The Little Lord of Small Concerns

December 26, 2022 by

My concerns are so petty.

Whenever I pause to pray, that’s almost always my first thought. Who am I to ask God for anything? He’s already given me everything. A warm home, a loving family, good health. So what if my baby won’t nap? So what if my puppy needs surgery? So what if I constantly feel overwhelmed by adulting? That’s called life.

Nearly all my petty concerns will resolve themselves, with or without divine intervention. So who am I to waste God’s time? Who am I to ask for mild creature comforts when so much of the world is suffering? I would genuinely rather God direct his energy to those who need it more. So my solution is often to just not pray. Some piece of me believes that’s a selfless act. I assume God’s energy, like mine, is finite. In a finite universe, I confess I’m not a priority.

[Read more…]
Filed Under: Advent, Anciently Revealed, Children, Comparative/Ecumenical, Doctrine & Policy, Family, Holiday, Religion, Scriptures, Theology, Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Toward a Humble Church

July 13, 2020 by

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A decade ago, I sat despondent in Relief Society during a lesson on humility. Law school exams were fast approaching and I felt overwhelmed. An arbitrary system was about to base 100% of my grades on half-day tests. Regardless of my objective mastery of the material, the system was designed to force competition against my smart and talented peers. I would be graded on a strict curve. Those grades would then be aggregated to assign my relative class rank. Without a sufficiently high class rank employers would flick my resume into the recycle bin. My future career was at stake. The legal job market was deep in a recession. I feared failure, and that my student loans would never be repaid.

I sighed and decided to interpret the lesson as a chastisement. I needed to repent and learn humility. I needed to learn “a modest or low view of my own importance.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Comparative/Ecumenical, Doctrine & Policy, General Conference, Liturgy, Mormon, Relief Society, Religion, Scriptures, Theology, Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Is not this the fast I have chosen?

April 10, 2020 by

Breanne loves hiking and biking and traveling.  She is a friend of all faiths.

Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward.   (Isaiah 58:6-8)

Fasting is a shared religious tradition.

I remember when I first learned that Jews have yearly fast days beyond just Yom Kippur. I was a graduate student in Jerusalem and was talking to a friend, who mentioned that he was fasting that day for one of the annual fast days commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple.

I was familiar with Yom Kippur and thought I understood a lot about fasting, so I asked him what he was fasting for. He looked confused, so I explained that in my religious tradition, we fast for something…perhaps something that requires greater faith than just prayer can provide. There is generally a goal of something that we want or need, so we sacrifice to show God that we truly desire that thing and hope to open ourselves up to further blessings. So what was he fasting for?

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Fasting isn’t for something. It’s…” and here he paused, trying to think of the right way to explain it to me. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Doctrine & Policy, Guest Post, Health & Medicine, Holiday, Mormon Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

From Broken Hearts to Expansive Love

February 26, 2019 by

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[BCC Editorial Note: this guest post contains raw and personal details of sexual assault, ecclesiastical abuse, and grace.  The content may not be advised for all readers.]

PAR has degrees from places warm and sunny, cold and cloudy, and hot and sticky. None of those degrees led to work he enjoyed.  He then realized having a job was the problem and now does his own thing for clients he mostly likes.

I’d like to share a little bit of my journey with you, friend.  Because I feel like maybe you don’t see me.  Not just me, but people like me.  I grew up in the Church.  I served a mission.  I went to school.  I worked.  I went to more school.  I worked.  Then I went to more school.  In school round three, I met my now-wife.  Through that point I probably voted like you.  I knew the prescribed answers at church really well.  You probably saw me as a model Mormon.  Sometimes, though, life happens.   [Read more…]

Filed Under: Family, Guest Post, Mormon Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Garments are Symbols of the Atonement

May 17, 2018 by
P. Anderson blogged at the Exponent as Starfoxy once upon a time, but entered retirement in order to build a reputation as a bloggernacle cryptid. She lives with her family in the Phoenix metro area, and just got a new solar oven.

Screen Shot 2018-05-17 at 8.58.16 AMI had a conversation years ago where I expressed a desire for the women’s garment pattern to change to a camisole type top. The woman I was talking to stared at me blankly and asked, “Then how would we stop women from wearing sleeveless shirts?”

I wanted to shriek.

Thankfully I did not shriek. (Though after the rant I went on, perhaps my friend would have preferred the shriek.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Anciently Revealed, Doctrine & Policy, Gender & Sexuality, Guest Post, Mormon, Rants, Scriptures, Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Fearful Tales of Interlagos, Brazil

May 10, 2018 by

XDxRvANaHeather Collins is a convert and in-progress author of a book on patriarchal blessings she never shuts up about, but will probably never finish.  Follow her on Twitter.

