An Allegory

There once was a man who wanted to find gold. He looked over the land and found a promising spot an built a cabin. He was upstream from an area where gold was found. He would go looking for gold and one day the wind blew a lot of tumbleweeds on his property so they covered half of his house. He spent some time getting rid of them. They came every year and kept him from looking for gold for a while.
Occasionally there would be hailstorms which kept him from his goal.
In the winter snow covered the ground it was hard to look for gold then.

Years passed and he died. He had requested to be buried on his property.

They dug a grave and were surprised to see about 2 feet down there was a big load of gold. He had the gold all the time but did not look in the right place. He only needed to dig a bit in the right place.

Each of you purchased the property (the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In order to gain a firm unshakable testimony you have to dig in the right place by reading the scriptures and pondering and praying.
The distractions that come in ever increasing numbers and variety are represented by the tumbleweeds, hail, and snow storms keep people from finding the gold of unshakable conversion.

When one goes to the internet or listens to podcasts it is often the winds of adversity which keeps us from listening to the spirit. Christ promised us that He would not leave is comfortless.

Using the revealed words of the scriptures we can have the spirit of the Lord to assure us of the gold of the gospel. We will not have to wait until we are in the spirit world to realize we were sitting on the gold all the time.

There will always be opposition to the truth. There are only two choices: God or Satan.

It had been prophesied that in these days and those that follow we will not be able to live on borrowed light. We will have to receive the gold by reading to scriptures and following the prophet.

Find the gold.

Love,
Grandpa

Walking Dead

 No this is not a commentary on the comic book series or the movie.

This is about mortality. Man is created with a body and then the Lord placed a spirit into the body, so we live in a mortal world with two bodies.

You can probably see where this post is going.

I read the news on four sites. There are a number of articles about people who are the walking dead. They shoot and kill. They rob and shoplift. They get drunk and get impaired and drive and kill or injure people. They abuse spouse and children. They are immoral and run the risk of serious disease. They try to change the way they were created by their Father in Heaven.

How do they bring their spiritual body back to life?

When we try to resuscitate a mortal body we use artificial respiration and we may try cardio version by applying an electric shock to the heart.

The way to resuscitate the spirit is to turn the heart to the Lord by keeping the commandments and repentance. Then place the spiritual feet on the covenant path. The mortal feet allow us to move forward. Thus to regain spiritual life we need spiritual feet to lead us forward. Next we move up the spiritual body to the heart. We have to turn our hearts to the Lord for a cardio version.

Thus we can no longer be the walking dead.



They are the walking dead. Their bodies are living, but their spirits are dead as to what is their potential and how the Lord created them.

Transmitter Receiver

 I have on my iPhone an app called find my friends. With it I can track the location of my children and those that allow me to follow them. If they turn off their phones I can no longer see where they are. If my phone is off then they can’t see where I am. Each phone is a transmitter and a receiver.

This is a little like our communication with our Father In Heaven. The Holy Ghost is like the internet enabling
two way communication with Heavenly Father.

To turn off the voice of the Holy Ghost we just need to stop our transmission of prayer and reading the scriptures. Our location transmission is always on. The Lord always knows where we are and what we are saying. We cannot hide from Him. That is how He cares for His children.

In order to receive transmission from our Father we have to tune in to the proper frequency. When I was growing up we had a radio with a dial we could turn to listen to different broadcast stations

One of the message on one station said, Don’t touch that dial. Listen to Blondie”.
Some times there was a loud noise that made it difficult to hear. We called that static.

By transgressing the Lord’s commandments we introduce static in the reception from the Holy Ghost and so we change the channel and lose the message from God and listen to worldly voices.

The more we pray and prepare for inspiration by immersing ourselves in the word of God to recognize His voice the clearer the transmission will be and clear up the static.

The Supposed Calling Envy

There is no inequality in the gospel of Jesus Christ and his true church. All are children of God and are equal before him as long as we keep His commandments.
Let me illustrate how inappropriate thinking can keep us from understanding how the Lord administers His kingdom.

