Average Joe

I seriously really liked this one.

I love this time of day

when the sky is faintest blue

and the sun lies a pale

yellow-white glow

above the distant trees

 

with shadows fading with the sun

into the coming dusk

and the air lies still 

save barest breeze

which stirs not bough but leaves

 

and its quiet now

when most have gathered in

from the hot, humid of the day

and the rise and fall of insect hums

is all of day's remains 

Thanks for sharing. Definitely worth thinking on.

So I suppose holding a pool with a dollar entry would be right out.

With the bad health of a few others , hopefully we will only sustain one next conference.

yeah, I've been arrested a few times by good cops...the bad ones usually accept the bribe and I go home   

yeah, I've been arrested a few times by good cops...the bad ones usually accept the bribe and I go home   

I must admit that one of the things that always turned me off about MMA is the very high rate of WWF fans among them. (No offense to WWF fans; I know that many MMA practitioners are WWF fans. But I am not.)

yeah, I've been arrested a few times by good cops...the bad ones usually accept the bribe and I go home   

There are many scriptures including those in the book of Isaiah and also D&C, which discuss Zion and a day when She will be redeemed. That day is yet future. Then Enoch will return as will the Lord with all the powers of heaven. What we have now is a type and a shadow. 

It's very sad but I'm not surprised that the movement above misunderstands the Law of Adoption as even Brigham Young didn't understand it either.
In the Joseph Smith History (1:39) we have Moroni quoting the text of Malachi to Joseph but changing the words slightly to say, “And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming.” (JS-H: 1:39)
The law wasn't that you were sealed to some to a man in a father son relationship but that you, like Abraham, have planted within you and then seek out and obtain the promises made to 'The Fathers'. It wasn't a linkup to your own dead who after all are in need of you, rather it was a linkup to those Father's who were worthy and who are already saved. It is welding a direct link between you and them bypassing all of those generations between you to where you are adopted directly into the Family of God.
I feel very inadequate to explain it to others having only come to an understanding of it myself but I know of someone who explains it very well and with great simplicity by use of the scriptures.

Boring waste of time. If you're going to sport fight, do MMA.

yeah, I've been arrested a few times by good cops...the bad ones usually accept the bribe and I go home   

umm...its not: "We would be of one heart and one mind if you'd all just agree with me." Its:  "We would be of one heart and one mind if y'all would just agree with me." 
 
just sayin'

In the words of J. Golden Kimball: “I won't go to Hell for swearing because I repent too damn fast!” 
 
Now that sentence spoken by a general authority will probably offend some and give others a good chuckle. Personally, I try to to keep things civil but PC ain't running in my southern redneck veins. There are disagreements over issues among general authorities. Brigham Young vs Orson Pratt, and Charles W. Penrose vs B. H. Roberts come to mind.  
 
To earnestly contend for the faith is to contend for what you believe according to the light of understanding within you. Everyone has different understandings. J. Golden had soul deep experiences with the Southern States Mission and as best I can recall J. Golden’s comment about the Southern States mission was “the only way to convert the South is to burn it down and baptize for the dead.”
 
I try not to burn the house down in conversations but I don't do PC, I don't do well with people who talk in circles, and I don't sing Kumbaya.  Maybe that's a sign of weakness to some but to me its a mark of character to stand for what you believe in without being phony.

Welcome to the site :)

Central Florida-right near  the woods and swamps. We got lotsa gators n' bullfrogs out here! (we really do! I grew up eatin my fair share of gator tail and frog legs!) That being said-right now we grow food for our family and extended family-lots of tomatoes, green peas, okra. We also have chickens, a couple hogs, looking to get some ducks. It's slow going but we're getting there! I grew up farming and ranching so it's what I love.
 
As far as questions they are basically my own little personal crisis of faith and if anyone can relate I would always love input. I will go ahead and post them in the advice section.
Thanks for the welcome!

I would assert there's quite a difference between a single GA using profanity at the pulpit generations ago, and using that single example to justify rude language directed AT someone in public discourse.
 
As Paul counseled:
"Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers."
 
As to contending for the faith, as you choose to put it, a few verses after the one you've paraphrased, it even says the following, "Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation,..."
 
