Last updated on September 10th, 2024 at 10:04 pm
September 1, 2024
Here is the best thing I heard (What?), saw (Eye.), and read (Read.) this week, as well as the best idea (💡) I developed.
What?
followHim Podcast – Helaman 1-6 – Dr. Jenae Nelson:
- [Dr. Jenae Nelson] “Many, many people either know or have a child who has left [the covenant path] or who is struggling. … In Helaman, we see all these narratives of dissenters, and we also find this great story of Nephi and Lehi preaching to the dissenters and there’s this mass coming back. So that gives me so much hope that this is happening right before Christ comes. There’s this mass coming back – so we had this mass exodus, but there’s this mass coming back. I can’t wait to see that in [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]. That gives me hope.”
Eye.
The Book of Mormon – Master Class: Class 33 – Alma 48-56: Defending Yourself From the Enemy:
- [John Hilton III – 26:16-27:07] “Dr. Michael Ricks, who used to be one of my students, has been doing some very interesting research where he’s been looking at covenant-related words like ‘covenant,’ ‘oath,’ and ‘promise,’ and seeing how frequently they appear throughout the Book of Mormon. As this chart shows, in the war chapters of Alma 43 through 63, these covenant-related words are more concentrated than in any other place in the Book of Mormon. In other words, instead of calling these the ‘war chapters,’ perhaps we should call them the ‘covenant chapters.’ It might be an interesting exercise to go back and reread Alma chapters 43 through 63 with the specific lens of ‘what can these chapters teach me about honoring covenants?'”
- To me, it’s no coincidence that the Lord’s current prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, has repeatedly taught about covenants in his 40 years of service as an Apostle, and especially in the last 6 1/2 years of his service as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ. Perhaps if we honor our covenants as the People of Ammon and the Stripling Warriors honored their covenants, we can likewise survive trying times.
Read.
“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin:
- “Why is information overload such a serious problem now?
“For one thing, we’re doing more work than ever before. The promise of a computerized society, we were told, was that it would relegate to machines all of the repetitive drudgery of work, allowing us humans to pursue loftier purposes and to have more leisure time. It didn’t work out this way. Instead of more time, most of us have less. Companies large and small have off-loaded work onto the backs of consumers. Things that used to be done for us, as part of the value-added service of working with a company, we are now expected to do ourselves. With air travel, we’re now expected to complete our own reservations and check-in, jobs that used to be done by airline employees or travel agents. At the grocery store, we’re expected to bag our own groceries and, in some supermarkets, to scan our own purchases. We pump our own gas at filling stations. Telephone operators used to look up numbers for us. Some companies no longer send out bills for their services – we’re expected to log in to their website, access our account, retrieve our bill, and initiate an electronic payment; in effect, do the job of the company for them. Collectively, this is known as shadow work – it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer. Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it. It is responsible for taking away a great deal of the leisure time we thought we would all have in the twenty-first century.
“Beyond doing more work, we are dealing with more changes in information technology than our parents did, and more as adults than we did as children. The average American replaces her cell phone every two years, and that often means learning new software, new buttons, new menus. We change our computer operating systems every three years, and that requires learning new icons and procedures, and learning new locations for old menu items.”
💡
At the conclusion of an endowment session in the St. George Utah Temple this week, I had a powerful thought: In a future day when we have the opportunity to be reunited with our Heavenly Father, I wonder if the veil of forgetfulness will be lifted and we will remember our premortal life with Him? I imagined falling at His feet and marveling at how well I knew Him. I am anxiously awaiting that glorious day!