BJ64

I can see no scientific way that the entire earth could have been flooded. However I also recognize that God is all powerful so I will not discount the flood as just a story. I will add however that despite what some in the church may have said, I am not a young earth creationist. I believe the earth is billions of years old. When you have an eternity can to create an earth it doesn’t matter how long it takes. However time is not measured to God anyway.

I believe that when you have a dear friend or relative come out as gay you begin to see the issue in a new light and with a new perspective. While I don’t expect the church to change its stance on gay marriage, I am willing to accept that homosexuals should not be denied love, companionship and intimacy just because they don’t live up to our standard and expectation of love and marriage.

I think one of the problems is that when people are taught over and over that sexual sins are next to murder (something that I think may be a misunderstanding of Alma 39:5) it makes discussing with the bishop, something even as benign as masturbation, a thing to be feared and dreaded.

This is a long thread and I can’t comment on everything but I’d like to make a few observations. I was in Brazil on my mission in the mid 80’s. We were expected to do more then 70 hours of proselyting per week. You couldn't do that if you obeyed the rules. We were expected to not eat dinner until we returned home at 9:30. Therefore the mission president required us to break the rule of dinner from 5:00 to 6:00. I basically obeyed the rules but didn’t freak out over getting home a few minutes early or late I remember doing splits with an AP who insisted that we stay on the street until 9:30 and insisted that you could not get blessings if you went home early. He wasn’t concerned about getting home a few minutes late though. I thought, who would want you knocking at their door at 9:25pm? There was a nickname for APs which which was assistente GH which stood for glória dos homens, or glory of men. On my mission we always had tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of non members in our area. The stake where I now live is in a high LDS population area. There are only something like fifteen hundred non members in our stake yet we have three sets of missionaries in our stake and very few baptisms. If the members were doing their duty there would be little need for missionaries in areas where there is a large LDS population. My brother lives in Rexburg, Idaho he told me ther are only two households in his ward that are non member. I haven’t kept in contact with most of the people I baptized but I have kept on contact with one family. We baptized the mother and two young sons. The father was not ready. Another son was born to the family later. This third son went on a mission to a the state of Washington. He returned to Brazil and was married in the temple. One of the older brothers went inactive and was killed in a motorcycle accident. This incident was a wake up call to the father who was then baptized by his youngest son and the family was sealed in the Temple. The son of the oldest brother has also been on a mission and is married in the temple. I can’t take credit for all of this, I just happened to be the missionary who was there when they were ready to hear the gospel, but I feel that even if this family is the only family I baptized which is still active in the church then my mission was a success.