Musings on Life and Living

[I was asked to give a talk in Sacrament Meeting this morning about grace and repentance. I ended up focusing mostly on the doctrine of grace, however. What follows is a fairly accurate transcript of my message.] “For His Grace Is Sufficient”  Sacrament Meeting Talk - 21 February 2016  In December 2002, I was a newly called missionary serving in the Hesperia First Ward in Hesperia, California. I had entered the mission field after just three weeks in the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had a strong mastery of the Scriptures, I had memorised the first two missionary discussions (this was back when the missionary discussions were sequential and the content was expected to be memorised and delivered the same way by all missionaries to all investigators), and I knew I had a strong testimony of the truthfulness of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Like many young boys, I joined the Boy Scouts of America as an eight-year-old child. I rose through the ranks, earning my Bobcat, Wolf, Bear, Webelos, and Arrow of Light, with a variety of other awards and recognitions along the way. I continued my journey in Scouting by joining Troop 229, the Boy Scout troop sponsored by my church. There I quickly earned the rank of Scout and then Tenderfoot. And then my journey stalled. For about five years. I went to Scout Camp, I attended troop meetings, I earned merit badges, and I went on campouts and hikes. I helped with Eagle Scout service projects and other service projects that we did as part of being Boy Scouts. But because I didn't know how to swim, I didn't advance in rank. Then I realised that I only had a short time before my chance to earn my Eagle would pass me up.

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...