I certainly don't see how being course or insulting in religious discourse can help us within the church arrive at unity. As mentioned recently in this thread, insults tend to spark pride both in the speaker, and in the hearer, which leads both sides to entrench and defend their own egos and prior opinions. I think we can and should do better.
 
And I basically agree with char713 that unity is only important in the essentials. Or, as one Christian put it centuries ago, "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and, in all things, charity."

Ok, I have not posted many children pictures in some time but now...  Here are some pix of my daughter http://moblalbum.com/18lx43e5c77g/photos/21  Cut and past to a new window and click on the view full album

Before I say too much - I want everyone to know that I do not have all the answers.  I do not know for sure but I do try to consider revelation and empirical evidence.  I honestly believe that there is much more that has gone on in history of the Americas than what many are considering.  I am impressed that all of what we know or think we know through science and revelation is only a small portion of what has been.  The Book of Mormon is only a small part of vast records - a small portion that was revealed for a specific reason - I do not think that the precious pieces we have in the Book of Mormon and revelation to Joseph Smith was for the specific purpose of establishing the origins of American aborigines from the polar north to the southern tip of South America.  It is my understanding that the purpose of all such revelation is to bear witness of Jesus Christ!
 
It is my personal observation that when religious individuals (I hesitate to say religious zealots though I think the term may have some application) want to prove things of science that were never the purpose of the revelations and somehow think they were more faithful for it.  I have no doubt in my mind that many - perhaps almost all with rare exception or more worthy than I am.  I am not even the favored son of my father or mother - nor do I have any intention of convincing anyone that I have any special spiritual attributes or intuitions that in any way make my ideas any better than yours.  But it has long been my impression that those that try to use sacred revelations intended specifically for a most divine intent and remove from that sacred content and use such sacred things to try to influence understanding of things to which are out of the context of their divine intention - are very likely to indulge in speculations that are likely a misdirection and obstruction to discovery of truth.
 
I have discovered empirical evidence that would indicate that aborigines of the Bahamas, east USA, northwest USA and other places in the USA as well as Mexico central America and South America all know of Jesus Christ and may have been visited by him.  I also believe such evidences extend into Japan, Mongolia, India, other places of Asia and Polynesia.   But I am personally not anywhere near thinking I understand what if any of these evidences actually have any relation the Jaredites, Lehites, or any one else mentioned specifically in the Book of Mormon.  It may surprise many to learn for example that the term "robin hood" was not the name of an individual but a description or title of the president of a council of 12 priests with special spiritual "powers" (including divine salvation) that dates far back into antiquities many hundreds of years before the era of "Dark Ages".  Could have the famed "fountain of youth" have connection to the living waters spoken of by Christ and the legendary "3 Nephits"?  I think it possible - but I cannot testify that such things are witnesses of the Book of Mormon or something else.  But at the same time I cannot say that I have revelation that such things have no actual connection to the Book of Mormon or anything else that has been revealed in these last days.
 
Many time I have posted not to resolve an issue but to try to introduce the possibility that there may more to consider than some would consider.  Not because I think I am "right" but because I honestly believe that many are perhaps more concluded in matters to which they ought to be more open.  Is the purpose of education not to open minds to more possibilities?  To take a next step in the concept of line upon line upon line and concept upon concept upon concept?

It appears that once again there are those here who simply refuse to take Joseph Smith at his word. I can't help but marvel at this.
When a person believes that Joseph shouldn't be taken seriously regarding the aboriginal Indians being the "remnant" of Lehi's seed, why should anything else he ever said be taken seriously? The standard for some seems to be, "Joseph was a prophet only when he was acting as such, and he was acting as such only when he agrees with me."
 
In a letter to John Wentworth, Joseph described the rise of the Church and a proclamation of the basic beliefs that would distinguish it from other religious factions. It is from this letter that the Thirteen Articles of Faith are canonized, as well as parts of the First Vision and the Joseph Smith History. It was written in his own words and signed by him personally.
In it he wrote:
"On the evening of the 21st of September, A.D. 1823, while I was praying unto God, and endeavoring to exercise faith in the precious promises of Scripture, on a sudden a light like that of day, only of a far purer and more glorious appearance and brightness, burst into the room…in a moment a personage stood before me surrounded with a glory yet greater than that with which I was already surrounded. This messenger proclaimed himself to be an angel of God, sent to bring the joyful tidings...
...I was informed that I was chosen to be an instrument in the hands of God to bring about some of His purposes in this glorious dispensation.
I was also informed concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country and shown who they were, and from whence they came; a brief sketch of their origin, progress, civilization, laws, governments, of their righteousness and iniquity, and the blessings of God being finally withdrawn from them as a people, was made known unto me.
I was also told where were deposited some plates on which were engraven an abridgment of the records of the ancient Prophets that had existed on this continent.
We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites, of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country."
 
