This Used To Count As Home Teaching

I’ve been on a kick lately. A blog-relevant kick. I’ve been looking into legends of Christ visitations outside of the holy land. Last week I posted 3 such legends – each specifically mentioning Christ by name. Then I started looking into legends of a bearded god appearing to people. There are loads of legends like that. I was just looking for a nice, even list of 10 to chain together. The tenth one struck so hard crocodiles might get PTSD triggered from the dinosaur extinction.     That tenth find, in my opinion, is more important than #s 1-9 combined. It is an Indian legend of Christ, specifically Christ, visiting their ancestors at the exact time the Book of Mormon says he did. A little background in case you don’t know - a visit from the resurrected Jesus Christ to Indian forefathers in America is, without a doubt, the crowning jewel of the Book of Mormon. It starts like this: 3 Nephi Chapter11: 1  And now it came to pass that there ...

OK these are pretty weird – and not doctrinal in the slightest. But they are interesting. They are interesting because of what Jesus said here – after his resurrection and just before his old-world ascension: John 10:16: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” The people in the Book of Mormon were those other sheep – Christ said so himself . And then he said he had yet other sheep to visit: 3 Nephi 16:1: “ And verily, verily, I say unto you that I have other sheep, which are not of this land, neither of the land of Jerusalem, neither in any parts of that land round about whither I have been to minister.” Of these other sheep we have no record. Yet. We certainly know they were visited, but do we know who they were? No way no how. But here are some interesting legends of Christ visitations. To be sure there are scores of accounts of...

When reading LDS history from the past 190 years or so, some things really jump out at me. It occurs that although God can give his children about any experience one can think of, there are a handful of repeat experiences that pop up again and again. God seems to favor handing out certain, specific experiences. He reaches into his toolbox and pulls out the same few devices. The device I’m talking about today is panoramic visions. Panoramic visions may be something you haven’t heard of. If you have heard of them, it was probably as a piece of a near-death-experience - occurring just before the person gets zapped back into their body while promising to be nicer to people with opposing political views. Or something. The fact that these absolute encompassing visions are so closely related to NDEs might make you brush them aside. Don’t do that. These things have happened to completely sane LDS people outside of the NDEs. Some of the people d...