Before we moved to Lander the stake president needed to call a bishop to serve in the Lander first ward. He and his counselors cleared the individual with the high council and submitted the recommendation to the first presidency. He then informed the individual to expect the call. The first presidency informed the stake president the he should find another candidate, because this man was employed at a job that required him to work on Sunday. That was a big blow to the man. He later served on the high council. When I was the stake president the stake Sunday school president moved and we needed to replace him. I felt inspired to call this brother to serve in that calling. I understood that he felt that this was a demotion and shortly after this he moved to the big horn basin I heard that he had hard feelings toward me. He didn’t know that he was no less serviceable in that position.

We had a neighbor who went to high school with me. She was much younger and we went to church together. She married in the Idaho Falls temple the same day we were married. Her father was at one time on the high council. After awhile she was upset that her husband was not “promoted “ to a leadership position in the church. They eventually divorced and he married a girl that I took to a high school dance on my return from my mission in 1957. She joined the church and as far as I know she is active even after he died two years ago. The first wife is inactive.

We do not have a church where every member is unimportant.
We need every calling and they are needed for the body of Christ. Metaphorically speaking we cannot be without a single toe.

My father’s cars

 

When I was growing up my parents had a model A Ford with a rumble seat.

We had this car as far back as I could remember in Rexburg and then my father drove it to Missoula, Montana when he joined the weather bureau.

We had to take the train to meet him in Missoula. After he was transferred to Pocatello Idaho, we drove from Missoula to Pocatello in that car . He had that car when we drove to Cheyenne and Martell and I rode in the rumble seat and Glendon rode in the front and there was a little shelf between the seat and the back window where he used to lie down.

We had that car all the time we were in Cheyenne. My father had bought the house that we lived in in Pocatello, but was unable to sell it and while we were getting ready to go to Denver, he traded a newer car for the house in Pocatello. Because he did not, want to own two cars he sold the model a Ford when we left Cheyenne to move to Denver.

My uncle Merrill was going to Washington DC to go to law school and so he drove the car from Pocatello to Denver. On the way, he had some car problems, and eventually got to Denver and the car was inoperable. My father did all of his traveling in Denver either by bicycle or public transportation, but mostly by bicycle. He rode his bicycle every workday from our home to the airport when he worked there and after he was transferred to the downtown office, he rode it downtown.

We did not have a car for the first months that we lived in Lander until my mother got a ride to Denver where she picked up a car and paid for it much to my father‘s dismay.

In spite of the fact that we had that car, we walked to school every day and back over a mile each way.

A refugee story

 A refugee story
Ernst Karl Willi Jensen was born in East Prussia Germany in 1913. He married Waltraud Anni Emma Klingbeil in 1942 when she was 18. His father ran a dairy and he worked on the dairy and eventually became the owner. When the war broke out he was not initially drafted into the army, because his work was considered essential to the war effort. Later he was drafted into the military and was sent to Romania. Because the Russians were moving toward East Prussia Ernst and his wife had a plan for her to leave and go to west Germany.

In 1945 they moved to Osnabruk and then to Barsel and 1952 they moved to Hildesheim. Where Ernst worked for a dairy, because in East Prussia they owned a dairy. It was two years later that the missionaries knocked on their door and introduced them to the restored gospel.

Waltraud and her sons were baptized and three years later Ernst followed. He later became the branch president and later a sealer in the Bern Temple and a patriarch. He and his wife had two boys one of which became a regional representative and along with his brother served as stake presidents.

Their sons served missions and some have served as stake presidents.

The son of the youngest of Ernst’s boys was called to serve as an area authority seventy in the April conference of 2024.

I was fortunate to have helped to teach Ernst and Waltraud in 1954 and kept in touch with the family to date.

A srory from my mission

 Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ‘rein 

When I was in Berlin I would often go to East Berlin where the Russians had their headquarters. As propaganda, there were large banners to let the inhabitants of East Germany know how great East Germany was. I don’t know if the people believed it, because there were many people fleeing to the west. That is why they built the wall and had the border restrictions as depicted in the movie “Night Crossing”.

One of these banners was placed in strategic spots all over the agricultural areas in the East. The translation is, without God and sunshine we will bring in the harvest.

This phrase came to mind yesterday as we were reading in second Nephi. The prophecy was about there being those who would say there is no God.

Karl Marks said that religion was the opiate of the people. The communist party was against religion and that ideology has spread to China and all of the associated countries.

It is presumptuous of anyone to think that one could harvest crops without sunshine or the blessings of God.

We are happy that East Germany is now not under Communism and are free to worship God.