Vort

Trump won.

They were simply trying to illustrate the folly of ignoring his words.

They were simply trying to illustrate the folly of ignoring his words.

They were simply trying to illustrate the folly of ignoring his words.

I agree with your overall point vis a vis the constitution's inspired nature not making it an infallible document; but I'm unconvinced  by the above-stated point.
 We know, from a bona fide revelation, that "what the Lord wished" was for the Saints to gather to, and build Zion in, Jackson County; where at some point a New Jerusalem will be built.  But over the next three decades the Church gathers in a number of non-Jackson-County venues:  Far West, then Nauvoo, then Salt Lake; and finally they're told not to gather at all.  Were these subsequent instructions "uninspired", "non-revelatory" compromises with a fallen world?

I just had to share this because I seriously am so grateful for you men that are willing and able to use your Priesthood in giving blessings when they are needed.
Long story short, a couple of weeks ago I had a mini stroke which caused me to fall completely back down a flight of stairs and hit my head on the concrete slab at the bottom.  That happened on a Saturday in New Hampshire while visiting my daughter.
Once I returned home I attempted to contact people in my ward and ask for a Priesthood blessing.  No one returned my phone call.
On Thursday I was attending my weekly BYU-I Pathway program gathering and I asked a couple of the men in my class if they would be willing to give me a blessing.  They jumped at the chance.  The one that did the annointing does not speak English that well. So he did it in his native tongue of Portuguese.  It was the most beautiful thing ever.  I was in tears as the Spirit was so strong even though I couldn't understand anything he said.  The other man that did the blessing gave the most wonderful blessing.  Let's just say it was probably the most beautiful blessing experience I've ever had.  
I realized once again that night that it doesn't matter what language you speak, the Priesthood works in the same way.
So thank you to you men who remain worthy and are so willing to use your Priesthood in cases like this.
 
 
 
 

james12, as much as I admire your posts, your implication here is dangerously false. It is simply, utterly, completely, 100% wrong.
Let's divide the early American settlers into two broad camps: Those who supported slavery and those who opposed it. Which of these two groups supported the idea of counting slaves as FULL people?
If you said those who opposed slavery, you are wrong.
And which of these two groups wanted to count slaves as ZERO people?
If you said those who supported slavery, you are wrong.
All of the people who we look back on today with admiration as having "enlightened" views on slavery WERE THE ONES WHO OPPOSED COUNTING SLAVES AS FULL PEOPLE.
The reason, of course, is politics. The southern (slave) states wanted their slave population counted toward their total representation in the House. Those who opposed slavery said, in effect, "You can't eat your cake and have it, too. You can't support the institution of slavery and yet turn around and count them as citizens for purposes of representation."  The infamous "Great Compromise" of counting each "Negro slave" as 3/5 of a person was a grudging concession by the North to allow the union to form.
Please, people, don't use the "three-fifths" clause in the Constitution as some sort of proof that our Founding Fathers thought of black people as being worth only three-fifths of a white person. This is utterly false.

People find a way to make time for the things they want to do. Which is probably why I never found much time to read my scriptures. I'd never really understood the scripture, "Feast ye upon the word of Christ," before my mission. I'd always loved the Book of Mormon and the Bible because I knew they contained God's word, but when it came to actually reading them? I wasn't so into that. I've never really been good at math, but I was good enough to know that scriptures + me = boredom. I willingly attended seminary and subsequent activities like mutual and institute. I even took classes on the scriptures during my time in college, but I still couldn't help but sit there slack-jawed when people would express how much they loved reading their scriptures. I wondered if they loved it as in "I love this and could read the scriptures all day, every day" or if they loved it in a "I love working out because it's good...
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Well, that was (the bigger) part of it; but the other part was taxation.  As I understand it, the Constitution envisioned a scenario where the federal government wouldn't tax the people directly; it would just levy a per capita tax against each state government based on that state's population.  So the southern states, while wanting slaves to count as a full person for purposes of representation, also wanted slaves to count as little as possible for purposes of calculating a state's federal tax burden.  And it was the opposite for the free states--they were happy to goose the south's "population" for purposes of tax collection, but not so fond of seeing the southern congressional delegations inflated.  Hence, the 3/5 fraction that (temporarily) settled both controversies.

