The Gospel According to Jeffrey

So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week or two, the Rapture is upon us . According to radio broadcaster  Harold Camping , tomorrow, 21 May 2011, will begin the “End Times” as millions of Christians are taken up into Heaven and everybody else—presumably including those of us who do not revere Mr. Camping as God’s duly authorized mouthpiece—will be left behind (perhaps with Kirk Cameron ) for Earth’s last five months of existence before the end. (And you thought that the end wouldn’t come until 21 December 2012. Of course, dear reader, you are wrong.) Of course, the biggest tragedy of all this is that after fourteen months of waiting, our ward’s  new meetinghouse  isn’t scheduled to be dedicated until Sunday evening, 22 May 2011. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I would think that Elder Lansing—the seventy who is scheduled to dedicate it—will presumably be twinkled into his resurrected state tomorrow, and I guess he probably won’t come back until after the tribulati

I just had a very interesting experience. I’ve technically been on Twitter for several months, but I’ve just started getting the hang of following stuff. Recently, I noticed that a lot of blogs have been using the  #mormon hash tag, so I added that to my list of stuff to follow, and the results have been—shall we say—less than 100% enjoyable. Besides the wonderful pages that have popped up with information that’s actually relevant, this morning I saw a British preacher tag his podcast with the #mormon tag. Interested, I listened to the entire thing: it was a one-hour sermon on how to identify a cult, and was actually quite good. In fact, I agreed with virtually every word he said, except when he offhandedly ran down a list of so-called “cults” and, with absolutely no indication of why he was doing so, included the slur “Mormons” as part of his rapid-fire list. It frankly rather amazed me: the whole sermon was wonderful, and then he tossed in that one, tiny, off-the-cuff slur an

“…and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God…” As I pointed out in my last post (seven months ago! Wow! How did that happen?!), education was obviously very important to Nephi. Given the fact that we are reading scripture, though, it should come as no surprise that his education includes more than just secular learning. What may surprise us, though, is how fully this integrates into the dichotomy expressed in 1 Nephi 1:1. For those that have read the Book of Mormon before, the subtle hint that Nephi has “seen many afflictions” is a subtle use of understatement. While he indubitably lived much of his life in happiness, the scriptures rarely teach us of mundanities, preferring instead to focus on the major events of the prophets’ lives. Thus, we read of many trials through which he passed, the “ refiner’s fire ”of his mortali