[jwald]

I just want to say thank you to everyone on this site. Providing a place to vent and encouragement to keep trying brought hope and progress to my husband who had started down a very angry path in his feelings towards the church before he found this site.

This is not something any TBM member could have done for him without getting deeply offended or spiritually hurt in the process. Because of this site he will be able to just let it all go peacefully instead of letting go with animosity towards the church. Thank you for helping him to grow and helping him to heal

[jwald]

Can I say Wow! ……Just wow. Thank you Ray, Katie and Tom for this discussion :clap: I’ve been pondering the whole grace vs works argument for awhile now.

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Old-Timer wrote:

A very insightful friend recently described the process of “taking my yoke upon you” as feeling the purity and power of His sinlessness. I love that construct, but I would add the following: Understanding and truly accepting God’s grace occurs when you realize that all of your inherited weaknesses (your temper, your judgmental nature, your fatigue, your lack of self-worth, your never-ending battles with whatever drives you crazy) – everything that keeps you from becoming who you desperately want to become – has been bought and paid for already. He fought that fight for you, and He won. Yes, you were born with things that keep you from being perfect, but He paid for those things – meaning that you truly can take His yoke upon you and walk confidently at His side as a brother or sister with the same eternal potential. It occurs when you realize that, because of the grace that so fully He proffers you, you aren’t required to pay for those things; rather, you are freed to pursue those qualities and characteristics you want to acquire to become perfect (whole and complete) – regardless of the tangible outcome of that effort. Repentance becomes an exciting, forward looking progression toward wholeness, rather than a depressing, backward-looking, guilt-inducing attempt to beat the bad out of you and never again make any mistakes. Bad habits and painful characteristics will disappear as they are replaced by good ones, not as they are “subdued and repressed by sheer force of will.”

I believe an understanding of grace is fully realized when one stops fighting God’s grace – when he realizes that all God wants is his willing mind and heart – when he quits worrying about his individual worthiness and starts focusing on his contribution to communal unity – when he simply lays it all at His feet and says, in essence, “I know you understand my weakness; I know you know my struggles and pains; I know you know how I feel about myself; I know you love me and have bought me, anyway. From now on, I will trust your promise and, despite my continuing frustration and my continuing weakness and my continuing failures, I will bounce back each time and continue to grow. I will not despair; I will accept my weakness and imperfection and failure, knowing you don’t care, because you love me, anyway. I will get back up each time I am knocked down and continue to walk toward you, until you embrace me and say, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’ – knowing I don’t deserve it and being eternally grateful for the grace that so fully you proffered me

Yes yes yes! This stuff is what we should be teaching. This is what I want my children to understand.

I want to say more but they just called me into work

[jwald]

Cwald said:

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jwald made me read it – said it would help our marriage. :problem:

Remembering perspective will also help if you ever get in to arguments with your family again. Your phrasing gets you in trouble. You often argue on the same side as them, your wording is just different than theirs.

“The details are less important than the picture”

I had an institute teacher who conveyed this when he taught. He stressed that in the end, belief in God, the Savior and the atonement were the “Big Picture.” How we reached that point was less important. The Bible could be the inerrant literal word of God or it could just be a collection of and faith promoting stories about God. What mattered was that we use the Bible to learn how to make our lives and the lives of those around us better. (Although he never went as far as making that claim about the BoM :think: )

Evolution may very well have happened the way science tells us or the earth was created in 6 literal days. Either way, the important thing was to recognize that God created us. How was less important. 😮

I did not realize how radical this sounded at the time. I was a ways off the TBM path at that point, but I loved that institute class

[jwald]

I just watched the Angles and Demons movie for the first time Sunday after church. Disappointing.

[jwald]

I’ve only skimmed the 14 fundamentals talk before this and to hear this HC member go point by point and give his opinion on things made me and DD physically ill by the end of the meeting. The spirit in the room afterwards felt very oppressive. DD thought the talk made us sound like a cult and was very uncomfortable with it.

[jwald]

I would love to participate in one of these someday. I grew up in Utah but our stake never did the treks until after I graduated high school. My younger brother and sister went and still remember it as one of their best experiences in YW/YM. I think it would be a good way for teens to connect with the past and feel a part of some sort of heritage.

[jwald]

Sorry I’ve been out of touch for awhile. I go through phases where I just can’t make myself get on the computer for awhile. I do it with TV and phones as well 😳

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Two of my least favourite words: ‘know’ and ‘true’ — all in the the same short sentence.

Ugh I agree!

