Thoughts and stories, by Pal

I saw this beautiful article in LDS Living, and thought it was so appropriate for Mother's Day! HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO ALL YOU DEAR MOTHERS, OR WOULD BE MOTHERS! LATEST FEATURED VIDEOS PODCASTS BOOK CLUB LESSON HELPS 7 Ways to Grow Closer to Heavenly Mother and Include Her in Your Worship by Danielle B. Wagner  | May 11, 2019 Makes You Think Mormon Life For many Latter-day Saints, there’s a desire, a yearning, to learn more about our Heavenly Mother—to feel Her presence and connect with Her on a deeper level. And that’s natural. We have Her divine DNA embedded in our souls. But sometimes  myths regarding Heavenly Mother  or uncertainty can cause us to be hesitant in incorporating Her more in our worship. “For some, I think it is cultural habits are hard to break,” says Martin Pulido, co-author of the BYU Studies essay " A Mother There”   and editor of  Dove Song . “It’s still an entrenche...

It was 150 years ago that the transcontinental railroad met at Promontory Point in Utah!  Here is a bit of history of that historic occasion, from LDS Living.    Uniting East and West: Latter-day Saints and the Transcontinental Railroad by Fred E. Woods  | May 10, 2019 Makes You Think When the coast-to-coast telegraph was completed in Salt Lake City in October 1861, Brigham Young sent a clear signal to President Abraham Lincoln: “Utah has not seceded but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country.” Less than eight years later, on May 10, 1869, hundreds gathered at Promontory, Utah, to witness another coast-to-coast completion. The driving of the last spike of the transcontinental railroad reverberated continuity to a once broken nation. 1 Railroad enthusiast Asa Whitney had strongly asserted that the Union Pacific Railroad would bring the nation “all together as one family, but with one interest—the...

This article from LDS Living has so much wisdom in it!  It has made me think a lot! 4 Ways What You Think Is Humility Could Actually Be Pride by Julie de Azevedo Hanks  | May 02, 2019 Mormon Life Pride is often referred to as the universal sin. From the perspective of Latter-day Saint theology, this seems pretty accurate; pride caused Satan to rebel against heaven, pride led to the downfall of ancient civilizations, pride is the driving factor that has caused evil individuals throughout history to come to power, and anyone who has studied the Book of Mormon has probably heard of the pride cycle. However, for this discussion, I’d like to move away from the archetypal, “big picture” idea of pride to focus on the perspective of it as an individual characteristic, that is, of personal pride. It seems that certain patterns of pride are easy to identify. I think that one of the reasons that pride is so difficult to manage, ...