BK & Co.

We did a re-take this evening.  We heard from some of you that you liked the colors here. 

Family Picture

Ask Me Who I am

One hundred generations of blood in my veins
Noble souls passed in pain
Joy and agony of lifetimes brought me here
An unrepeatable miracle of God
With all my attributes –
eyes and face
hands and feet
My hair or lack thereof
With all my nurturing or depravity
Love and abuse
Praise and scorn
Pride and shame
Guilt and hope
I bring to the table
Who I am

A child of God born of a hundred generations
The blood runs through my veins
Heredity and inheritance of the blessings and curses
The gifts or poverty
And all my learning through the days of my childhood until
The day I’m leaving home

All my beliefs wrapped up in my mind
All the inheritance of my generations wrapped up in one being
With the divinity God gave me intrinsic to my soul

Divinity, the wicked traditions and the good
In one

23 August 2008

Neal A. Maxwell quotes Tolkien

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. [Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), p. 190]

http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=7085

Neal A. Maxwell spoke at a BYU devotional in 1978 about secularism.  Sadly his prophecies are coming true now.  I see the backlash of the passing of Prop 8 in California against the church.   It is a move to remove the tax exempt status of the Church.  This is specifically mentioned in Maxwell's talk.

The full text is here: http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6197

I quote him:

"If we let come into being a secular church shorn of traditional and divine values, where shall we go for inspiration in the crises of tomorrow? Can we appeal to the rightness of a specific regulation to sustain us in our hours of need? Will we be able to seek shelter under a First Amendment which by then may have been twisted to favor irreligion? Will we be able to rely for counterforce on value education in school systems that are increasingly secularized? And if our governments and schools were to fail us, would we be able to fall back upon the institution of the family, when so many secular movements seek to shred it?

It may well be, as our time comes to "suffer shame for his name" (Acts 5:41), that some of this special stress will grow out of that portion of discipleship which involves citizenship. Remember that, as Nephi and Jacob said, we must learn to endure "the crosses of the world" (2 Nephi 9:18) and yet to despise "the shame of [it]" (Jacob 1:8). To go on clinging to the iron rod in spite of the mockery and scorn that flow at us from the multitudes in that great and spacious building seen by Father Lehi, which is the "pride of the world," is to disregard the shame of the world (1 Nephi 8:26–27, 33; 11:35–36). Parenthetically, why--really why--do the disbelievers who line that spacious building watch so intently what the believers are doing? Surely there must be other things for the scorners to do--unless, deep within their seeming disinterest, there is interest."