I loved last years theme that was focused on the Savior and was a little disappointed when I learned what this years theme was. As Primary prez I am in charge of sharing times in our little branch and decided to focus as much as I can on familiarizing the kids with the scriptures and less on whether or not they are true. I will leave that up to individual families. Luckily I am able to get away with stuff like this because our primary is predominately converts and less actives. It also helps that many of them can’t read or are far below the reading level for their age. We will focus more on learning where the books are located, writing down our favorite scriptures and becoming familiar with the language of the Bible and BoM.

[jwald]

It was quite a shift in thinking for me when they released me from YW and called me to our very small and inconsistently attended primary. The whole shift to “black and white” thinking that is required in primary was hard because it was much easier for me to teach teens who are starting/have reached the point where they realize “black and white” is not how everything operates.

I teach sharing time every week and help out teaching the combined CTR/Valiant class when my TBM counselor is out of town. I pick and choose my lessons whenever possible but when there are things I must teach that I may not agree with, I am able to teach with out too much hesitation when I shift my thinking a little. I can teach tithing when I emphasize how we should do it to help others and downplay/skip the “obey at all costs” and “fire insurance” aspect of it. When WoW lessons come up I make sure to emphasize that people who don’t follow the WoW aren’t bad but may have habits that aren’t good for them. I also make sure to talk about things like eating healthy which is also part of the WoW and point out that even though they may go on a “candy binge” from time to time this does not make them bad people. 😮 I always sprinkle plenty of reminders throughout my lessons that when Heavenly Father sent us here he knew we would make mistakes. That’s why he sent the Savior to us

So far I have not set my TBM counselor off with my sharing times but she does tend to “matter of factly” emphasize points I purposefully skip from time to time 🙄

But I also realize how “black and white” the under 10 age group tends to be and figure she’s doing me a favor.

[jwald]

Wow! I’ve used all of these types of thinking at one time or another in my life. Seeing them listed like that will help me self-examine when I get negative about things. Thanks for posting them.

Jumping to conclusions (mind reading), emotional reasoning, and should statements, seem to be my biggest hurdles right now. Should statements kept me living in the past trying to fix what can’t be fixed. My thinking recently when it comes to “Should I or shouldn’t I?”, is to do what I need to do, pay the price (if one is required) and move on with my life. It has helped tremendously to shift my thinking that way. 🙂

[jwald]

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Flower,

You have given me a lot to think about and strangely enough I had a spiritual experience reading your post. I’m not sure what it means but I think I gained some insight into my own life and I thank you for sharing your thoughts so that I might gain understanding.

Canada

ME TOO!

💡

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-We may choose to be reborn and even choose the life we are born into. (Because we are here to “experience”, it make sense that we would want to experience all human conditions. How else could we ever truly know ourselves? This could never be done in one life. Therefore we may choose to come back and experience more. Maleness, femaleness, love, wealth, power, success, poverty, discrimination, suffering, abuse, etc… This helps me to understand suffering, and view it as an incredible experience. I still however, have a strong desire to ease suffering… perhaps because I have experienced extreme suffering in a past life)

The idea of reincarnation has always rang true to me. But I never really thought about why until your post. I don’t know what God is. I think I exasperate my husband because one day I will be content to conceptualize God in the traditional sense and the next day have no problem conceiving God as a benevolent being/beings from another world who helped jump start our planet before moving on.

But if we are to one day become Gods/Goddesses we would need something like reincarnation to be truly omniscient wouldn’t we?

[jwald]

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I don’t want to be the missing Heavenly Mother figure.

This is very close to my feelings about the whole becoming Gods/Goddesses in the afterlife. I don’t have any desire to be “worshiped” as a Goddess but becoming a nameless, unseen, unspoken to entity in the lives of all the “spirit children” I’m supposed to help bear just does not sit well with me. We are taught to understand God as a loving Heavenly Father so naturally we would extend our own experiences as parents on earth to what we imagine in the afterlife. Which makes me hope that we either don’t really comprehend what God is or that there is something I’m missing about the purpose of our existence here on earth. :think:

[jwald]

Thanks for the welcome everybody. I look forward to participating in some of these discussions that my husband goes on and on about.

[jwald]

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Sheesh. Here all this time I was thinking “Poor cwald. Nobody understands him.” Phooey with that.

😆 :clap:

[jwald]

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Yeah. I walked in on my 12 year old a couple of months ago. Wife was pretty freaked out about it – end of the world type mentality. I think I handled it much better than my Dad handled it when I got caught.

😆 OK yeah, this is why I decided to finally speak up. My husband is prone to over-exaggeration from time to time. 🙄 Caught off guard is more like it. Freaked is DH, when I taught the boy all the anatomically correct words at age 2 LOL! But I’m glad he handled it and not me.

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