor. "I Don't Like Mondays"? She was disturbed and possibly on illegal drugs. No one noticed. Columbine? The kids were being treated by a mental health expert who prescribed them medication that was *not* approved for use in minors due to... risk of psychotic episodes. Couple this with the parents not paying attention even as the kids were building *bombs* at home, and the inevitable happened. And so on, and so on, and so on. There was a warning sign at some point, but it got ignored. The guy here in Texas who shot up a church to get back at his ex-wife? He was dishonorably discharged from the military for domestic violence. The military was supposed to have reported this to the FBI, but they never did and so his name never went on the official registry; this is why he was able to get the weapon he got. It's as much about people not acting on what was right in front of them as it is about the weapons themselves.

I would also add that a major catalyst for mass shootings is broken families. I have heard a few times that the large majority of mass shootings are done by people who grew up without a father figure or an abusive father. As the US starts moving further away from the nuclear family, this problem will continue to grow

Actually @pam calls it her “awkward stage” thank you very much. And she is quite sensitive about it.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Dude, that's awesome. And who gave you this picture!?!!?!? Was it Melissa?

When Noah was commanded to build an Ark, most of the rest of the world appears not to have been commanded. He DID warn them and probably asked them to do certain things. Instead they mocked him. When the Israelites were hit by a plague of Snakes, Moses built a bronze snake that those who looked at it would live. It was an easy thing, but many mocked him. When Joseph F. Smith stopped Polygamy in the Church, it was not with the word, command, but otherwise for the Manifesto says... Does this mean we are under no demand to refrain from Polygamy? It was given to great mockery of him and other Church leaders at the time and a schism occurred which has many of those who are called Members as different sects to this day. At the time Wilford Woodruff gave it there were many who did not undertake this advice and continued as they were. Even under Joseph F. Smith this continued for awhile. In our modern time we have been asked to have food storage. Many have not followed this advice, and indeed many have not suffered for NOT following the advice of the church...but does that mean we should disregard it? More recently, the Family Proclamation says Once again, it does not say we are commanded. Many do take the words of warning and requests seriously though. Most recently, the Prophet, Russell M. Nelson stated... In this, it actually is stronger than an urge, request, or even simply asking. It is a statement. The question is, do we follow the prophet. Once again, the above item is NOT a question, it is NOT a simple maybe, it is a statement from the Prophet regarding when our temples will be reopened. We have been blessed thus far and hopefully will continue to be blessed, but what happens when many Saints blatantly encourage others to NOT follow the Prophet? I am following that advice which is why I am here asking people to actually LISTEN and FOLLOW what he has asked us. I'm not saying you need to immediately go out and get vaccinated if personally you have gotten told not to, but the discussion should NOT BE how or why one should disregard the statement from our last conference, but HOW WE CAN FOLLOW this advice to do all we can to bring the COVID numbers down in our areas and reopen the temples. Some may already have their temples open full time as they were before the pandemic, but most do not. The non-concern with getting the temples back to full operating norms and doing what we can to get there is concerning. If you feel that this is a matter of prayer for confirmation, I can understand that, but ONLY if you have not persecuted others who have had questions in the past and called them all sorts of names when they faced similar issues with the Church. Those who have asked for others to be banned due to not following the religion of worshiping the Conservative party politics of the United States have NO PLACE to now contest the statements of the prophet and argue against them. Ironically (not all, but a majority) of those who are now fighting against the words of the prophet are the same ones who have asked for posts to be deleted, others to be banned, and showed no sympathy to those who had difficulties in the past. It is a double standard that has caused this forum over the past year or two to become more of a FAR RIGHT conservative talking forum rather than one that discusses the facets of the Church, and even now is promoting a far right veiwpoint over that of following the words of our prophet from the last conference. This should be of concern, because this is NOT a complex issue. We are discussing the words of the Prophet from the last conference. Why should I need to be on the defensive to support his statements or talk about them on a forum which is supposedly here for members to discuss this type of thing simply because it is not a popular thing among the far right? (and to be clear, it is a far right issue, as I do not think most members actually have problems with what the Prophet has asked us to try to do, even those who are conservative. Most WANT the temples to reopen, and if we have to do everything in our power to reduce the Covid Numbers, than that's what I think most are trying to do these days).