Prophets Speak: Elder Richard G. Scott and President James E. Faust

One of the conference talks that I read this week that caught my eye was the talk by Elder Scott entitled, “The Sanctity of Womanhood.” This talk was delivered in the Priesthood Session on April 1, 2000.

Some of the quotes that stood out were:

“So many of our sisters are disheartened, even discouraged, and disillusioned.  Others are in serious trouble because of the choices they make.  Satan has unleashed a seductive campaign to undermine the sanctity of womanhood, to deceive the daughters of God and divert them from their divine destiny.  He well knows women are the compassionate, self-sacrificing, loving power that binds together the human family.  He would focus their interest solely on their physical attributes and rob them of their exalting roles as wives and mothers.  He has convinced many of the lie that they are third-class citizens in the kingdom of God.  That false hood has led some to trade their divinely given femininity for male coarseness…

Because it is their nature to give and please others, many women do not realize their intrinsic worth. That loss makes them vulnerable to those who would convince them that their major role is to be physically appealing.

“So many of our own young women sacrifice their God-given endowment of femininity, deep spirituality, and a caring interest in others on the altar of popular, worldly opinion.”

Satan is so loud in trying to get us distracted, turn us into males, and/or destroy our belief in our inherent individual worth.  I am grateful for Elder Scott reminding us of our worth and our importance in God’s plan.

In the Young Women’s meeting given the week before President Faust taught along the same theme,

“I wonder if you sisters fully understand the greatness of your gifts and talents and how all of you can achieve the “highest place of honor” in the Church and in the world.  One of your unique, precious, and sublime gifts is your femininity, with its natural grace, goodness, and divinity.  Femininity is not just lipstick, stylish hairdos, and trendy clothes.  It is the divine adornment of humanity.  It finds expression in your qualities of your capacity to love, you spirituality, delicacy, radiance, sensitivity, creativity, charm, graciousness, gentleness, dignity, and quiet strength.  It is manifest differently in each girl or woman, but each of you possesses it.  Femininity is part of your inner beauty.”

Spiritual Creations

I recently finished reading Elder Bednar’s new book, Increase in Learning: Spiritual patters for obtaining your own answers. 

There are only four chapters in the book. At the end of each chapter there are several “readings” that help the reader learn more about the principles taught.  These readings are his previous related conference and CES talks.  The four chapters are:

1. Our Individual Responsibility to Learn
2. Knowledge, Understanding, and Intelligence
3. Prayerful Inquiry: Asking, Seeking, and Knocking
4. Doctrines, Principles and Applications

This book is power packed with some fantastic tools to help us learn through the Spirit better.  At times there were certain parts that seemed overly simplistic.  Yet, as I took the time to reread and pray I realized there was a great depth of “hidden treasures of knowledge.”  There is so much more for me to understand with this book, but two of the biggest lessons I learned were: spiritually creating your day and the why, the what, and the how of the gospel.

At the recent World Wide Training they talked a lot about the why, the what, and the how of the gospel, or so I’ve been told.  I hear the Training will be (is already?) available on line for us to listen to.  I look forward to that.  Included in the book by Elder Bednar is a DVD that helps with learning and understanding the principles taught in the book.  The interview was particularly helpful in understanding more concretely what Elder Bednar meant with the why, the what, and the how of the gospel.  I’m not going to write more about that only to say these principles have been very helpful in being a parent and also for myself trying to learn what the lord is trying to teach me.

I do want to write about the principle of spiritually creating our day.  On first glance the principle was basic and I thought I already had that down.  Ever think that?  On rereading it I realized there was much to it.  After rereading and rereading the chapter again I starting working through the talks.  His first talk, that I distinctly remember listening too, was from October 2008 and it was called, Pray Always.  He said:

“The patterns used by God in creating the earth are instructive in helping us understand how to make prayer meaningful.  In the third chapter of the book of Moses we learn that all things were created spiritually before they were naturally upon the earth.

“’And now, behold, I say unto you, that these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth,

“And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew.  For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth’ (Moses 3:4-5).

“We learn from these verses that the spiritual creation preceded the temporal creation.  In a similar way, meaningful morning prayer is an important element in the spiritual creation of each day-and proceeds the temporal creation or the actual execution of each day. Just as the temporal creation was linked to and a continuation of the spiritual creation, so meaningful morning and evening prayers are linked to and are a continuation of each other.”

