Stopped Updating this Blog

As you might have noticed, I have stopped updating this blog as I am using LDS "My Study Notebook" to keep track of my conference notes. It also works with my iPhone, a big bonus.

Preserving the Heart’s Mighty Change

I gave this talk to my family in Aug 2011.
I documented this talk on Google Docs..

Moral Discipline

Read to family in Aug. 2011.

D. Todd Christofferson

Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard.

During World War II, President James E. Faust, then a young enlisted man in the United States Army, applied for officer candidate school. He appeared before a board of inquiry composed of what he described as “hard-bitten career soldier[s].” After a while their questions turned to matters of religion. The final questions were these:

Moral Free Agency

by Daniel H. Ludlow

Adapted from Speeches of the Year, Brigham Young University Press, 1974, pp. 173–88.

There is a principle that is basic to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and yet it is not faith or repentance or the Atonement. But faith, repentance, the Atonement, and all the other principles, ordinances, and doctrines of the gospel are based on this principle—indeed they would be virtually inoperative and impossible of existence if it were not for this principle of moral free agency.

Temple Worship: The Source of Strength and Power in Times of Need

Read this to my family back in August.

Elder Richard G. Scott

Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

When we keep the temple covenants we have made and when we live righteously…, we have no reason to worry or to feel despondent.

Each member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is blessed to live in a time when the Lord has inspired His prophets to provide significantly increased accessibility to the holy temples. With careful planning and some sacrifice, the majority of the members of the Church can receive the ordinances of the temple for themselves and for their ancestors and be blessed by the covenants made therein.

Because My Father Read the Book of Mormon

I read this to my family on 9/8/2011.

Elder Marcos A. Aidukaitis
Of the Seventy

I invite all who hear me today to read the Book of Mormon and to apply the promise it contains. Those who do will know that the book is true.

Good morning, dear brothers and sisters. I feel a profound joy and honor in speaking to you today. I pray that God may guide my words and that His Spirit may be with us so that “he that preacheth and he that receiveth, [may] understand one another, and both [may be] edified and rejoice together” (D&C 50:22).

I consider June 2, 1940, to be a very important day in the history of my family. On this day my father was baptized into this Church.

Writing to his father, Elder Jack McDonald, one of the missionaries who baptized my father, described the day with these words:

Let Him Do It with Simplicity

Read this to my family on 9/25/2011

Elder L. Tom Perry
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

In our search to obtain relief from the stresses of life, may we earnestly seek ways to simplify our lives.

Those of us who have been around a while—and Elder Wirthlin and I have been around for a long time—have recognized certain patterns in life’s test. There are cycles of good and bad times, ups and downs, periods of joy and sadness, and times of plenty as well as scarcity. When our lives turn in an unanticipated and undesirable direction, sometimes we experience stress and anxiety. One of the challenges of this mortal experience is to not allow the stresses and strains of life to get the better of us—to endure the varied seasons of life while remaining positive, even optimistic. Perhaps when difficulties and challenges strike, we should have these hopeful words of Robert Browning etched in our minds: “The best is yet to be” (“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” in Charles W. Eliot, ed., The Harvard Classics, 50 vols. [1909–10], 42:1103). We can’t predict all the struggles and storms in life, not even the ones just around the next corner, but as persons of faith and hope, we know beyond the shadow of any doubt that the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and the best is yet to come.