Who was on the Lord’s side, who?

(Nutshell for Non-LDS: Mormons believe that everyone alive once dwelled with God before being born. Before the world was even formed there was a war in Heaven, as John’s Revelation made famous, and this war was about whether we should be allowed to make mistakes when that would mean we would suffer, or if our lives should be so controlled that nobody would be able to sin or choose wrongly at all. Satan advocated for the latter, and the rest is mythology.)

If the War in Heaven was a war of words, an essentially missionary war, and nobody was won over from the Bad Side to the Good Side, then it had to have been the most supremely ineffective missionary effort of all time. Which means that we need to consider…

How many of us were once on Satan’s side of that war?

Gratitude

People often remember to be thankful for the big things, like their children or having food on the table. And when they think to be thankful for the little things, they think about their mother's sense of humor or the way that their friend is always able to sit down for five minutes when they need to Talk.

I won't dispute that they're little things, but if that's what we're going to term them then maybe we should also classify them as deep things. And in that case, why not have take a moment to be thankful for the shallow things, too? Yeah, they don't mean much, but they're still there and they're still nice.

I'm thankful for Jack's pizza. I'm thankful for Doctor Who. I'm thankful for Harry Potter fanfiction, and fanfiction in general, and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in particular. I'm thankful for notebooks and pencils and my missionary planner that I've been able to adapt to civilian life, because it makes life a little bit simpler. I'm thankful for chocolate, and I'm thankful for Homestuck, and for pillows, and for the Animorphs series.

I want to say that I'm thankful for these things and for so many other little, shallow things that don't really matter, because even if they don't matter they're still there, and not being thankful for them doesn't mean that I'm wise. It just means that I'm ungrateful.

What are some of the shallow things that you're thankful for?

All things holy

See also: Shakespeare's Beam

I was in the car the other day watching buildings pass by, when it struck me, as it had many times before, that the act of creation is something holy. Something that partakes of the divine nature and mimics, in its own small way, the myriad acts of creation performed by God.

Immediately after this realization, however, there came to me the thought of my time working at McDonald's and Jack in the Box. Making many hundreds of cheap hamburger patties of the lowest quality that the customer would tolerate was surely not a sacred act.

When I see a contradiction like this there a few possibilities. The first is that I don't have enough information at hand and that there isn't a contradiction at all. In this conflict there didn't seem to be that situation. Besides that, though, it could be that the original premise was wrong. Or, finally, that the premise is so right that it forces me to reconsider other ideas that I held.

It was the third possibility that was proven in this situation, immediately after I relinquished my hold on the original premise. Creative acts were something holy, and making cheap hamburger patties was a creative act. And any paradox that I saw here, I realized, was purely my own invention.

Perhaps it seems frivolous. Perhaps it often is. But those hamburgers fed people. They relieved hunger. They sated appetites. For some who couldn't get anything more expensive, those hamburgers were as good as ambrosia.

It's such a little thing, but it still did something. Maybe it wasn't as much of a waste of my time as I first thought.

The Redemption of Shemesh

Note: I apologize for my lateness in posting this. I was caught up in wanting perfection for this story. 

There once was a young man, or a horror shaped in the likeness of a young man, whose name was Hastur. He was the moon, or, in other words, his light was not his own. He had light, but it was only a light that had been taken from others, and he gave nothing of his own in return to she that had loved him. His true name, spoken only in the wild places and in terrified whispers, was Darkness, and the name of his dominion the same.

Out of the mouth of babes

"Behold, it came to pass on the morrow that the multitude gathered themselves together, and they both saw and heard these children; yea, even babes did open their mouths and utter marvelous things; and the things which they did utter were forbidden that there should not any man write them." 3 Nephi 26:16

Isn't it curious how the little ones can sometimes be the spiritual leaders in a home?

Sometimes they don't pick up on what's going on. Sometimes the situation is too complicated for them to comprehend. And sometimes they pick up on what God's trying to say so much faster than anyone else.

Perhaps it's unusual for someone with this kind of message to admit that children are not a uniform crowd of Yodas but, quite often, don't come running with pearls of wisdom spilling out their mouths. There is much about children that should never, under any circumstances, be emulated. Sometimes they are the most charitable of God's children, but there are other times that they can be vicious monsters that ruthlessly seize upon anything that makes another child different from the pack.

When Jesus tells us to become as little children, we wants us to be childlike rather than childish. There are some things of childhood that must be discarded. He wants us to take all the good that we can find in the nature of children, discard the rest, and to this goodness add the wisdom of serpents and the learning of priests.

We grow beyond childhood for a reason. To innocence let us add experience. To the stillness that oft lets children hear the words of God where only silence greets their parents, let us add the wisdom that allows us to act correctly on what we have heard.

Fiction: Afflatus

The scarecrow looked behind him. As far as he could see there was the desert. Somewhere out there was the train that had taken him as far as the rails of the Bad Road would go. After he had disembarked, he had rented a horse and gone many days further, until he had reached the small shack that now sat before him in the distance.

Wisdom from the Tree of Life

Go to the flower, thou malagrug; consider his ways, and be wise: How he moves, and how he is still.

For the lady of the house takes him in her hand and moves him from room to room, and sets him here, then there, and thus the flower goes. And where he is set, he remains, and how she adjusts him, he remains; his image and his incline are according to the eye of her desire. As she cuts, transplants, and bends, he yields beneath her touch.

Where he is, he is, until she takes him up again. Where he is, he stands, and his beauty is beheld by all; it cannot be hid. He drinks of the still water of his rest, and his bread is the light that is without end.

And as he was taken from the garden of his beginning, he is dying. And he leaves petals behind in every place that he is taken, here a little, there a little. He does not look toward them as the lady takes him elsewhere, nor think back to them, but is content for knowing that, wheresoever he might go, some of him is left behind.

Where his lady moves him, there he is, until she moves him yet again, and in this he fills the measure of his creation.