Two quotations from yesterday’s sacrament meeting that I thought were cool

The first from a young woman, age 15, who was baptized a few months ago. She was the first in her family to be baptized, and was followed by her mom a few weeks later. The young woman was speaking about standards and the value of living them. Her quotation: “Peer pressure is for losers.”

The second was in a great talk about tithing by a long time member of the church. She spoke of her family’s own struggle with church contributions years earlier – no miracle promotion, no pot of money to replace the contributions made; instead her husband lost his job! But here’s the quotation she used:

“Things cheaply purchased are seldom appreciated. Attitudes which cause us to look for bargains in some areas of life will carry over into more important things” (F. Burton Howard, “On Giving And Getting,” New Era, October 1985).

Her point was that the blessings of paying tithing or making other contributions in the church do not come cheaply; it does not pay for us to seek bargain blessings.

Yesterday was a good day to be in sacrament meeting.

Making the standards our own

In a recent sacrament meeting someone mentioned the idea of making the standards our own. The context was the 13th article of faith, the new Mutual theme for the year. By making standards our own, the speaker was not suggesting that we each develop our own set, but that we adopt the Lord's standards as ours.

As I thought about making the standards our own, I thought about something Sister Allred mentioned in a Relief Society leadership meeting my wife attended a few months ago. She suggested a better title for For The Strength of Youth (the standards pamphlet) would be For The Strength of You because it has value for all church members, not just the youth. (Our local RS president must have taken this to heart. This month's mid-week RS meeting is one in which our ward's young men and young women presented For The Strength of Youth to the Relief Society.)

In John, 17:7 we read, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." I think this is all about making the standards our own, taking those qualities outlined in the 13th article of faith, in the Strength of Youth pamphlet, and throughout the scriptures and living them, internalizing them, feeling their blessings in our lives. In this way, I think we follow Alma's admonition to take the countenance of Christ upon ourselves (see Alma 5:14).

This presupposes, of course, that one accepts "the standards" as what the Savior would have us do. When I have taught standards to the youth, I've suggested they are like the sign at the amusement park that says "you must be 'this' tall to ride." They tell us we where we are striving to go in our behavior to be like the Savior, and to enhance our spiritual lives.

And my own John 17:7 experience has been a positive one.

Do we get to pick and choose?

This is the first of a few essays that will be broadly linked. In this one, I explore the idea that we need to align ourselves with God instead of trying to make Him into what we want Him to be.


Have you ever met anyone who said, "I could never believe in a God who _____________," and then filled in the blank with the thing they could not tolerate.

This attitude strikes me as odd.

Perhaps it's my father's voice in my head that causes my discomfort. My family joined the church in the late 1960's; I was the youngest of my parents' four children and we were all baptized together. My parents had been very active in their protestant church prior to our joining the Mormons, but my father had expressed his concern about our church's changing because of social changes at the time.

My father's view was that if God is God, and if He does not change, then the church should not vote about what was true this year or not. For my father, God was a fixed point, a given. And it was up to us to discover who He was, not to create Him in or change Him to the image we liked.

So when someone tells me he prefers the God of the New Testament to the God of the Old Testament, I'm confused. (Now I've written before about the fact that the Old Testament also teaches the need for love of God and love of fellowman, just as the New Testament does.) Or if he wants to select a la carte the characteristics of a God he can believe in.

It seems to me what our job is in this regard is to discover God, not to create Him. We can discover Him through study of the scriptures, through revelation through the prophets (including modern prophets), and have those truths ratified through our own personal spiritual experience.

Personally I'm guided by some counsel I received from Elder Theodore Burton of the Seventy while I was on my mission. He taught in a zone conference that those things the Lord felt most strongly about He tended to say more than once in the scriptures. He suggested that teachings that appear only in one obscure verse might not be as significant as those broad themes that get repeated play.

Perhaps you've had a similar experience to mine that in General Conferences I sometimes hear themes emerge from a particular session. It may be I hear those themes because I come to the conference with questions, but I don't think that's always the case.

In any event, I am reluctant to couch my faith and testimony in terms of what I want God to be like; instead I try to understand how He has revealed Himself to be. My understanding continues to grow and develop, even 43 years since my baptism. But it's not God that's changing. It's me. And hopefully, I'm changing for the better.

A higher standard?

Do you hold yourself to a higher standard than you do others? Sometimes I think I do, and I wonder if I should.

I tell myself I do it out of tolerance, and in an effort not to judge. But do I?

I grew up LDS (from about age 9) in a non-LDS community. Except for my sisters, I was usually the only Mormon in my school, and the older I got, the more divergent my standards (or better said in those early days, my family's standards) were from those of my friends and classmates. Now in the professional world, I work with very few church members, so I am in the same boat.

Even among church members, some of us attend more regularly; some go to the temple more often (and some don't go); some are more consistent about holding Family Home Evening than others, and so on.

My parents never taught me to have friends only in the church. It would have been difficult to do so as I was the only boy my age at church. But even if I had many friends at church, my folks would not have wanted me to isolate myself on some Mormon social island. We have also encouraged our kids to have friends at church and outside the church. We live in a non-Mormon community, but there are more kids my kids' ages at church than I had, and they are fortunate to have good friends there, too. But they also have friends at school who aren't LDS. Some of those friends are religious in their own families and others aren't.

While I know what my standards are, is it fair or reasonable to assume those I associate with will have the same standards? In high school I was fortunate to have a group of friends who, while they did not always share my standards, at least respected them. (The weekend of high school graduation, most handed me a can of Sprite at the door, warning me that the punch was spiked.) My work colleagues are respectful of my choice not to drink alcohol. And they know better than to ask me to go places where I wouldn't take my wife. And many have learned to be more mindful of their language around me (though I've never asked them to).

Some of our children as teenagers have had friends who really pushed my tolerance envelope, however. It almost seems they sought friends who were on the very edge, and I wondered how to respond. (To tell them not to associate with those kids would have been foolhardy; by this time they were old enough to make these choices, and they were making them.) We generally tried to be gracious when these friends came by, and the friends were generally respectful of us when they were in our home. But we worried.

The questions that linger in my mind: how do we teach our children right from wrong, and still teach our children to be tolerant of others? Are my standards higher or just different? We use the phrase "love the sinner, hate the sin", but even that phrase smacks of judgment to me. Or is it my place to understand what God expects of ME (and only me) and live accordingly? Is my telling myself that I have higher (or different) standards than others allow me (or force me) to judge others in, even in some passive way? And is that ok or not?

I'm interested in your thoughts and experience.