The only time I ever trained a new missionary was in the most dangerous area I was ever assigned to in Brazil. She was Argentinian, and we dealt with a triple language barrier. I’d come without suitcases to take her back to our area, deep in the interior of São Paulo state. Tatuí was rural, relatively safe, and hours away from the city by public transit. We had a small branch to work with and had just baptized a child with no support at home.

I wasn’t happy about that baptism. I was tired of baptizing young kids whose parents wanted nothing to do with the Church. That was how I was baptized, and I knew the years of heartache that would be ahead of every child we did this to. The price of staying without parental support is higher than most people know.

I was frustrated with my area. I wanted to go anywhere else where I felt like baptism would be more likely. In my mind, that meant going back to the city. 

Then our phone rang. It was my mission president. There had been a change of plans. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Church Programs, Missionary, Mormon, Women Tagged With: , , , ,

Resurrection

August 6, 2017 by

As a Mormon raised on the 2nd Article of Faith, I believed that the principle of individual responsibility made the concept of an inherited “original sin” incoherent. We each, I thought, came into the world as blank slates, given eight years to develop the capacity for accountability—at which point baptism gave us a clean start, just in case. From then on, we bore the responsibility of acting well, with repentance and weekly sacrament participation to take care of our inevitable mistakes. With Christ’s help, we would be capable of living in the world as good people.

It’s not that I disbelieve any of this now, exactly. Still, I’ve recently found myself telling people that I believe in original sin. I always hasten to clarify that it’s not the Augustinian seminally-transmitted version of original sin that has won my assent. I don’t believe that my veins flow with depravity born from Adam’s fall, and I don’t believe that newborn babies carry its taint. I do believe, though, that our common humanity has a dark side that none of us escapes. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Elder Holland, Free Soloing, and the Fall #ldsconf

April 5, 2015 by

300px-Snow_Canyon_4My childhood memories of General Conference are replete with stories about farming; my memory may exaggerate, but in it, virtually every talk derived its moral lesson from some combination of scripture and farming.[fn1]

The omnipresence of farming stories sticks in my mind in large part because I couldn’t relate to them. At all. I grew up in a Southern California suburb, entirely removed from agriculture, or even agricultural heritage. (My great-grandparents, at least on one side, had been farmers, but had given it up in favor of dentistry, a field both my grandfather and my father subsequently pursued.

I wondered, as I sat hearing about chickening the cows, or milking the turkeys, or whatever it is one does on a farm, what stories General Authorities would be telling in the future, when they were no longer all the children of farmers, when agriculture had lost its primacy in our culture.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Conference, Mormon, TCoJCoLDS Tagged With: , , , , ,

On Disappointment and Happiness

December 10, 2014 by

Disappointment happens—and it hurts. What’s worse is that there are opportunities for disappointment everywhere.While there’s nothing particularly modern about disappointment, modern communications technologies can amplify our awareness of disappointing events and also provide fora in which we can express the disappointments we feel. These technologies, in other words, have expanded our capacity for disappointment. Just as it’s now completely normal to encounter a Facebook post articulating disappointment with an occurrence on the other side of the world, it’s also long since become commonplace to posit “the internet” as a factor in leading people to become disappointed with the Church. If disappointment is a basic part of human experience, I believe that it’s worth thinking about what part disappointment plays in our efforts to build Zion and how, then, we can engage in that work in our current technological environment. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, TCoJCoLDS Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Cultivating the Garden of Friendship

November 24, 2014 by

In a recent post I expressed my belief that the world is an entropic chaos tending toward death, and that in rebelling against this we can make beauty, which the all-devouring nature of the void requires that we make again and again. I mentioned this idea in conversation with a new friend the other day, and she suggested that it would be better to think about how to cultivate beauty, to find ways of sustaining it over time. This seemed to me a good and wise correction, and although seeds of the idea do appear in my post, especially in the idea that human connection is the highest form of beauty, I wish to develop them further here. Zion, after all, is at once a place and a form of human community where the people are, as the scripture reminds us, of one heart and one mind, dwelling in righteousness, and having no poor among them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Doctrine & Policy, Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Theology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

In Which I Unpack a Finance-Based Atonement Parable (or Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Work on Wall Street)

July 31, 2014 by

Understanding the Atonement is tough.[fn1] To try to understand it, theologians have come up with theories to describe the whys and hows of the Atonement, and stories to illustrate how the Atonement works.

We’ve got a handful of favorite illustrative stories in Mormonism, including bicycles and lickings. I was recently reading chapter 12 of the Gospel Principles manual, and I came across an Atonement story that I haven’t seen in a while: a parable of a debtor and a creditor. What follows are my thoughts as I reread it:[fn2]  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Mormon Tagged With: , , , , , ,