In 1833 Joseph sent a letter to N.C. Saxton, the editor of a Rochester, New York newspaper, which was written (as Joseph later indicated) "by the commandment of God".
In the letter he wrote: "The Book of Mormon is a record of the forefathers of our western tribes of Indians...By it we lean that our western tribes of Indians are descendants from that Joseph that was sold into Egypt, and that the land of America is a promised land unto them...”
 
In this letter Joseph made it just as clear as he did in the Wentworth letter that the remnant of Lehi were the western tribes of Indians in America.
 
By what measure (aside from being a professor at BYU) can any faithful member of the Church dismiss what he said? 

In 1968 [then] Apostle Monson prophesied of the building of the [then] communist East Germany temple.in Freiberg. [see article here]

Geneticist Dr. Donald Yates has been studying Cherokee DNA, particularly genetic markers passed on only from a mother to her children, not passed on along paternal lines.
 
He found what he sees as strong evidence that Cherokee Native Americans have Middle Eastern ancestry—ancestry that cannot be accounted for by modern admixture, but which is rooted in the ancient origins of the people.
Native Americans are conventionally held to fit into a handful of haplogroups. The term haplogroup refers to a genetic population group stemming from a common ancestor. Haplogroup T is not among the haplogroups most geneticists recognize as Native American. Yates, however, said that it is prevalent among the Cherokee and has been for a very long time.
 
He wrote in his report, released earlier this month: “T is the leading haplogroup (23.1 percent), with a frequency on a par with modern-day Egyptians (23.4 percent) and Arabs (24.4 percent). T is thus a defining mark of Cherokee ancestry. … We can safely rule out recent European admixture. As we have discussed again and again, there was no available source for a huge, sudden influx of female-mediated Middle Eastern DNA on the American frontier. Even Sephardic Jews (11 to 14 percent), many of whom were also Indian traders, could hardly have accounted for such admixture.
 
“Moreover, had it occurred in the colonial period or more recently, the diversity, age, and unique characteristics of the T haplotypes would not have yielded the patterns noticed in this paper. Most T’s would have matched people in the Old World and we would simply be looking at an effect of migration. Instead, we have a North American branch of T with peculiar SNPs [single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, a DNA sequence variation] which is evidently a cross-section of a very old population originating in the Old World.”
 
While the level of the T-haplotype found across Yates’s 67 Cherokee test subjects is comparable to those found in Iraqi and Iranian Jews (about 24 percent), it is far higher than that found in nearby regions where one would expect admixture. In neighboring countries in the Middle East, as well as among Jews from other regions, the frequency of T is only 4–14 percent. (read article here)

Don't anthropologists tell us that the earliest archaeological record of mankind in the Americas consists of a site in Pennsylvania dating to about 12-15,000 years ago, and a site in southern Chile dating to about 14,800 years ago?
 
The implications of that are that, under the Bering Strait theory that is commonly accepted in scientific circles, you apparently have humans migrating from the continental US down to nearly the southern tip of South America over, at most, a 2,800 year period, and without a written language or the possibility of assistance/interactions/intermarriages with pre-established populations. 
 
That being the case, it's highly possible--even probable--that descendants of a group capable of communicating in writing and having very good prospects for assistance/interactions/intermarriages with local populations, starting out at roughly the middle of the continent in Mesoamerica, would be able to overcome those same geographical barriers over a period of roughly 2,400 years and swap genetic material with humans virtually everywhere in the hemisphere that human populations existed--including north into what would become the continental US, and south to the very tip of the continent.  So, in other words, that population would have descendants all over North and South America,  which coincidentally (or not), is precisely--if very, very broadly--where modern scriptures and prophets have indicated that biological descendants of Lehi may be found.

Disagree.