Mason Wheeler

May as well post this here. I'm in Orem, Utah, living in a little apartment with my wife. But not for long. We just closed on a house last week, also in Orem, and will be moving early next month. Here's the crazy bit, though. While we were there a few days ago, we happened to run into some neighbors who struck up a conversation with us. The subject of geeky interests came up, and they asked the question, "do you like Brandon Sanderson?" My wife just laughed and nodded at me. "Oh, he's like his biggest fan." Not strictly true, but... well... So then the neighbors pointed to the house next to ours and told us who lives there: Janci Patterson!

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, my faith hasn't "impacted" me so much as defined me. Without the Church: My parents would never have met each other at BYU, so I wouldn't be here I would have had far less of a reason not to make certain harmful life choices that I've managed to avoid I would never have served a mission in Argentina, ended up learning Spanish, developing a life-long love for the people, their culture, and particularly their food My brother wouldn't have gotten me, as a birthday present back in 2006, a couple books by an up-and-coming LDS author, called Elantris and Mistborn. I would have missed out on multiple different career opportunities that came via friends from church, including the one that brought me to where I'm living now, which is where I met my wife In a very literal sense, it's made me who I am today. The person I would be without it would be unrecognizable.

When Bitcoin first came out, I looked at the idea, and the technology involved, and thought "this will never amount to anything more than one big scam." Turns out I was wrong. Over the years, it's turned into a fractal scam, with smaller scams inside the big one, and smaller scams still inside of them!

When I was very young, I honestly used to think that Chinese people must be very poor, because they can't afford forks and knives to eat with, just sticks.

@Thaidakar the Ghostblood "If the situation is not changing, then God is using the situation to change you" is an interesting idea, and is probably true some of the time, but that's definitely not a general principle. Keep in mind the Parable of the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1–8) where Jesus explains that righteous desires will be fulfilled eventually, even if it does take a while, and you have to keep praying and have faith that the Lord will act in his own due time.

Congratulations, Elder Silhouette!

It's just politics. It turns out that a long history of living prudently and operating within your means, plus several decades of compounded investment gains, can add up to a lot of money, and people looking to make trouble for the Church are pointing to that money and saying "they must be doing something wrong; why aren't they spending it on [thing I think is more important than what the Church is doing]?!?"

Palmyra. It's set on a hill overlooking the historic Smith family land, and President Hinckley personally requested that people inside the temple be able to look out on the Sacred Grove.

My wife and I went there last night. Inside, I noticed that all the windows were big, elaborate stained glass numbers. Church trivia: That's the way all the windows in all the temples are... with one exception. There is one place in the entire world where there are Temple windows of plain, clear glass. Quick, without looking it up, does anyone know where and why?

Honestly, I think that would really suck. Can you imagine being called to serve in the area of Disneyland, being stuck there for two years and never being able to visit it?

Keep in mind that "pursuit" was a noun meaning "thing with which one occupies one's time," not a verb meaning "chasing after," 250-ish years ago.

I hear ya. As a kid I lived in Millerton, NY for a while, a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere. It was an hour's drive to church and an hour back each week.

I'll never forget the first thing my mission president said to me in my first interview. I knew he had originally lived near me, but I wasn't expecting "Elder Wheeler, I understand your bishop is [bishop's name.] I know him, he's a good man." Turns out he used to be my bishop's bishop!

Like I said above, all sorts of problems come from substituting feeling for thinking. It would be a lot easier to find common ground with people if, when someone said something they don't like, people would stop for a moment and think about whether it's true or not, and whether part of it is true or not, before responding with an emotional reaction.

Largely because of how common it is for that "more" to come at the expense of others. This isn't always the case by any means, but it's common enough that everyone's familiar with plenty of examples of rapacious people who climbed to the top over a pile of unfortunate victims one way or another. The real problem comes when people weaponize these well-understood concepts to sow discord and ill will with malicious lies. For example, you've probably heard some variation on "how can [person] have [amount of money] and honestly say they're making the world a better place, when we've got [number] starving people in the world? Don't they know that it would only take [smaller amount of money] to cure world hunger?" This is obviously completely false — even the most simplistic understanding of supply and demand will tell you exactly how that scheme would fall apart if someone actually tried to buy up [smaller amount of money] worth of food all at once — but it sadly doesn't stop people from saying things like that to prey on people's emotions. It seems to me that finding common ground and peaceful unity really requires calm, sober reflection and analysis of the world around us, which is really not in fashion in these days of outrage and inflamed passions. I once heard someone lament that "too many people not only don't know how to think, they don't even know what thinking is. They confuse it with feeling."

OK, since there are a bunch of people from Utah here, I might as well ask. Do we have any locals here who are free tomorrow evening? I was a crowdfunding backer of Angel Studios' new film His Only Son, and they sent me two tickets to the premiere event tomorrow in Vineyard. I was going to go with my wife, but she works evenings and wasn't able to get the time off tomorrow, so now I have a second ticket and nothing to do with it. First come, first served. If you can make it to Megaplex Theatres at Geneva tomorrow by 5 PM, PM me and the premiere event ticket's yours. You don't have to "attend with me" or sit by me; I just don't want it to go to waste. The event runs until 9 PM; I don't know where in that 4-hour block the movie will actually be played. EDIT: And the ticket's been claimed now.

According to a friend from Idaho, even summer can be winter; he said they once had snow on the Fourth of July.

My brother says that in Utah, we don't have 4 seasons. We have summer, we have winter, and in between we have brief border disputes between the two where they fight over which season it gets to be.

March comes in like a penguin and goes out like a... nother penguin.

How come?

Congratulations on that! You got a response and were able to recognize it! From the scripture I linked earlier: It seems that you've taken this first step and found that it is indeed delicious to you, and honestly that's pretty awesome. Now... keep going. Keep praying, and keep listening with your heart, and the responses will come. They won't always be as powerful as this first one — you don't need something big to prove to you what you already know at this point — but I promise you, you will receive what you need, from one who knows what you truly need and who loves you.

To be fair, it really depends on the sibling. Those of us who have several will know exactly what I mean...

Agreed. This is why I said that @Shadowed knows that these are thoughts coming from an external source. I've experienced the same thing myself; an idea comes to me that doesn't follow from what I was thinking about at the time, that isn't the way I think about things, that I shouldn't have had any good reason to know about... and then it turns out to be correct, for no good reason that I can honestly attribute to myself. I've had these pieces of inspiration help me with my job, I've had them help me in social situations, I've had them help me out of danger I didn't realize I was in until afterwards. It doesn't happen as often as I'd like, but it happens enough to be recognizable, to understand that it's something real and trustworthy. Something worth putting my faith in, that I can say "I know this is real and it's true." And the Gospel tells me what it is, why it's there, and what I should do about it.

You know yourself. You know that this is not how you think; you've just said as much. You were raised on atheist, rationalist skepticism and brought up to believe that way. So as a rational skeptic, is it truly rational to believe that these thoughts and feelings which are so alien to the way your mind works are coming from within your own mind that does not work that way? By the principle of Occam's Razor, which alternative seems less unlikely? Your brain has spontaneously started thinking in a whole different way for no good reason, while at the same time leaving you unchanged enough to notice that this is not the way you normally think. The ideas that seem like something external are, in fact, being fed to your mind from an external source, and your parents were simply mistaken about the atheism stuff. It's perfectly possible for perfectly valid, logical reasoning to lead you to a false conclusion, if you begin from an incorrect premise. (This is known as ex falso quodlibet, roughly translated as "a falsehood can imply anything to be true.") If you're going to ask us, specifically, for help, probably the best thing any of us could point you to comes from the Book of Mormon. The scriptural language may not be something you're used to, but it's not that hard to follow. I'd like you to have a look at Alma chapter 32, particularly from verse 27 on, where it explains a process of experimentation that you can use to go from "no more than [a] desire to believe," to testing and experimenting on the principle of faith, to learning and knowing for yourself that it is a good and true principle. Any of us can tell you that yes, Jesus is real, and his love for you is real, and can be felt in your heart in the way you're describing, and most of us are quite willing to do so. But if you ask a bunch of "wise experienced LDS peoples," our answer will be to take it one step further: to learn and acquire this understanding for yourself rather than simply taking our word for it, because that's our doctrine. The evidence of faith is just as real, and just as testable, as the evidence of science, but there is one very significant difference: on the faith side, no one else can perform the experiments for you. It's an intensely personal, individual matter that you simply can't get just by believing that someone else ran this experiment and got the right results.

One Week. Sorry, I kind of figured the song was well-known enough that it would be obvious to anyone who read the altered lyrics.