The utility of mellow moments

Further proof i’m evil: Contra the usual church class meme, i’m actually pretty sure i don’t grow as much spiritually when i face trials compared to how i grow when i experience times of peace, giving me time to ponder and learn from what’s around me.

Not quite as wonderful anymore

You know, i’m sure i can’t be the only one who misses the counterpoint Wonderful!s in the old (i.e., pre-1985 hymnal) version of “I Stand All Amazed”.

Opposition in a few things

Mini-rant: I’m tired of the overuse (not to mention misuse) of the “opposition in all things” line. For the record, it pretty clearly does not mean that, for example, one needs to taste straight lemon juice in order to properly appreciate chocolate.

However, the judicious addition of lemon to dark chocolate, yeah, i’ll admit that can only help.

Things to teach your children

A recent sacrament meeting speaker i heard talked about how his grandmother was the ultimate example of motherhood, and one of his evidences for this was that she’d had seventeen(!) children.

He went on to talk about her “righteous posterity”, made up of sixty-two grandchildren, and now several (i forget the number) great-grandchildren.

Now i’ll quite vociferously argue against the meme of holding up one’s fecundity as a valid measure of how good of a parent one might or might not be. However, if you look at the numbers, we see something interesting:

62÷17<4

Or, in other words, each of her seventeen children produced, on average, less than four children themselves.

It appears that she taught them at least one important parenting lesson, eh?

It makes special musical numbers bearable (almost)

Ever look at all the kids standing up in front of the congregation when the primary children sing and play “Guess which two of them have hit their adolescent growth spurts already?”

Family…Isn’t it about time?

You know, i’ve noticed that there’s a great deal of worry among church leaders about the activity level of teenagers growing up in the church. This makes sense—in any church, particularly one with a lay leadership, those who grow up in that church are a likely pool for future leadership.

Of course, if someone stops coming to church at fourteen years of age, it’s likely not the kid who’s made the decision to stop coming—it’s more likely the parents. So why do parents of teenagers stop coming to church (and, by extension, stop bringing their children to church)?

Well, i can’t think to speak for all of them, or even a majority of them, but when i look at the absolute timesink involved in having an active teenager in our church (and it gets worse when they turn fourteen, and i can’t even imagine what it’s like for parents with both male and female teens), well, i can begin to guess about at least one reason.

Really, folks—would it kill you to leave a few weeks of the year completely free for families to just spend as families, without making them feel like their kids have to be at some activity or another? Just saying that it would be nice, that’s all.

What the world needs now

I’m rather tired of hearing lines such as “What people need most is a knowledge of the gospel”. I mean, let’s make sure they’re getting enough oxygen first, and then maybe we can talk religion…

The topbottom of the mountains

Where did people ever come up with the idea that, when Isaiah talks about people streaming to the house of the Lord in the “top of the mountains”, Isaiah’s talking about the Salt Lake temple? Might i remind everyone that Salt Lake City is in a rather deep valley?

Names for canon

Doctrine and covenants are two different things, you know.

Planning ahead

From the it’s-never-too-early file, a thought on Halloween…

The church doesn’t allow gender-switching costumes at its costume parties. This means that whatever i (a guy) wear to a church event, i can’t go as a female person.

Given the church’s belief that one’s sex isn’t mutable, then, that means that i can totally go to my next church Halloween party as RuPaul, doesn’t it?

Just a simple rant this evening

To anybody out there who might ever be in a bishopric, high priests group leadership, or elders quorum presidency, please don’t ever compare percent home teaching rates with percent visiting teaching rates and go on about how the men aren’t being good priesthood holders ’cause they’re doing so much worse than the women of the ward. Beyond the horribleness of the attempt to make gospel teaching into a competition, the two numbers are not comparable, since there’s different guidelines on what constitutes a countable contact for home teaching and visiting teaching—and so trying to compare them makes you, in the eyes of those who actually know what the numbers are based on, look like nothing more than a numbers-obsessed jerk.

You’re welcome.

I can’t help but ask these questions

The scriptures talk about “stirring the hearts of men up to anger”. Is this as opposed to “pureeing the hearts of men up to anger”?

Cars

It continues to amaze me, the degree to which the policies and expectations of the Mormon church* assume that all families, or at least all families with children, have (at least) two cars. This ranges from the expectations of certain church callings to various church programs.

