Devotional – Page 5 – Nauvoo Neighbor

Earrings, Scrupulosity, and Love

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 368th week, and we’re covering the Saturday morning session of the October 1999 General Conference.

It’s been a long time since I started this General Conference Odyssey way back in 2015. I stuck with it really well through about 2019 and had another good chunk in 2020, but I missed pretty much all of 2021 and 2022. One of my goals is to stick with it again throughout 2023. Eventually I’ll go back and fill in all the gaps, but I don’t know when that will be.

Church Spending

Church finances are often a point of criticism. But should they be?

In thinking about church finances, it’s helpful to have a basic grasp of tools large organizations use to make complex decisions around investments and spending. In this presentation we look at one of those tools, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, and think about how organizations bring maturity to their decision making processes.

The important question to consider is, what methodologies are the church’s critics employing? And are those superior to frameworks like AHP?

Are Latter-day Saint Missions Traumatic?

This was a challenging topic to discuss, addressing some current negative thinking around our missionary program.

YouTube narration here:

Responding to the SL Tribune’s Mischaracterization of my Testimony on Conversion Therapy

A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune unclearly characterized my comments to the Utah State Legislature on August 18 regarding conversion therapy. I would like to clarify them. While I oppose the current version of the conversion therapy rule, I do not support conversion therapy. As a therapist, I don’t believe changing sexual orientation is an appropriate goal in therapy. But I oppose the conversion therapy rule because not only does it forbid these kinds of attempts to change sexual orientation, but also brands a much broader range of interventions as “conversion therapy,” including assisting clients who wish to manage their sexual behaviors.

Reflecting on Van Halen

A couple of weeks ago on a work trip I spent time with a coworker friend I hadn’t seen since before COVID; he’s a guitarist, and in our catching up we talked about the sadness of losing Eddie Van Halen in 2020.

Getting Along < Shared Belief < Conversion

The Book of Mormon is an absolutely remarkable text of religious psychology. At various points in the text, certain terms are used to make fine distinctions between very specific states of mind and heart. And the consequences of these states of mind and heart are spelled out in terms of social trends in communities.

When I say I know the Book of Mormon is true, part of that statement includes my conviction that it conveys real history of real people and real phenomena. The other part of that statement is that its unique picture of religious psychology is accurate. This morning, my reading in 3 Nephi reinforced this conviction in me.

Nephi’s Faith Crisis

Although “faith crisis” has become a bit of a buzzword, there’s a real phenomenon beneath the fad: sometimes your expectations and assumptions collide catastrophically with new information.

You have three options when this happens. You can try to pretend nothing has changed, but if the new information is real, this denial won’t last. At best, it’s a delaying tactic. Eventually you will have to either walk away from your former beliefs or rebuild them.

One great example of a faith crisis is Paul. Prior to meeting Jesus, he thought he had it all figured out. Meeting Jesus demolished his old beliefs. He knew he was wrong. But he didn’t know what to believe instead. Not on an intellectual level, at least. According to N. T. Wright’s biography, Paul spent years figuring out how to take the raw material of his old beliefs (especially the Hebrew Bible) and put the pieces back together so they fit his knowledge of the Savior. (This is the third option.)

Nephi is another example of a faith crisis, but the depiction in the text is a lot more subtle. Still, the pieces are there. Start with 1 Ne 2:16:

A God of Order in a World of Chaos

Why are we here?

There are many answers to that question, even among groups of people who hold the same religious beliefs.

But a good representative statement from Evangelical Christianity is found in pastor Rick Warren’s best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life:

The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions. If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by his purpose and for his purpose.

…You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God—

Christ and the Second Arrow

My sacrament talk delivered on 4-24-22:

Repentance: Hebrew word teshuvah: “turning,” or reorientation
Greek word metanoia: conversion, transformation

These notions of repentance are different from saying sorry and trying to stop sinning.

The Second Change of Heart

This is an adapted version of the lesson that I taught for Easter Sunday yesterday.

The Good News of Christ makes faith and repentance possible. We have cause for faith because, in vanquishing death and sin, Christ gives us all something to believe in: the possibility that every grief and sorrow may one day be turned to joy. Christ’s perfect example and his Atonement also serve as the motive and means for repentance, filling us with a desire to turn to Him as well as a path back home. These principles—faith and repentance—will lead us be baptized and then to receive the Holy Spirit, which will cause us to become new creatures. This is it, the whole Gospel, in one paragraph.

I want to expand this message into three parts: the what, the why, and the how of the Gospel, each expressed as a promise of Christ’s gifts to us.