Musings on Life and Living

My friend Ben Spackman has been engaged in a long-term blogging project of reading the Holy Bible and writing commentary . He has an advanced degree in ancient cultures and focused his work on Near Eastern cultures and scriptures. So, of course, he blogs as Benjamin the Scribe, adopting the title used in the times of Jesus Christ by those who read the scriptures and wrote commentary. I have often used his posts as a guide to my planning for my Sunday School lessons, to help me better understand the scriptural passages I will be teaching and to just further my own personal scripture study.

Over the past fifteen years or so, I have had the opportunity to help a lot of people move. Most of these moves have taken place while I've been living in the Champaign-Urbana-Savoy area (what I like to call Chambanavoy). There are a lot of college students around these parts and they make up a very large portion of my church community. For some reason, Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons) are notorious for asking each other to help load and unload moving trucks/vans. During the hundreds of moves I have helped with, I have discovered that there are ten types of friends helping with the move that you are inevitably going to see. I decided to write a blog post about them. (And probably becasue I spend more time reading articles on Cracked.com and BuzzFeed, I decided to use their writing style.) My experience has been that most of these friends are guys, and so I am using the male pronoun here. Please note, however, that women are just as capable of doing these things as men.

Gretch and I have had a subscription to Netflix for a few of years now. We started with free trials that we accessed through different debit and credit card accounts. After deciding we really did like using Netflix, we actually subscribed and have used it as our sole source of television programming. This has become a nice way to have background noise during the day when we are doing other things, a way to relax in the evening and watch shows together, to relive old memories as we share favourite programs, and a way to learn. I'm not quite sure when it happened, but at some point Gretch decided that we should watch documentaries on Sundays after church. Through these programs, we have learned about the natural world, history, science, discoveries, architecture, design, and all sorts of other things. Some of the documentaries have been so grossly biased that we dropped them before finishing. Others were just awful, such as one about UFOs. Today we started watching a documen...

Again, I know that this post isn't actually going up on the Sunday before Christmas. In fact, it is going up the day before (Christmas Eve). I decided it would be better to space out the last three posts in the series but actually get them done instead of posting them back to back and having nobody read them or have time to really think about the message.

My friend Sarah Doremus has recently started blogging again and has been doing a guest series of ways to "make Christmas merry." I have been enjoying this series and then I saw her post that her husband, my friend Lucas, wrote about the difference between happiness and joyfulness . This is something that has run across my mind from time to time but really crystalised while reading his thoughts. Happiness is a good thing. Really, it is. Happiness has been the topic of books, movies, essays, and philosophical treatises for ages. (While not for all of the above, but folks have been discussing happiness for a really long time.) I like being happy. It makes me, well, happy! So, what is happiness? To this I turn to one of my favourite resources: the Online Etymology Dictionary . According to this collection, the word "happiness" has been used to describe a "pleasant and contented mental state" since the 1590s. So then I decided to dig back furthe...

Okay, I somehow completely lost track of time and my posts for Advent completely failed to go up on time. I started to write this post on the second Sunday of Advent and then didn't finish and didn't post it. Then I completely missed the third Sunday. Today is actually the fourth Sunday, but I am going to get two and three written before I get around to four. I'll do better next year! The second Sunday of Advent is focused on love. There are many different kinds of love. My native language, English, doesn't do a good job of expressing this. We use the word love to describe several different things and several different relationships. For example, I love my wife. I love my sisters. I love my female friends. Even though the objects of this love are all women, the relationships with them are considerably different. I also love books, bacon, and chocolate. Again, a very different relationship. And, of course, I love my Father in Heaven and my Saviour, Jesus Christ. ...

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there are many Christian traditions that have, for various and sundry reasons, not become a part of the LDS tradition. Some are because of the 19th Century frontier Protestant roots that many of the early Latter-day Saints came from. Others are because our church does not agree with or embrace those traditions. And some are just because the Latter-day Saints moved to the Intermountain West in the mid-1800s and developed their own traditions separate from the greater Christian community in the eastern United States. One tradition that I have been pondering for the past several years is that of Advent. A professor of religion at Brigham Young University, Eric D. Huntsman, is a man I have never met yet have heard so much about from friends of mine who attended BYU. Several years ago,  he began observing Advent with his family , incorporating LDS scriptures and stories into a month-long celebration of the birth of Chri...