Elder Bednar than gives some examples of how to spiritual create your day through prayer.  Basically you go through all the things you want to accomplish, say and be that day.  For example you want to interact with your kids nicely and happily all day.  You express this desire and you visualize yourself doing it.    We ask for help from the Lord.  We work the day through with Him with what he wants us to do.  Basically you play out your day with the Spirit guiding you through it in your mind.

Then you go to work.  As that spiritual creation becomes a physical reality you recognize the Lord’s help with your weaknesses in accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks like being patient or having the energy to do something.  With each realization Elder Bednar reminds us to thank our Father throughout the day for blessing us and lifting us higher.  When we do this he says we are keeping the commandment to, “Let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord” (Alma 37:36).

At the end of the day you review your day.  How did your spiritual and physical creations match up?  Thank Him again for working miracles in our life.  Repent for the things you did wrong.  Reflect what you could have done better in those situations.

That’s basically the main thoughts with it.  I learned from this HOW I can have the Lord much more involved in my life.

I have been earnestly trying doing this.  As I am letting the Lord lead me through my day each morning in prayer I have learned how I can apply this principle to other areas in my life.  For example, I now spiritually create my Sunday School lessons on Sunday morning, I strive to spiritually create my week, my husband is helping guide our family through spiritually creating our week as a family, I spiritually create specific goals or tasks-long or short, etc.  The list goes on and on.  The results are that I am seeing miraculous and AMAZING things happen.  I am doing and being in ways I seemed forever doomed to not bring about.

Another important concept I realized is how important it is to have solid evening prayers.  I have been able to recognize more specifically all the blessings God is pouring out on me and also I feel like I am repenting much better and completely.  After doing this I spent time spiritually creating my early morning wake up.  I pray for help to get up easily and quickly and I visualize myself doing so.  I ask for His help and tell him that as it is 10:30 PM and the thought of getting up at 5AM the next morning is very unappealing.  I say I am tired.  I ask Him to please help me and deliver me from these feelings and this insurmountable obstacle.  This is important to make sure I start my day off right. This is also important because for the first hour or two I don’t prayer beyond a prayer in my heart because if I did I would fall asleep.  So my evening prayers are my spiritual creation for the morning until I am able to say coherently my morning prayers.

Through my reading in this book I have realized the importance of asking the right questions in my prayers.  Joseph Smith could have asked any number of questions but he specifically asked, “Which church should I join?” After finding out that Nephi needed to build a boat he asked, “Where can I find ore to make the tools?”  Asking the right questions is very important.  The process of reading, pondering and prayer help us to learn what the right question is.  When we learn the right question to ask I testify the heavens will and do open!

 Here is one of my favorite statements about prayer found in the Bible Dictionary:

“The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but are made conditional on our asking for them. Blessings require some work or effort on our part before we can obtain them.  Prayer is a form of work, and is an appointed means for obtaining the highest of all blessings.” (Emphasis added).

 As it says, this amount of mental effort given to prayer takes work.  We are so easily distracted with life that it is hard to quiet our minds enough to communicate with God.  It is worth it though.  All these things have very life changing for me.  I hope some of these thoughts and principles can help you.

Thinking About Whole Foods

I have been reading a lot of books about food.  I’ve read books about what hunter-gathers ate, books about people sneaking into poultry farms in the middle of the night and the horrors they saw, books trying to prove how dogs would really rather eat a vegan lifestyle (okay that was just a chapter in a book about raw foods), I also read a clever recipe for how to make raw pancakes (it was actually very good)….The range of books on the topic of food in my public library is quite extensive.  A lot of it is a little nutty.  I have studied in the scriptures extensively on the subject as well-that’s where I started-and I have found some really interesting things.

The most important message I have gotten in all my reading is to eat WHOLE foods.  Not parts of food, but real, whole foods.  An apple is a real food.  We found some salsa that only has whole foods in it.  It’s yummy. 

I have found one book amongst the masses of dwaddle on the subject that has some good ideas.  It’s called, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” by Michael Pollan.  He makes some interesting points about how we are more concerned with nutrients (or parts of food) instead of in the food itself.  Here is his succinct, sage advice: “Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly plants.”  That pretty much sums it up right?

Mr. Pollan had some good advice about his first point: “Eat food.”  (Pointing out he means real food, not parts of food or synthetic food).  Here are his points to finding and eating (whole, real) food. 

1. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. He says Go-Gurt is not food and your grandma wouldn’t recognize it. (She would recognize yogurt though).  By the way we all know where our red food coloring comes from that is in all our food right? Red bugs, crushed up from South America. Yummy.  Think red M&M’s, grapefruit juice, strawberry yogurt….
2. Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. (like Twinkies)
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are:
1. Unfamiliar
2. Unpronounceable
3. More than five in number
4. Contain high-fructose corn syrup

He listed “Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread” as an example of a food that breaks all of these rules. He listed all 41 ingredients but I’m not going to type them here. It would take up a lot of space. He pointed out unfamiliar ingredients like ethoxylated monoglycerides and unpronounceable ones like azodicarbonamide.  Sounds yummy doesn’t it!  And of course it has high-fructose corn syrup.  Do you know how many food items contain high-fructose corn syrup?  Try checking out your refrigerator and you shall be surprised. (Unless your name is Lara or Misty, you threw those foods away along time ago).

4. Avoid products that make health claims.
5. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.  (We’ve all heard that one).
6. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Meaning go to a farmer’s market or grow your own food.

I thought those were some very basic ideas to get our family started on a whole foods way of life.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what Leah Widtsoe said.  I quoted her in my last post.  Summarizing her thoughts she said we should spend as much thought into what we feed our children as we do our prize winning livestock. Coming from the area of the world I live in and the passion around us for 4-H that is a very interesting thought.

The Word of Wisdom

My early morning study as led me to ponder seriously “The Word of Wisdom.”  Since it is “that time of year” when the world thinks about diets and dieting I’ll share a recent resource that I have discovered.

As I have been restudying the Word of Wisdom I remembered that in John A. Widtsoe’s biography, written by Alan K. Parrish, which I had read several years ago, there was a lot of dialogue about The Word of Wisdom.  So I pulled it out.  I learned from the biography that Elder Widtsoe and his wife Leah wrote a book called, “The Word of Wisdom-A Modern Interpretation.”  Their book was approved by President Grant and in a later edition by President McKay.  The book later served as a manual for the Priesthood. 

Joseph Fielding Smith said of their book, “This work is needed immediately and should be published as soon as possible.”

President McKay wrote, “Elders Joseph F. Merrill, Charles A. Callis, and Albert E. Bowen, acting under appointment, report that they have read your manuscript entitled THE WORD OF WISDOM-A MODERN INTERPRETATION, with very great interest and found it to be an ably written exposition of the Word of Wisdom as seen in light of a multitude of confirmatory evidence furnished by modern science….We are therefore pleased to give our consent to the publication of this book.”

When their book was up for another printing Leah would not proceed without the approval from the first Presidency.  Parrish writes, “Each of the presidency wrote a strong letter of endorsement urging that the book be updated and reprinted.”

Their book is available through Amazon and a free copy is available on line here to print.  It is not the best layout however.

 In Widtsoe’s biography the author compiled several quotes.  Here are some:

Elder Widtsoe wrote: “To many of our members feel that if they refrain from taking liquor, tobacco, tea and coffee, they are keeping the Word of Wisdom.  They are doing so only in part.  If the law be understood and lived, people would not be ill and the blessings promised may be fulfilled….The Church of Christ must ever try to care for the whole man.”

He also said, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to give man health and happiness. Health is concerned with the spirit and mind as well as with the body of man.  The Gospel is mistakenly supposed to concern only man’s spiritual health. Mental and physical health forms the only assurance of spiritual progress.  A man who is physically or mentally ill is not truly happy, though he may approach spiritual peace.  The three parts of man’s nature are interrelated and depend upon one another’s welfare.”

Elder Widtsoe wrote, “In the true Gospel of Jesus Christ, the sanctity of the body is second only to that of the spirit.  It is the duty, as well as the desire, of every person to preserve his physical health, so that he may live out most completely the destiny of his existence.”

The author summarized some of Leah’s writings by saying, “That teaching children about [physical health] exceeds the importance of teaching them reading, writing, or arithmetic.”

And later he summarized her again by saying, “Leah explained that mortal bodies are composed of dust of the earth, which chemists had divided into fifteen elements that could be found only in the Lord’s foods, the plants and fruits of the ground.  Children should be fed with at least as much thought as farmers put into feeding their prizewinning livestock…a person’s health is largely a function of the food consumed.”

As some of you may be pondering health at this time I invite you to read the Widtsoe’s book as I think it will add value to your studies.