Thoughts and stories, by Pal

  Patterns in Stories of Lasting Healing From Depression By  Jacob Z. Hess  · January 26, 2023 This is a longer post, but is very much worth reading! The following first appeared  on Public Square Magazine .  What can we learn from people who find sustainable healing from depression?  This has been a question burning under my fingernails ever since learning about a remarkable researcher named Kelly Turner. Dr. Kelly Turner noticed  something usual in her early studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Across the 1,000+ cases of “spontaneous” or “radical” remission from cancer (where someone heals in a statistically unlikely way after conventional medicine has failed), very few questions were asked of the survivors themselves. So, she set about doing just that—conducting interviews with initially just 20 people and ultimately gathering many hundreds of stories all around the world. Her findings are summarized in the bestseller,  Rad...

 This really made me think!  Everywhere we go we see this ----   ! Are We Guilty of Latter-day Idolatry? By  H. Wallace Goddard  · February 6, 2023 In his stirring message,  The False Gods We Worship , President Spencer W. Kimball suggested that many of us Latter-day Saints are guilty of idolatry. Idolatry! That seems like a harsh indictment for such an earnest people who do so many good things. Yet he challenged us: In spite of our delight in defining ourselves as modern, and our tendency to think we possess a sophistication that no people in the past ever had—in spite of these things, we are, on the whole, an idolatrous people—a condition most repugnant to the Lord. Idolatry is the worship of someone or something other than God as though it were God. Satan is clever. He knows that we are unlikely to place a golden calf in our living room and convene the family for prayer around it. We know better than that. So, he uses a more cunning method to push u...

      To those dear readers who occasionally read my blog: I truly am sorry for not writing for the last 7 weeks!  I got a slipped disk in my back, and I was in a fair amount of pain, and I basically became quite sedentary!  Just this last Monday I was able to get into a pain specialist doctor and get a shot in my lower right back, which has taken away quite a bit of the pain.  Also during this time, I had a lot of nerve twitching, and tremors all the time in my right foot!  It was so noticable whenever I walked, that I sat most of the time!  I didn't dare drive, as that was my driving foot!     I have been to a good chiropractor, who has done traction, electrical stimulation, etc. but I stubbornly had decided to go only 2 times a month -- to save money! I'm going again today--driving myself!      I learned that my thinking was quite wrong, when I saw my sister who had so much pain in her back due to having gone ...

  Inside Church Headquarters: A glimpse into the Church’s welfare and humanitarian efforts From the bishops’ storehouse at Welfare Square, the Presiding Bishopric talks about the Church’s worldwide welfare and humanitarian efforts By  Sydney Walker     3 Dec 2022, 10:00 PM MST From left, Bishop W. Christopher Waddell, first counselor; Bishop L. Todd Budge, second counselor; and Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé chat with volunteers and missionaries at the bishops’ storehouse at Welfare Square in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022.   Laura Seitz, Deseret News     Editor’s note: This is the next part of an Inside Church Headquarters series on the Presiding Bishopric. Walking down aisles of food at the bishops’ storehouse at Welfare Square in Salt Lake City, the  Presiding Bishopric  greeted missionaries and volunteers one by one, praising them for keeping the facility clean and organized.  One of those missionaries was Elder Jordan Co...