Eran of Arcadia

I lived in VA (part of the DC South mission) after college and met my wife there.

To be serious: I think the church handbook says you can be excommunicated if you actually get gender surgery, but otherwise openly identifying as trans (with a new name and pronouns) is considered "discouraged" but at the same time, the church will update your records to reflect your gender identity.

Also if You Could Hie to Kolob, Come Thou Fount, Joseph Smith's First Prayer, Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy, and many more.

My wife and I co-taught Primary for a while until they called her as YW President. It was great.

Not everyone's personal circumstances allow them to do everything in the Church, but everyone's personal circumstances allow them to have a relationship with Christ and to gain exaltation. I can't guarantee what other people will or won't say about it, but I know plenty of people who didn't serve missions - some of whom could have, and some of whom are close friends - and I don't usually see people judge them.

I read somewhere that 90% of missionaries who leave a significant other behind break up (or get dumped) before the end of their mission, and 70% of the remainder break up after they come home. I don't know how accurate that data is. (Also I had never been on a real date before leaving for my mission so . . . )

Well, for what it's worth (and no I'm not biased) a foreign-language mission in the US is the best kind.

Hey I served a mission in the California Arcadia mission speaking Spanish! I came home in 2004, which was probably before you were born.

Has anyone read this article? I saw it on Reddit but I didn't want to talk about it there - Reddit doesn't like the church very much, and anyways they kind of think of religion and politics in rather binary terms over there. One thing I have observed is that people see the way he writes Jasnah and assume that means he's secretly an atheist. Never mind that he writes religiously devout characters just as well - apparently both theists and atheists can write theist characters, but only atheists can write atheist characters, or some such. I really do admire how well he writes other voices than his own, but I'm not sure I always agree with him on what is often called "progressivism." Thoughts?

Haha you don't have to be an adult to be a missionary. I spent half my mission daydreaming about dinosaurs.

I mean, if we're talking Donner Party/plane-crash-in-the-Andes style survival cannibalism, I don't think there's anything that prohibits it. Killing some rando so you can eat them is right out, of course.

I'm firmly in the "Pluto belongs in the dwarf planet class," but I also have to say that my astronomy-obsessed daughter paid far more attention to Sister Browning's talk than to any other.

Fun times in Sacrament meeting today: the congregational hymn was "True to the Faith" and we stood up to sing it, but we only sang one verse. So everyone sang "faithful and true, we will ever stand," and then immediately sat down.

I was, for 3 years, the only member in my entire high school.

Well I was part of a service project to help build the Palmyra Temple, my ward was the first youth group to do baptisms there, and it's where I got my endowments. On the other hand I was sealed to both my parents, and my wife in the Washington DC Temple.