Paradigms

A few quotes have been on my mind lately. The first is from Hugh Nibley: “History is all hindsight; it is a sizing up, a way of looking at things. It is not what happened or how things really were,…

I think we’ve all been there. You may have a good home/visiting teacher now, but I think we’ve all had no-shows and probably for most of our experience in the Church. Conversely, many of us have probably had experience being…

After returning from my full-time missionary service, I started work with my father building decks down on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I remember standing there one morning and thinking about how life was now entering a new phase and…

Back in 2011, I wrote a post about the Word of Wisdom. I had some things that were bothering me personally and decided to face them head on. I did a lot of study and research combined with soul-searching and…

I wrote most of this back in 2014 but haven’t published it until now. In fact there was a lot more history before and after this but I feel like this one experience was a big turning point for me. Few…

We live in a world with billions of people and each one of us has ideas on how things should be. Whether it is how governments should operate to where the family should eat for dinner, we all have different ideas….

There was once a craftsman who built a fine house. As the years went by it served him well until one day he noticed a crack along the ceiling. He was disappointed to see this flaw in his otherwise exemplary…

OneClimbs commenter and general all-around good guy Richard Nobbe left a comment on one of my recent posts and I thought he had a host of excellent questions. I was intrigued with the challenge of providing some of my own…

It’s happened to me several times, in fact, the first 17 years of my life were lived without any real sense of the presence of God; at least that was my perception at the time. Time went on, and God did manifest…

“So many people I hear say: “Oh, if I just make it to heaven I’ll be secure,” and I always ask them, “Where was the devil when he fell?” It’s not heaven that will make you secure, my friend, it’s…

Every single one of us, right at this minute, believes things that are wrong. There is an idea that you cherish, some way of seeing the world that seems so clear to you, but it is wrong, or at best,…

The following was a talk I gave in my sacrament meeting for Mother’s Day, May 10, 2015. Today I want to address motherhood as it relates to paradoxes, mother Eve in the garden, scriptural themes that are given the female…

I have found this to be a very peaceful way to truth. Contention often arises when prideful individuals play intellectual ‘king of the hill’ and declare things about God, heaven and earth that they may only believe and not really…

What if we modernized Korihor’s philosophies and compared them to the kinds of things we hear people saying today? For morning study a couple days ago, I started off reading about the sons of Mosiah but then felt like reading about…

“One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong, but generally more…

I transcribed the following from the third part of an interview with Terryl Givens on the Mormon Stories podcast. I can’t remember how I came across this interview, but I remember seeing Terryl Givens’ name which immediately drew my interest. I’m a…

Receiving truth “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may.” (Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 199) The best way to obtain truth and wisdom “The best way…

Every fast and testimony meeting I can’t help but ponder what people mean by what they say. I suppose that only the person themselves really understands what they are trying to do by going up to the stand and speaking. One person…

I recently started the Book of Mormon over again in audio form while I’m at work. Chapter 6 of 1 Nephi caught my attention and led to some significant thoughts about agency. And it mattereth not to me that I…

After crying out “O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto…