Thoughts and stories, by Pal

   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 with an expectation that my

  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 of an unfinished manuscript about the ext