Life

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

I believe we can find happiness in our lives and overcome pain, regardless of the trials in our lives.

Some of my earliest memories as a child are of being beaten by my father and later scrounging for food while he was passed out drunk. I had what some would call a rough childhood. I have had friends that had worse, so I’m grateful not to have endured more. During that time, I shared my troubles with a younger brother. My mother stood by the abuse and later left us, after my parents divorced. We were later placed into foster care when my school became aware of the level of abuse and neglect that we had endured.

At first things didn’t get any better for us, and we endured several setbacks along the way. We went through two short-term shelter homes, and one uncle before we were placed in a long-term foster home. While in that home, I encountered something that helped me change my life. The family were less active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who decided to start going to church again while we lived there.

While attending church, I made an important discovery. I learned that I had a Heavenly Father that loved me and wanted me to be happy. Until this point in my life, I hadn’t experienced much happiness. I realized that if I looked for happiness in my life, Heavenly Father would help me find it. This has been a guiding light in my life since that time.

After that foster home, I had the misfortune to be cycled through several other foster homes. Some of the families were members of the church and some were not. Some of them showed me genuine love and others looked at me as a paycheck. All during those continuing trials, the memory of a loving Heavenly Father helped me to know that I could find love and joy.

Part of that happiness came from me and my outlook on life. While my circumstances didn’t change greatly in the different homes, my outlook did. I found that if I had a positive outlook on things, I would be happier, and it would later lead to my circumstances changing for the better. Happiness is not something just given to you. It’s something you have to find for yourself in all that is around you.

I am now a husband and a father. I am not a rich man by any means, but I have worked hard and I have a home. My family is a great source of joy in my life. I am amazed at the greater amount of love and happiness I have felt after becoming a father. I am grateful my Heavenly Father sent me to a home where I would find the Gospel. None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t decided to look for that happiness that I know my Heavenly Father wanted to bless me with.

Last April my brother got married. It was the weekend of General Conference so I did not have the opportunity to see all the Conference talks as they aired. I read them later and the talk by Brother Larry M. Gibson “Fatherhood — Our Eternal Destiny” stuck out to me; as I am a father of a young child and as I had the opportunity to speak to my brother concerning the responsibilities of a husband and father.

At the wedding, my son and I represented my brothers only family members by relation of blood. We both grew up in foster care and do not have relationships with our parents. At the wedding my brother told me he was disappointed in our parents and grateful to me for having filled some of role model roles in his life. He is not an active member of the church but I am grateful he has found someone special in his life.

Considering all we have been through, I will be happy for every step we take towards living normal lives and having loving relationships. I feel like I pray for my brother much as any parent should in our situation. I hope I have shown him a good example by having a family and endeavoring to be a good father. I feel like my lessons in fatherhood began with myself, then teaching my brother and now teaching my son.

When I was a young man, I decided I wanted to have a family and that I wanted to be a father. I wanted to give my son the love and opportunities that I was never given. My first goals to prepare for this was to serve a mission and to prepare to be married in the temple. If I didn’t serve a mission, how could I ever expect my son to do so? I also had seen the benefits this gave for preparing spiritually for the rest of my life. That decision did not come without sacrifice. I gave up a scholarship opportunity that I would have had to take advantage of before a mission. I believe this sacrifice was worth it, even as I am still struggling to get the education that I have always wanted.

The benefits of being married in the Temple are obvious, when I looked at them from an eternal perspective. When in High School, I made a list of characteristics that I wanted in my future wife. As I met and dated some young women, I moved on as they were lacking. When I met my future wife, she had a strong testimony and wonderful parents. Those were two qualities that I had found difficult to find in other young ladies. We later married after I served my mission. Knowing that I am sealed to my wife and that our family will be together for eternity is a huge gift. I deployed twice in the Army and I know that having a temple marriage was a strength to me during that time.

After she finished college, we had a son and he has been a wonderful blessing in our lives. I hope that I have prepared to be the type of father he deserves. I hope to have many teaching moments in the future with my son much like that which was shared in this talk. As he grows and has the opportunity to be ordained in the priesthood, I hope he will learn the lessons it teaches to later be a loving father. I believe being a father is truly one of the most important jobs a man could have.