My Place to Reflect

In the October 2014 General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , Elder Larry Kacher gave a talk, " Trifle Not with Sacred Things ." He started with a personal experience about swimming in the Indian ocean on the coast of Oman and being caught in a rip-current. The flow of water was quickly pulling him away from the safety of the shore and attempting to swim against the current was of no use . Ultimately, he escaped the current and returned to shore tired and grateful for his life, and the life of his wife who had followed behind him. At this point in the talk, Elder Kacher said: There are many currents in this earthly life—some safe and others not. President Spencer W. Kimball taught that there are powerful forces in our own lives much like the unseen currents of the ocean. These forces are real. We should never ignore them. As I was preparing for a talk in our congregation's Sacrament meeting  (November 23, 2014), I decided to find out more...

The Watchmaker: Being Methodical in Planning for Success As a Scoutmaster and counselor in a ward Young Men presidency, I attended a stake priesthood leadership meeting as part of our stake conference this weekend. Explanatory Aside : In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , congregations are organized into geographical units called wards; a group of wards in a geographic region forms a stake, which references the Old Testament scripture, "Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes" ( Isaiah 54:2 ). In this meeting, a member of our stake presidency referred to the Watchmaker analogy . This analogy is to the effect that if you were to be walking through a desert and came upon a perfectly functioning pocket watch, then your thought would not be that the watch had happened due to random fluctuations in nature, but rather that there had been a watchmaker t...