The Gospel According to Jeffrey

For those of you who aren’t regular readers (either here or on my Facebook page ), I’ve been self-employed and working from home, for most of the last 10 years. While I’ve absolutely loved almost everything about this arrangement, I suddenly lost my largest client in November, decimating my business and making short work of our family’s finances. Since my wife,  Anna ’s, parents and several siblings all live in the  Lafayette, Indiana , area, we’ve usually lived there or, when work took us elsewhere, at least within an hour’s drive, give or take 15 minutes. It’s all my children know; it’s about all that Anna knows! But now, out of sheer desperation, we’ve had to widen our net. The result: last month, I accepted a job in Birmingham, Alabama , over 500 miles away. We’ll be moving there in about five weeks. This past weekend, our family made the 1,000-plus–mile round trip to go house hunting. While there are certainly a lot of positives about the position and the area, on...

First of all, if you’ve somehow missed the first four parts, I invite you to start at the beginning . Enjoy! At some point this morning, a friend wrote me to see if I had noticed the major differences between President Packer’s spoken Conference address. Curious, I decided to listen to the audio of the discourse while reading the official transcript. I didn’t have any trouble with the obvious verbal slips that anyone can make (misread words, etc.), but I thought it rather interesting that one of the paragraphs I cited in Part III —the one that had so many people up in arms—had, in fact, been slightly changed. Spoken version: “Some suppose that they were preset, and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Father.” Printed version: “Some suppose that they were preset, and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and the unnatu...