What I Know

August 5, 2019 by

Natalie Brown is a former BCC permablogger and friend of the blog. She is returning to graduate school this fall to write a dissertation on nineteenth-century writers’ experiences with home loss and displacement. 

What I Know: The Power of Narrower Testimonies

As I sat down to pen my father’s eulogy, I drew a blank. How could I say anything that could adequately capture him, bring me solace and serve the needs of a community that was mourning? Words didn’t come, and so I prayed that the Spirit would tell me what to say. My answer came later that night as I listened to family tell stories of my father. Each of us saw a part of him: the spouse, the parent, the colleague, the friend. No single person saw the whole. This is what I realized: No one can tell the story of someone else’s life. It’s an impossible task, because we carry only our own sets of experiences. Each of our stories together, however, add up to something more. If there is a silver lining to a funeral, it’s the opportunity to see those stories come together to reveal a person even larger than we know. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Church Programs, Family, Guest Post, Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Religion Tagged With: , , ,

Testimony

September 14, 2017 by

Yesterday, in a conversation about apologetics at the Maxwell Institute, I bore my testimony in a semi-public place, which is not something I usually do. Even so, I felt that I should share the substance of what I said here, with some slight elaboration.

I believe that trying to love people matters. I believe that even though I’m less certain by the day what love even is or whether love has the power to do what I hope it can. I believe it because that is the life to which my reading of the New Testament, in particular, calls me. On a pretty deep level, I can do no other: I routinely fail to love in the way that I believe I should do, and yet each failure sends me back to the path, more secure in my conviction. For me, Jesus is love. I say that in part because it’s what the scriptures witness to me, but more because in my own life I have experienced Jesus as the most faithful of friends, even and especially as I fail. His faithfulness calls me to be similarly faithful to those I love. I do not understand how to walk this way, but every day I try. The life that I try to lead in spite of my failures is my witness.

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

“Through a Parent’s Eyes” (Elder Renlund) #ldsconf

October 4, 2015 by

dale-g-renlund-largeUnlike Elder Renlund, my career has not put me in contact with death. And yet, I understand, on a more modest scale, the need and impulse to develop emotional distance from people and problems. Being able to detach myself allows me to function in a world where things don’t always go the way I would have them go. [Read more…]

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

Guest Post: New Testament Lesson 1

January 18, 2015 by

This guest post is by Brad Masters. He is a judicial law clerk, an Angels baseball aficionado, and a contributor at Normons.com.

It’s been sad to watch friends and family struggle with their testimonies. Lately, we’ve been inundated constantly with tough stuff, from priesthood bans to polygamy to any other number of topics du jour. Far too many have lost faith in Mormonism. (One is too many.)

Interestingly enough, many whose faith is extinguished not only leave the Church, but leave Christianity altogether. Rarely do the exmormon.org boards (which look increasingly like the kinds of caves trolls retreat to after long hours spent pestering unexpecting bridge-crossers) or other “recovering Mormon” blogs showcase testimonies of no-longer-Mormon Christians.  Instead, the posts are mostly from newly-minted atheists. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Sunday School Tagged With: , , , , ,

On Faith and Choice

January 14, 2015 by

Faith doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has, and I suspect it never will.[fn1]

And still I go, every week, and teach and learn and take part in ordinances and community and church culture and all the rest. And why?

Because I’ve chosen to believe.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Mormon, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Beaches and Footprints

November 18, 2014 by

Sam Brown is an historian, scholar, author and medical doctor. His latest work, First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith In Light of the Temple is now available, and is a publication of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. We published an excerpt from the book a couple of weeks ago and are happy to offer another now.

We often remind our adolescents and young adults that they will need to stand on their own, that they will need a testimony that can withstand separation from their parents. And it’s true that our attachment to Church and gospel must be stronger than the vagaries of young adulthood. There must be within us something more than just conformity to whatever people around us say. But we must not believe that our walk of faith is solitary. We must be able to experience commitment to true principles and to the people of Zion that can resist mocking voices or temptations of the flesh. But we should not thereby forget that God and the Holy Ghost generally speak to us in the context of our relationships with the Saints. Our lives are deeply blessed by the people who carry the Spirit to us at times of great sadness or anxiety. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books & Journals, Guest Post, Young Men, Young Women Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Shape of Faith to Come

February 28, 2014 by

ornettejazzWhen I was in high school or college, I bought The Shape of Jazz to Come, Ornette Coleman’s seminal 1959 free jazz album. I listened to jazz at the time, especially Miles’s electric stuff, but even more I listened to James Brown and Prince and P-Funk and various alternative rock bands. In fact, I’d probably never heard Ornette Coleman before I bought the album.[fn1] I bought it because I knew it was important, and I wanted to like it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mormon, Music Tagged With: , , , ,

The Testimony Puzzle

June 2, 2013 by

“I’d like to stand on my feet today . . .”

I have never been a big fan of testimony meetings for a variety of reasons, but maybe my opinion is starting to shift.

I recently taught the May Sunday School youth lesson from Come Follow Me “What does it mean to bear testimony?” Since I teach 12-13 year olds, including my own son, I wanted to find a game or object lesson to help illustrate testimony.  I found the idea for a puzzle on the church’s website.

I showed the class a partially constructed puzzle.  My son immediately shouted out “It’s a goldfish in a bowl.  Boom!”  I said it wasn’t a goldfish.  Another boy agreed with my son:  “It’s definitely a goldfish.”  I assured the class again that the picture was not a goldfish.  The puzzle object lesson seemed to be working in ways not intended, demonstrating that some people draw wrong conclusions based on scant evidence and their own personal assumptions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Missionary, Mormon, Religion, TCoJCoLDS Tagged With: , ,

Church-Hacker #15: Christ-Centered Testimony Meetings

October 21, 2011 by
An idea for better testimony meetings, submitted by Tevya of Mormon Life Hacker. (Sounds like Church-Hacker, but it isn’t. Go check it out.)
Testimony meetings that are about anything but testimonies seem to be a common problem. In college, a few of us were very concerned about this after a particularly bad testimony meeting. My good friend had an idea he’d seen done in another ward–he suggested it to the bishopric, they implemented it, and it worked fabulously!

It’s simply this: print a nice picture of Christ (here’s one that’s high-res enough for printing), and then beneath it, print these 3 steps in a very large, plain font:
  1. Tell us your name.
  2. Tell us a little about yourself.
  3. Tell us how you feel about the man in the red robe.
Put it in a sheet protector, to keep it nice. Each fast Sunday, put it on the pulpit. The first time he does it, the conducting bishopric member could explain it, and it may even be appropriate to explain it each month, so people are aware it’s there when they come up.

I love that the 3rd one doesn’t say “talk about Jesus” or something like that. It requires just that little bit of extra cognitive effort to make the association, and get’s them thinking a little more, rather than just skimming it and going ahead with what they planned to talk about.

Let’s stay focused, people!

____________

Got your own Church-Hacker idea? Submit it! (The church-hacking guidelines are here.) See all entries in this series here.

Filed Under: Church Hacker Tagged With: , ,

Some things too sacred to share

September 23, 2008 by

Too sacred to share. I’ve been thinking about that for a few days as I readied a post on my faith-science blog that for a long time fell into the category for me. I changed my mind. There was some discomfort with it because we run across the words ‘too sacred to share”, but I’m not sure what they mean. Here are a couple of uses I pulled up on a search on the Church’s web site: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Religion, Society & Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,