james12, as much as I admire your posts, your implication here is dangerously false. It is simply, utterly, completely, 100% wrong.
Let's divide the early American settlers into two broad camps: Those who supported slavery and those who opposed it. Which of these two groups supported the idea of counting slaves as FULL people?
If you said those who opposed slavery, you are wrong.
And which of these two groups wanted to count slaves as ZERO people?
If you said those who supported slavery, you are wrong.
All of the people who we look back on today with admiration as having "enlightened" views on slavery WERE THE ONES WHO OPPOSED COUNTING SLAVES AS FULL PEOPLE.
The reason, of course, is politics. The southern (slave) states wanted their slave population counted toward their total representation in the House. Those who opposed slavery said, in effect, "You can't eat your cake and have it, too. You can't support the institution of slavery and yet turn around and count them as citizens for purposes of representation."  The infamous "Great Compromise" of counting each "Negro slave" as 3/5 of a person was a grudging concession by the North to allow the union to form.
Please, people, don't use the "three-fifths" clause in the Constitution as some sort of proof that our Founding Fathers thought of black people as being worth only three-fifths of a white person. This is utterly false.

(Raises hand, hesitantly.)
I think there's a difference between policies that are wrong-headed from the start, versus policies that outlive their usefulness at some future date.  The 3/5 compromise, to me, is a good example of the latter.  As an abstract and absolute statement on the value of human life--obviously it was horrendously flawed.  But without it, abolition may have never happened at all.  It would have been a relatively easy thing for Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia to form their own slaveholding federation quite independently of the "United States" in 1787.  As a means to the end of binding the slave colonies to the free colonies and create an environment where abolition would be socially and politically possible at some future date--the 3/5 compromise worked.

See? You can learn something new every day if you pay attention.

I learned a lot from my mission. Here are just four lessons, one positive, one sort of negative, and then another two positives.

1.       1. I learned fairly early on in my mission, I think when I was still with my first companion, that love is the greatest motivator. There was no particular event or incident that led me to this conclusion. It came about as a result of pondering and reasoning, followed with reflection about the example of the Saviour’s love for us, and my observation of missionaries who appeared to be motivated by a sense of competition and pride. I couldn’t see that anything other than a total and sincere concern for the eternal well being of those whom I was called to serve could bring about the changes that they needed to make in order to be ready for baptism. To serve these people properly, and to really be a help to them, I needed to love them. After coming to this conclusion, I began to pray for a love for the Filipino people and it wasn’t long before the Lord began to bless me with what I had asked for. Its been a long time since my mission finished but this feeling the Lord blessed me with continues to linger. To this day, I continue to have an interest in the Philippines and enjoy associating with Filipinos and every now and then I go back to the Philippines. After my mission when I returned to university, I changed my course and studied anthropology and sociology, with a focus on South-East Asia. As part of my course I ended up doing many assessments that allowed me to explore and further develop my love of the Philippines and the Filipino people. And of course, I ended up marrying a Filipina who I had met on my mission.


 
2.       A day or two before I left for the MTC, I asked for a blessing from a friend. Certain promises were made towards me during that blessing. Perhaps somewhat pridefully, I paid more attention to the promises rather than to the conditions attached to the promises. When I arrived in the mission field, I went about sure in the knowledge that what had been promised would eventually come about. It never did, despite my hopes and expectations. Probably because I did nothing to bring them about. I just did my normal missionary activities and did nothing to earn, or work towards, or make myself ready for, the blessings that had been promised. I arrived home after my mission without having received the promised blessings. I learned from this that when it comes to receiving blessings, it is better to work than to wait.

 
3.       This third lesson is sort of like two combined. It relates to the importance of obedience and hard work. In almost every Zone Conference, the Assistants to the Mission President would provide us with training on what they promised us was a guaranteed successful method of increasing the number of investigators and baptisms. Many of the more experienced missionaries, sometimes including myself, would sort of roll our eyes and say no, this will never work, this is totally impractical, what a dumb idea, I’m not going to do this. But it was clear to me, that those missionaries who did faithfully follow the counsel that had been given, did experience the promised success. All that was needed on their part was faith in the counsel that had been given and a willingness to follow it and do what was required. The counsel might have seemed like a dumb idea, and inconsistent with my own experience and understanding, but when it was faithfully followed, it produced results.

