Making our history one step at a time
God loves you as an individual, with all your facets, talents, quirks and all. The Plan of Salvation isn't a cookie cutter, and God isn't a perfected bureaucrat, trying to fit us into a celestial Gantt chart. It's all about you.
For a time in my singles ward, I thought I would be doomed to eternity as a ministering angel. Is this the God that is no respecter of persons? And I'm not the only one who has or is feeling like they don't have a place in God's plan.
I love this image of the wounded healer. We all have something that is broken. But we all can offer our love and care to those who are lonely, anxious, or in pain.
I recently had a friend ask me, why did you, a gay Latter-Day Saint who had every reason to leave the Church, choose to stay? How did you keep your faith? I wanted to write down some of my thoughts as I've been pondering this.
My favorite image from this book is of God willing to be overruled by his children: "My sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me." When we see injustice in the world, even at the hands of a church, we should seek to confront it and make it better.
"Teach lessons, not people." Oh. Wait. Got that backwards. "Teach people, not lessons." The targets we use to quantify success can lead to (often harmful) unintended consequences.
Feeling emotion at church can either be some of the most uplifting or make me feel phoney and suspicious of the feeling itself. Is how we feel important?
Lowell Bennion is my hero. "Nothing matters ultimately in any setting—in marriage, the family, school, the church, the community, the world—except what happens to persons."
Could trying to walk in someone else's shoes ever be a bad thing? Many would argue that empathy is central to the development of morality. Bloom argues otherwise: that empathy acts like a spotlight, biasing us to short-term answers and parochial solutions.
