Wherein David B falls back into his natural habitat, the pun

A speaker in a church meeting i was in recently was talking about food storage, and pointed out that you need to rotate through food and water in your storage so that you don’t end up throwing stuff out as waste after you keep it past its shelf life. To aid in this, the speaker suggested dating your food and water supplies.

Date ’em? I hardly even know ’em!

That’s not the way it works

“Let Us All Press on in the work of the Lord,” goes the song, “that when life is o’er we may gain a reward”.

Um, no. Deity is not a vending machine. You don’t gain a reward ’cause you worked hard, you gain a reward because the grace of God is sufficient for your salvation. Sorry about that.

Another awkward song

“Sweet Is the Peace the Gospel Brings” is one of the more awkward musical settings for a song in our hymnal, and the whole problem actually comes from a single small flaw—it’s entirely the fault of the second and third notes in each verse. Throwing things like “is the”, “laws and”, and “we who” into eighth notes while everything else in in quarters (plus extended time for the end of each line)? No, not good at all.

Modesty, yet again

My oldest is approaching twelve years old, so she recently attended the “New Beginnings” event for girls entering the young women’s program during the coming year. As part of my ward’s program this year, the entire (rather small) group of active young women put on a semi-improvisational skit designed to teach about various gospel values.

(It wasn’t that bad, either—and it had a decent amount of natural and un-self-conscious humor to it. Gave me a flicker of hope for the future. But i digress.)

Anyway, one of the girls’ had, as her character, someone with a problem with modesty. When another girl prompted her to give ways she could be more modest, she gave answers like not wearing so much jewelry and not trying to draw so much attention to herself.

That clearly wasn't what the other girl expected, so she tried again, asking whether there was anything that might be changed about her clothes. This actually seemed to puzzle the first girl a little bit, but she eventually came up with something along the lines of maybe not wearing clothes that were quite so bright and flashy.

Clearly, this girl has been raised by parents who use the same definition of modesty as me (and the same definition as, according to a plain text reading, the writers of the Book of Mormon)—a lack of ostentatiousness.

It’s good to realize i’m not completely alone.

Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

More than a stonecutter

The story of John R. Moyle is amazing. It’s incredible. It’s inspiring. It’s mind-blowing, in all the positive senses of that word.

And yet as it develops into a mainstream bit of Mormon folklore it runs the risk, i fear, of becoming as bleached of nuance and detail in favor of sappiness and simplicity as the story of the Willie and Martin handcart companies became before it.

Sometimes we do our stories a grave injustice as we tell them.

What we’re ashamed of

This is normally a text-only blog, but the following recently came across on GraphJam, and i just had to post it here:

Yeah, that seems about right.

A tisket, a tasket…

Sometimes, after a particularly grueling Sunday of meetings (and, it seems, more often on testimony meeting Sundays), i feel like i’m the only person in the church who believes that the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, or in fact in any other reasonably sized conveyance.

Sealings in less than a year!

As is widely known, the church requires members who were married civilly without being sealed in a temple at the same time* to wait one year from the date of the civil marriage before they can be sealed.

It’s not as widely known that there are a few exceptions to this, the most interesting (in my opinion) being that if one or both of the members had been a member of the church for less than a year at the time of the civil marriage, they’re eligible to be sealed as soon as both of them have been confirmed members for at least a year.

For example: If someone got baptized this past 1 January, and another this past 1 February, if they got married this coming 1 June, they wouldn’t have to wait until the following 1 June to be sealed, but rather only until the next 1 February. Also, as i read things, even if a lifelong member married the person baptized this past 1 February on 1 June, they’d only have to wait until the next 1 February for their sealing, not the following 1 June.

So if you’re going to require waiting periods to enter the temples, i like this policy for a number of reasons. (And, contrary to what one might expect from reading this blog, i actually do like finding church policies that i like.)

* For those countries that don’t recognize a temple sealing as a valid marriage, substitute “as close together as possible” for “at the same time”.

Beyond serifs

What is it with hyper-cheesy fonts in materials created by young women’s leaders? Is there something in the handbook that mandates superfluous curlicues? ’Cause if there is, i missed that line somehow.