Life

There are several laws of nature. One of these laws is that as teenagers we like to do really stupid things and it’s a miracle we all survive to adulthood. If you get several teens together, they will often times shortly wander off to do some hair brained stunt. Some of these adventures can be more dangerous than others and I unfortunately know this from experience. As I have looked back at some of the adventures in my life, I realized it was very important to have the right companions along for the adventure and to make sure we all had the same adventure in mind.

I grew up in foster care. I was placed in the system when I was six years old and I was emancipated from the state when I was eighteen. While growing up, I lived in a dozen different homes. Some of these were short term “shelter homes” where I stayed only a couple weeks and others were longer term “permanent placement” foster homes. Bouncing from home to home, I was often lonely and did my best to make friends with existing members of the family where I had been placed.

One of the homes was with the Diamond family. They had a daughter several years younger than me and my younger biological brother also lived there. They tried to integrate my brother and I into their normal lives as best as they could. One summer we went up to Sequoia National Park to spend time camping with them and the Diamond’s extended family of aunt’s, uncles, and cousins. It was a beautiful experience leaving the heat and smog of Southern California to experience the fresh cool air of the pines and Sequoia trees in the park. The trees towered as high as a skyscraper and they were often as wide as a house.

    It was also a big adventure into nature for us. I remember on a previous trip watching as a family from Germany set up a picturesque picnic table and then proceeded to leave it for a short hike. Even I as a city kid knew this was going to end badly. I had watched enough of Yogi Bear to know that leaving picnics in forests was a bad idea, but I didn’t know of the power of a bear. The family was gone for about five minutes when a bear casually walked into the camp site and sniffed at the meal laid out for it. It casually ate the meal as the family returned and watched with horror from the side. As the bear left, it casually reminded everyone who was boss as it easily flipped the picnic table just so that it could retrieve a few fallen morsels of food.

While on the camping trip with the Diamond family the foster cousins asked my brother along for a night hike. We thought this sounded like a great idea and went along for the fun. As we left, the foster cousins asked us to turn off our flashlights. They told us that if we saw a bush rustle we would all turn on our lights to light up the animal. Somehow their ridiculous plan still hadn’t occurred to me. As we walked he heard a rustling and we all quickly had our lights shining on the spot. As our lights rested on the bush, a large hairy form started standing up to it’s full seven foot height. We had a black bear spotlighted ten feet away from us. It growled baring it’s teeth and I secretly thought to myself, “we are all going to die.” Fortunately, I did not die as you can obviously observe. The bear must of thought “dumb teenagers taste bad” and it wandered off.

As we returned to our campsite I had a few moments to consider how thankful I was that the spotlighting of the bear didn’t turn out to be lethal for us. I chalked this up to being a time that I had gotten roped into doing something pretty stupid, and I was just glad to be alive. During my life I have thought back on this experience several times. We all have paths we walk in our lives with others. During my life I have walked many different paths, and have chosen different companions along the way. While growing up in foster care many of my foster brothers had options for companions and paths that led them to the dangers of drugs and prison. I’m glad that I picked up along the way the importance of choosing good companions and ensuring I know what goals we have together. With this knowledge, I was able to avoid being led blindly on to the dangers of the bears in the path again.

Should a predominantly LDS community use its majority voting power to make laws that reflect its religious beliefs? When addressing this question, members of the church should consider if their answer would be the same if they were asked this concerning an area dominated by followers of Islam, Judaism, or any other religious belief that does not reflect their own. While it may seem good to the majority, laws like this can be seen as tyrannical to the minority. There are three good reasons a Latter-Day Saint should oppose creating laws which only reflect personal religious belief.

First, the rights of an individual need to be protected against the power of the majority. A person should be free to make choices as long as those choices don’t involve aggression or fraud against others. Most of the laws a community makes really only work to protect against those types of dangers. A law crushes individual liberty when it is made not to protect against those dangers but its only use is to enforce a religious code. Some members of the Church would say the creation of the laws is only there to guide people to do the right thing. The founding fathers foresaw this desire and ratified the Bill of Rights to the Constitution to help codify protections for minority groups to practice or not practice religion as they see fit.

Another good point is that Latter-Day Saints should first examine the principle of agency. LDS.org defines agency as “the ability and privilege God gives us to choose and to act for ourselves.” This gift was so important that it was one of the central principles dividing those in the War in Heaven. A third of the host of Heaven followed Lucifer in support of giving up this gift to him and they were ultimately cast out. With this gift we are “free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil” ( Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:27). Some Latter-Day Saints have said there are times agency needs to be enforced. This is an obvious contradiction and perversion of the way the Lord would have us do things.

The third reason Latter-Day Saints should oppose enforcing personal religious belief is that they should look to whose example they are following. When we look at the methods of influencing others we can see that the Lord’s way is through persuasion and love. The way of force has been the way of Lucifer from the beginning as he has always “sought to destroy the agency of man” (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 4:3). When a government creates laws which don’t protect the citizens but it enforces a moral code, this is following the example of Satan. There really is no counter argument which can support the position of following the example of Satan.

Members of the Church want to share the happiness of the Gospel with others. This can’t be done through the might of law enforcement. Righteous followers of the Lord should use their influence to encourage having laws which protect liberty and use their own personal influence to encourage moral behaviour in others.

The benefit of all this insane weather is Medina Lake has gone up 30ft in the last 2 days!! That is a full 24% of the entire lake volume….63000 acre feet of water…just amazing.

Source: Water Data For Texas