 
4.       Closely related to this is my own experience with the blessings of hard work. I served in a mission that had many areas where tracting was not necessary. However, I ended up serving in some areas where tracting was necessary. When we had no referrals, we would tract, sometimes for weeks at a time. While we rarely got any really good investigators from tracting, when the Lord saw how hard we were trying, and how committed we were, He would often bless us with investigators from unexpected sources. I am convinced that He would not have blessed us with these investigators if we had not shown our commitment through our tracting. The lesson I learned from this is that if we are doing the right thing for the right reason, and working hard, the Lord will bless us, sometimes in ways that are not directly related to our efforts, but are definitely a result of our efforts.
Great topic Carb, its been helpful for me to reflect on this and write down a few thoughts.

For my undergrad zoology degree, I could either help a faculty member to determine the DNA sequence of white rat mitochondria, or else work with a guy who would rent me a couple of cotton beetles to investigate their life cycle. I chose the lessor of two weevils.

LOL at the singular "something".

That itself is a judgmental and pharasaical pronouncement. It's "only" a social rule being broken if you pull out a ham sandwich and a can of Sprite during sacrament meeting, and prop your feet up on the pew in front of you while you snack and chat on your phone. So is that what we want our sacrament meeting to be?
I don't care if you drink Coke, but if you crack open a cold one in the middle of sacrament, you are breaching more than mere social protocol. You are treating lightly a sacred meeting. It's a shameful thing to do. If you want to tut-tut those who disapprove, then whatever. You're disingenuous to pretend there is nothing there to disapprove of.

Stakes might be a good proxy, too. I see the number of stakes increased by 60 from 2014 to 2015. Interestingly, the number of districts decreased by three in that period. Districts of the Church are organized in a mission when there is no stake covering that area, so a decrease in districts suggests that those districts were absorbed into one or more newly created stakes.

Like the Earth, my car tyres are round. But sometimes they are flat. 

Not sure what the expected thing to do is. I'd say this is your wife's call. Does she want to go to a professional motivational seminar for LDS women, or meet privately with a General Authority? For me, the choice would be easy. Maybe it will be equally easy for her.

Wait, which is it? Fixed or broken?

You should be ashamed and humiliated. There were three jokes.

The most important thing I learned on my mission was that Heavenly Father guides this Church and he loves me. That's pretty much it. 
Some odd things I learned. 
- The Church continues to grow despite the missionaries. 
- Not all members share the same beliefs about many things. I remember a heated argument in our apartment with a missionary who believed that the only purpose of sex was to have children and believed having sex with a spouse for any other reason was a sin. 
- There are individuals within the Church that believe the position they hold determines whether or not the Lord accepts them. How many they baptize and how quickly they made Senior, DL, ZL was super important to them. I grew up in an area with few LDS, but seeing this in the field really floored me.
- I'm different then most guys because I don't care about sports and my experiences in the field led me to believe that team sports bring out the worst in people. 

My experience was much like @Carborendum and @DoctorLemon - I'm an introvert, and the missionary experience was nearly pure hell for me; compounded by the fact that it was the first thing I'd tried to do that I didn't really do well.
I think frankly the most valuable experience I had, though, was seeing (pardon the judgy-ness of this) bona fide bad guys working up the mission leadership ladder based on the number of people they were able to schmooze into getting baptized; and then seeing them use their authority to make everyone else's lives miserable.  I finally concluded that often a leadership calling represents God giving someone enough rope to either pull themselves out of the pit they've been mucking about in--or else, to just hang themselves.  It hasn't led me to view LDS leaders with fear and suspicion and paranoia, the way many LDS progressives seem to; but it has enabled me to love and learn from the many, many genuinely good leaders in the Church while still, when necessary, being able to steel my resolve and just say "Okay, Elder/Bishop/President; you go ahead and bluster about the mission/ward/quorum as you see fit, and I'll just stay over here quietly doing my thing knowing that sooner or later you'll be gone and I'll still be here".
Not sure that's the healthiest dynamic in the world to establish vis a vis Church leadership; but it's worked for me.   

You should be ashamed and humiliated. There were three jokes.