Men and Women are Equal Partners

I’ve started reading a fascinating book “65 Signs of the Times Leading up to the Second Coming” – David J. Ridges and I thought I might start a series of posts that opens the discussion for them, because I like to go beyond what he highlights in the book, to more of a let’s show examples in the world. Let’s talk about after effects, etc.

The author makes a good point to say this book isn’t written to scare people and uses quotes from prophets to try and set the tone. I’ll probably put these quotes on each of the posts so that we don’t forget and end up getting caught up in the signs. That isn’t what I want to do either.

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Eternal Family

This is the talk I was asked to give on the family – there might be some mistakes because I was editing it right before I gave it…lol. Also not long before church was to being, I was informed that one of the speakers wasn’t going to be there so I needed to speak for about 20 minutes – I’ve never spoken for that long before and had to bulk up my talk quickly…

I want to tell you a story about my parents.

I t takes place some years ago when they met each other and fell in love. They decided to start a family, but were later devastated when their first born daughter died only hours after being born. Out of her death grew a desire to find answers to why their baby had been taken from their lives and would they ever see her again.

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Are You Still Learning?

Sometime ago, and yes I’ve forgotten what the name of the talk was – but I know who it was by. It was given by Cleon Skousen. It mentioned that David O. McKay wanted to have current events discussed in Priesthood meeting, but ultimately was afraid of the backlash it would cause. Then more recently, like yesterday I started reading (listening) to Jack Monnett’s book “Awakening To Our Awful Situation” that again made mention of being commanded in studying current events along with histories.

I really wanted to put some validation to this. While I have been unable to find much with what I heard from Cleon Skousen, I was able after a little while digging around the internets to put some validation to being commanded in continual learning.

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Contention

It’s Tuesday again, that means another exciting installment of TOPICAL GUIDE TUESDAY (say it like those monster truck announcers). This week, and maybe this is going to be a continuing thing – but I’ve been thinking about my own issues, and I suffer from this affliction, so let’s talk about it and see if we can come up with something.

Did anyone remember to try and thank the Lord for our blessings from last weeks challenge? I did, and even though I didn’t make it all week, I consciously thanked him a number of times and noticed slight changes in myself. I still need to continue with that, but let’s move on and look at another topic.

I went looking for Contention’s definition but came across a number of them that really didn’t make contention out to be so bad. It was merely arguing or debating. So I went looking for it among the teachings and writings of our modern day prophets. Read more…

Family

Originally published on May 25th, 2008

Recently, it seems my mind has been opened, and I’ve felt new needs. Today was no exception. We got on the topic of dedicating our homes.

I quickly picked up on that and it occurred to me, that even though we’d been in our home for nearly 2 years I don’t think it’s ever been dedicated. It may have been blessed by my wife’s father, but I had not taken up the yoke of my Priesthood responsibility to do so. Like I said, recently things have changed for me, call it a spiritual awakening, or a spiritual maturity – either way I feel very strongly that our home needs a change.

I love it [The Gospel], and let me put it in context of why I’m saying it right now. Our home has some issues – I mean that in our family. There’s something missing, and I think it goes along with how we treat each other and, well, the lack of family unity we experience occasionally. If I notice this, then I know my wife’s felt it a lot longer. But I believe this is why I picked up on the idea of dedicating our home so quickly. I knew I wanted to do it and I felt like it would actually be a great topic to write about too.

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