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Showing posts from October, 2018

Hearing A Voice When Nobody Is There: God’s Tool Box Part 3

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For God’s Tool Box Part 1 – regarding panoramic visions, click here . For God’s Tool Box Part 2 – regarding losing something, praying about it and then seeing it’s location in a visionary experience, click here. God's Tool Box Part 3 though – oh this part 3 is about hearing a voice. A voice that fills you with faith and sometimes even keeps you alive. I have never had this experience myself, but I know an awful lot of people who have. Below is a pretty big list of people who claim the experience. Some are from pioneer days and some are more recent. It’s something that, according to the glimpses below, isn’t specifically sought after. It does appear, though, to be freely given. This first one is from just before the martyrdom. It’s interesting for a lot of reasons – the first is that it really does show JS Jr. really was thinking about the Rocky Mountains as the next place for saintly roots to be thrown down. The second is that God used the situation to h

What They Don't Teach You in Church (Dun Dun Duuuun!)

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I’ve had people pull me aside twice that I can remember off-hand, for a very specific purpose. The point of these two pull-asides was to big-eyed whisper about Joseph Smith looking at a stone in a hat to translate the Book of Mormon. It wasn’t just to inform me of this piece of history (of which I was already aware), but to follow up with the question; “Why didn’t they tell us?” One of these pull-asides happened between the second and third hours of church. Wisps of sacrament meeting cheerios still clung to the guy’s breath. The “they,” of course, are an ambiguous church leadership, likely in over-sized swivel chairs stroking lap-cats in the basement of a dimly-lit stake center. This leadership, apparently, will stop at nothing to keep you from learning about the stone in the hat. They’ll sell loads of books that mention it in the Church-owned Deseret Book, but in their heart-of-hearts they’d really prefer you skip that entire shelf. A reason this isn’t d