Blessed Are The Peacemakers

  Choosing to Stay: Faith, Affliction, and the Space Between I was planning to share a post about Christmas. But this year, Christmas has felt….complicated. Illness has a way of tinting everything it touches, even the season that is supposed to feel bright. So instead of writing what I intended, I’m writing what is real. In one of my favorite books, the main character is lying on his deathbed and describes longing for the space between heartbeats, because every beat brings pain. Not death exactly, just the pause. The small mercy between moments. That image has lived with me for years, and lately it has come back with force. That is how my body feels now. Every heartbeat is work. Every breath is negotiated. I find myself longing for the spaces in between, not necessarily because I want to leave,but because those spaces do not hurt. When I first became sick, almost twenty years ago, I had a dream. I was standing in my kitchen, and the Lord was there. Then th...

  Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul. Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn. Part 3: The Thorn, Meeting God in Contradiction Gethsemane: Where Certainty Breaks Open In the garden, the One who knew all things knelt and trembled. The One who told His disciples, “Let not your heart be troubled,” confessed that His own soul was “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” The One who promised, “My yoke is easy,” bowed under a cup too heavy for words. At the center of the gospel we do not find tidy resolution. We do not find perfect composure. We find a God who falls on His face in the dirt, overwhelmed, asking if there is another way. Here, in Gethsemane, we meet holy contradiction. Gethsemane, The Pressing Place Few people realize that the word Gethsemane means “the olive press,” the place where fruit is crushed under increasing weight until the oil flows. Jesus did not enter a r...

  When Seeking Hidden Truths Starts to Cost Us Our Peace Scripture does not ask us to pretend that conspiracies do not exist. In fact, it does the opposite. Again and again, the record acknowledges secret works, secret combinations, hidden oaths, and deeds done in darkness. Helaman is blunt. Secret works exist. They corrupt societies. They destabilize communities. They thrive where ambition, fear, and pride are left unchecked. Nephi warns of secret oaths and hidden power structures. Ether records that secret combinations existed from the beginning and will continue until the end. Scripture is not naive. But scripture is also not fascinated. When the Book of Mormon exposes secret works, it never does so to invite endless investigation. The record does not linger on details. It does not encourage the reader to chase every thread or decode every shadow. Instead, it shows patterns, consequences, and outcomes. Darkness is acknowledged so it ...

  Part 2 Seven Parables For A Plastic Soul Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul. Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn. Part 2: The Soil - Pondering, Labor, and Neuroplasticity We sometimes imagine spiritual understanding as lightning, sudden brilliance, a voice from heaven, truth delivered complete. Revelation can come like that, but most often it does not. More often it arrives like sunrise, barely noticeable at first, until one day the room is full of light and you no longer remember when the darkness left. If a story changes the heart by entering through the senses, scripture transforms by returning again and again, not skimming but sitting, the way steady water erodes stone through sheer repetition. Neuroscience offers a language for this slow dawn. The brain is plastic, which means it can change, but it is not passive. We become what we repeatedly attend to. Every time you read a passage,...

Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul. Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn.   Part 1: The Seed: Why Jesus Spoke in Parables When a memory forms, the brain sends tiny electrical signals across a gap between neurons. When that signal repeats, the bridge strengthens. Fire it again tomorrow and the next day, and the path becomes a road. Continue long enough, and the road becomes a highway. Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation. Scripture calls it God writing His law upon the heart. It stirs wonder that the Creator of the brain chose stories as His primary medium for teaching souls. Jesus could have delivered lists, frameworks, or systematic instruction, yet He spoke of mustard seeds and fishermen, wheat and tares, lamps and coins, weddings and vineyards. He stretched eternity across daily life so that truth could be handled like bread and smelled like soil. Of course, He was perfectly capabl...

  Crash through the surface... A Symbolic Layer in the Parable of the Master’s House “Knowledge initiates, wisdom receives, guides and tempers. Knowledge can be dangerous unless it is informed by wisdom. Wisdom provides guidance and counsel to channel what comes from knowledge. Creation begins with the active initiative of knowledge, but order and harmony for the creation requires wisdom. Balance between them is required for an orderly creation to exist.” - Our Divine Parents Before anything else, a gentle orientation. When I use the words masculine and feminine here, I am not talking about men and women as groups. I am not assigning roles to genders or dividing the parable’s characters into male and female camps. I am speaking symbolically, the way scripture often does, about two spiritual patterns every human soul carries within it. Every one of us has stone and clay inside us, structure and softness, discipline and creativity, law and...