Making the Right Decisions

I was talking to a father while attending a stake conference. He was telling me about the pressures on his teenage daughter to follow the ways of the world, and how she had made the decision not to allow those pressures to influence her life.

She was the only member of the Church in her class in school. She was a popular young lady with the boys, and had many opportunities to go out on dates. The boys in her class did not live by the standards she had been taught in our Church. She made the decision to tell every boy who asked her for a date what standards she lived by. If she were to date them, they would be expected to conduct themselves in accordance with her standards. She would get such a commitment from them before she accepted a date. One day the big campus football hero came up to her before the most special dance of the year and said, “You know, I would ask you to go to the dance with me if you would lower your standards just a little.”

There was no hesitation in her voice as she replied, “If I would go out with you, I would be lowering my standards.” Be strong enough to make your decisions to not follow worldly ways.

- L. Tom Perry

Progress Through Change

C. S. Lewis indicated there is often pain in change when he wrote of God’s expectations for His children: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace”

-Marvin J. Ashton

Pornography the Deadly Carrier

Just this month I read a review of a new movie. The leading actress told the reporter that she objected initially to the script and the part she was to play. The role portrayed her as the sexual companion of a fourteen-year-old boy. She commented: “At first I said, ‘No way will I agree to such a scene.’ Then I was given the assurance that the boy’s mother would be present during all intimate scenes, so I agreed.”

I ask: Would a mother stand by “watching,” were her son embraced by a cobra? Would she subject him to the taste of arsenic or strychnine? Mothers, would you? Fathers, would we?

“I do not believe the greatest threat to our future is from bombs or guided missiles. I don’t think our civilization will die that way. I think it will die when we no longer care. Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that 19 of 21 civilizations have died from within and not by conquest from without. There were no bands playing and flags waving when these civilizations decayed. It happened slowly, in the quiet and the dark when no one was aware.”

-Thomas S. Monson

Symbolism of water, blood, and spirit

"Also: The symbolism here used helps center our attention in the atoning sacrifice of the Son. The same elements were then present:

                "Spirit (in that our Lord voluntarily gave up the Ghost, permiting his spirit to leave the body)
                "Blood (in that he there completed the act, commenced in Gethsemane, of shedding his own blood for the sins of men)
                "Water (in that when one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side...forthwith came there out blood and water. And he that saw it [John himself] bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.) (John 19:34-35)"

Pride vs Humility

"Pride is concerned with WHO is right. Humility is concerned with WHAT is right."-Ezra Taft Benson

The Human Mind

Small minds talk about people. Average minds talk about events. Great minds talk about ideas. 
-Eleanor Roosevelt

The Process of Delegating Callings

Because of the inspiration and revelation involved, a General Authority is actually divinely appointed and is approved by the Council of the Twelve before being called and set apart, and later sustained by the general conference.

To give you an example of how this works, let me share with you an experience of President Heber J. Grant. While he was a member of the Council of the Twelve, when asked by the President of the Church to submit names, he repeatedly submitted that of a very good friend of his for consideration to fill existing vacancies among the Twelve.

The man was never chosen, and President Grant is reported to have said at one time that if he ever became President of the Church, and there was a vacancy to fill, he would call that man, because he was so well qualified.

After he became President and it was necessary to fill a vacancy, he told the Lord that he knew whom he wanted, but that he wanted to select the man that the Lord wanted. The name of Melvin J. Ballard, whom President Grant knew slightly, but not too well, came into his mind and kept recurring to let him know that he was the man who should be called. He was nominated by President Grant and approved by the Twelve. He was ordained and set apart by the First Presidency and Council of the Twelve and at the following general conference was presented to those in attendance for their sustaining vote.

-N. Eldon Tanner