Consider the extra-special bonus meetings that members in administrative callings (such as members of the bishopric and organizational, group, and auxiliary presidents) have to attend before and/or after regular Sunday meetings while their families have to sit around and wait, often hungry, unless they have another car. Perhaps more extreme is the situation of members of stake high councils, who are expected to drive all over the place to attend various units’ sacrament meetings while their families need to drive to the meetings in their home wards.

Another case: Fathers of teenaged girls are usually asked to help out with young women’s camp.** However, since these events are usually held some distance from the girls’ homes, these fathers have to be able to drive to the campsite (and, just because of the way the logistics work, carpooling isn’t usually an option)—while the part of their family that remains at home still has to get around somehow.

So, the questions:

1. Is this a good, or at least a reasonable, assumption for the church to make?
2. If not, how can it be changed (if, in fact, it can be)?
3. Might this have any sort of effect on the activity or devotion level of families that, by choice or by necessity, only have one car?

* In the United States, at least. Given social norms outside of the United States, i suspect that this is less true elsewhere.

** This, i have recently learned, is the event formerly known as girls camp.

Temporary eternities

Multiple times, i’ve heard people say that everybody should wear clothing that covers the outlines of the temple garment, whether one wears the garment or not, because what the temple garment covers is “the Lord’s eternal standard of modesty” (to use one particularly memorable phrasing).

Um, yeah. You know, anyone who’s going to claim that the lines of the temple garment have anything to do with eternal principles should be more aware of the ways that the design of the garment has changed over the years.

Couldn’t get an extension

So i heard a sacrament meeting speaker recently say that the Mormons were “evicted” from Missouri in the 1840s. Wow, thought i—i hadn’t realized that they hadn’t paid their rent on time. Well, such are the evils of cashflow problems.

Drawing lines

Quick question, in case anyone out there knows: Is there an easy way to find out what ward boundaries are? I mean, i know that for my own ward it’d be easy* to ask the ward clerk, and for wards in my stake or nearby ones i could maybe ask a stake clerk, but is there a way i could just randomly check how many wards there are in, say, Munich, Germany and where the boundaries between them lie?

And i know i could go to the church’s website and repeatedly plug in addresses until i find addresses on either side of the boundary line, but that just seems astonishingly painful. Maybe—maybe!—it’d be worth it to find the boundaries between a single pair of adjacent church units, but for the wards in even a single city? No way.

(And yeah, yeah, i know, disappointment all around on two posts in a row with the serious tag. Back to more casual observations next time, i promise—but at least this one’s not the thoughtful type of serious, it’s just a request for information!)

* Really easy, in fact.

Sustaining and agreeing

A serious question today, one that’s been rolling around in my head for quite some time but that’s been indirectly crystallized by some interesting discussions going on over at Faith-Promoting Rumor lately:

When we vote* to sustain our church leaders, are we promising to agree with them?

There are a lot of people in the church who would say that the answer is yes—the whole “when the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done“ sort of approach.** This has been supported by some church leaders, too.*** On the other hand, there are declarations that go in the other direction—see, for example, all the stress in current policy on participants in ward council being open about their opinions including if they disagree with the bishop, and the importance of consensus decisions rather than top-down directives.

It’s an interesting tension—and maybe it’s there on purpose, and there’s no actual complete answer to my question. I don’t know, to be quite honest. Y’all’s thoughts?

* Yeah, i know, it’s the wrong word, but i’m going with it anyway.

** And yes, i know the history of that quote, and that the initial introduction of the line didn’t put it in a positive light. Doesn’t keep people from saying that’s the way we should be going about things, though.

*** See, for example and perhaps most famously or infamously (depending on your position on the issue), Ezra Taft Benson’s Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet address.

Violence and missionary work

I once heard a full-time missionary speak in sacrament meeting about people “getting hit with” the Book of Mormon, something completely new to them. I got this incredibly vivid image of missionaries bopping people over the head with Books of Mormon, causing the people to then fall into baptismal fonts.

Something about the “converting power of the Book of Mormon” should probably come here…

Hierarchies

I have come to a decision about administrative callings in the church:

Mission or temple president > stake president or bishop

Not because they’re more important or anything, but rather because even though they have to sit on the stand during church meetings, they get to hang out with their wives while they’re up there.

If it’s inside it doesn’t count

A friend of mine reports on her blog* that the women in her ward got chocolates this past Mothers Day.

All really very unremarkable—chocolates are a very ordinary default Mothers Day gift in our church, after all.

Well, unremarkable except for the latte fillings the ones from her ward had, that is.

* Which i’m not linking to, since she regularly includes details about her children on it.