Thoughts and stories, by Pal

  Jacob’s Answer to Parental Despair: The Olive Tree and the Antichrist  By  Joseph Grenny  · July 7, 2022 In the past seven years I have loved and lost hundreds of precious sons and daughters. And I have seen inexplicable miracles in the lives of hundreds more. I know what it means to have “joy and great hopes… that they would walk in the paths of righteousness” on one day, and to feel the searing agony of seeing them throw it all away on the next. Through it all I’ve learned that almost all losses are temporary, and that much of my parental misery comes from my misunderstanding of redemptive labor. My extended family lives at an unusual school called The Other Side Academy. Adult men and women come to us after decades of homelessness, scores of arrests and after perpetrating innumerable acts of evil. They live with us for 2-4 years. We labor with them as they struggle through confronting monstrous demons. I’ve watched them find rewarding careers, reunite with aband...

   Are We Losing?: A Gospel Perspective on Imperfect Families  By  Joseph Grenny  · May 10, 2022 A 91-year-old friend recently called with an urgent plea for help making sense of the circumstances of her posterity. She listed how many of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren suffered from sexual or drug addictions, rejected the Church after declaring themselves L, G, B, T, or Q, or lost their testimonies for various reasons. She concluded her spiritual census with despair, “Is there any hope?” I vaguely recall a seminary lesson back in 1974 in which my instructor assured us that if we consistently attended Church services, read our scriptures, and held weekly Family Home Evening our future children would be similarly faithful. I won’t swear that my memory of that lesson is perfect, after all I was 14 years old, it was 6:30am, and I was simultaneously admiring a cute girl in the class. But I know I’m not the only one who emerged from my early Church years wit...

  Larry Barkdull, the writer of this article, was a speci al friend of mine, in 1989, and 1990.  He then was the publisher of Sonos Music, which sold Latter Day Saint music, and he published 3 Simplified Music Books that I wrote.  He later became so incapacitated by giving one of his kidneys to a son who needed it, that he sold his company to Music Art West, which became Jackman Music.  My music books weren't published again, but a couple or so years ago Jackman Music was sold, and the new owners found a copy of my Simplified Primary book, among their inventory, and republished it again.  He is such a brilliant writer, and I hope you'll enjoy this he wrote as much as I did.  I'll try to publish new additions to this as they come out.  This is the cover of the current copy.  The first one was blue. Can we Work with More Power and Faith?  By  Larry Barkdull  · July 18, 2022 Before he died, Larry Barkdull had written a substantial part...