Enabled by Grace

I'd like to offer my sincere apologies for having not written sooner. After my last post I got an internship down in Utah and moved down there. It's been very exciting to work with local city government to get necessary things accomplished. I'm looking forward to seeing how my work influences the city decisions. Also my wife, Wendy and I are expecting our first child later this year. We're very excited about welcoming our little girl into our new family. Wendy and I also visited Idaho about a month ago to visit friends and family. I'm close to finishing up my internship. I'm currently reading the Foundation series and Dad is rereading it.

My sister Catherine has a skill for making shirts and Onesies. At my request a few months ago she taught me how to make them. I came up with a design and then most of the execution with her careful oversight. This is the result.

The concept comes from one of my favorite TV shows the Avatar: the Last Airbender.
Here are two other shirts Catherine's made for me.

The above one is also from Avatar.

This shirt comes from a book called "The Little Prince". The quote on the back reads "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". The quote is in French because I wanted a shirt with French on it that wasn't something mundane like "J'aime Paris" or "I love Paris".

So I came across a concept that I really like. It came from a talk in the last April session of LDS General Conference. The talk was by Elder Cardon entitled "The Savior Wants to Forgive". I liked the concept so much that I made it into a diagram which makes me feel like I understand it pretty well. Elder Cardon explains that if we seek the Lord's grace that it will be granted to us and make weak things strong. Endowed with this grace we are then capable of accomplishing tasks that we normally would not be able to do alone. It's a really simple message but it was something that really stuck out to me. It's something that I really believe to me true because I've searched for grace and been enabled to do things that I never thought I would be able to do.

I hope y'all have a good week!

Being Sensitive....to the Spirit that is

I figure I will start out by updating you on what happened yesterday. This is what happened: woke up, work, lunch, homework, comforting a friend, homework, dinner, dance, evening chat. Here's the best best picture of me and a couple of my friends at the dance.
Megan, try not to make weird noises or twitch too much when you see this photo.

Today, I got up and went to Church was good but could have been better if I had managed to get to sleep a bit earlier.

So as today I found a theme that the Lord has given me for the last week. It like my title indicates, that we need to be sensitive to the Spirit. I have to say that is something that I struggled with remaining sensitive to the Spirit. It requires a lot of repenting and doing the right thing no matter how tired, hungry, or what type of 'mood' you are in. It also requires not giving in to those ideas to say something that you know will drive the Spirit away or is inappropriate.

This afternoon, I was reading a devotional given by Elder Bednar when he was just President Bednar of BYU-Idaho, entitled "Line Upon Line" which has some of the same material he used in his talk during the April general conference "The Spirit of Revelation". I found this talk because it was recommended to my teacher Brother Lon Pyper, who has been a spiritual mentor of sorts for me up here, back in 2009 while I struggling to make a decision. I think I'll try to get a picture with him so that you, my dear readers, can have a face with the name but I digress. In this talk he talks about how if we are keeping the commandments and are diligent then we will receive revelation. He says that often times "we receive a series of seemingly small and incremental spiritual impressions and nudges, which in totality constitute the desired confirmation about the correctness of the path which we are pursuing." I like that quote because I've started noticing those 'nudges'. He also talks about the relationship between faith, obedience, wisdom and desire, which I have diagrammed below.

Faith --> Obedience --> Wisdom --> Greater desire for added light and truth

I would also like to note that it dawned on me today, that while Elder Bednar gave both of these talks, the difference being that he was ordained an Apostle in between them, that he has the same basic testimony that he has always had; though his testimony of the principles of the gospel is obviously much stronger now then it was then.

So I would like to encourage you, mes chèrs lecteurs et lectrices, to try to remain sensitive to the Spirit. I promise you that as you do the Lord will guide and help you. He will sustain you in your trials and amplify your joys amid your sorrows. I hope that each you have a good week as you strive to be sensitive to the Spirit.

Faith, Agency, and Knowledge

I believe that most of my readers will be already be familiar with the fact that I am now dating a very pretty and active young lady by the name, Kara Wheat; I am very happy about this. I'm happy to have her as a good influence in my life.

I recently finished reading "The Lectures on Faith" written by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. It's about eighty pages of deep reading. Oftentimes you need to stop and think about what you've just read.

In the lectures, it says that three things are needed for faith to be productive and fruitful. They are 1) a belief that God exists 2) a correct knowledge of His attributes and perfections and 3) a knowledge that one's life is in harmony with the Lord's will. In part of the book it is explained why we need to have an understanding of each attribute and perfection of God and how a lack of even one of them weakens our faith. It reminded me that I need to perfect my own personal testimony of each one. So while I was reading this, I thought about the relationships between faith, agency and knowledge. Last week, I was teaching my family history class and I needed to make fill the rest of the time that my lesson hadn't. So I got a discussion going with my class about this and other things from the lectures on faith. I showed them a simple diagram I came up with to help visualize the relationship.

I should mention that for one of my classes we have to diagram cause and effect for each theory we read so I feel it's getting to me, in a good way.

We discussed the diagram and found that I was missing Incentive. In the end the diagram looked like this.

We found that agency well used increases faith and agency poorly used has the opposite effect. We talked about faith or lack of faith can effect our agency and what we do or don't do. We then talked about how if we have more knowledge of good things then it will increase our faith. The more we develop faith then it will finish by becoming a perfect knowledge. We decided that as our knowledge increases that it then gives us more incentive which in turn increases our agency. It then becomes obvious that we can then use our agency to gain more knowledge. Honestly I think that this fascinating to reflect upon but then again I may just be a gospel nerd.

I hope and pray that we can do a little better at exercising our faith and enlarging our knowledge. I know that as we do so accompanied by humble prayer that the Lord will bless our efforts. I hope that this has helped someone better understand faith and its effects. May the Lord bless your faith is my prayer.