Purpose of Facebook / Effects of Social Media

Religion, including the LDS church, supplements the life many individuals (real people leading a real life like myself!) to live purposefully. To be a part of a community of real people that share your values is a powerful thing. If for you the exmo community is that place then I'm happy that you've been able to realign and find what truly matters to you, and associate with others that support you in living your best life. And I mean that!

From what I've seen, for some leaving the church can be a catalyst for positive change in mental state, a total change in paradigm that allows for rapid personal growth. For others, joining the church is that exact same catalyst. For myself personally, I enjoy setting aside time for that experience every week as I take the sacrament at my church. In Christianity the name for that process is repentance ("changing the way we see God, ourselves, and the world"), in self-help literature we may call it a paradigm shift. No matter what you call it, we should all be supportive of everyone as they take the time to align their vision of who they want to become with their vision of ourselves, the world around us, and our best self/God.

I often do a self-actualization exercise where I try and draw a "pie chart of my brain". It works as a gut check for myself that I am spending my time in my brain thinking of things I value and less time responding to emotional impulses, justifying my own behavior, or whatever else I wish I'd spend less time doing.

With all of that said, hopefully this paragraph can be taken in context: I really hope we can get away from the point of nitpicking a church news article written by one person, went through likely a small peer review process, using that to disparage an entire religion (and to be clear my problem isn't at this point, if you want to subscribe to that content then the exmo subreddit is a good place for it), then posting that to a totally different community of people you have personally interacted with on Facebook and expecting it to make that collective of Facebook friend's feeds lives better? It's the kind of emotional pandering that bothers me since it is so easy to let it fill up the personal pie chart with detrimental, emotion-reactive thoughts and still feel good at the end of the day with some likes or upvotes or whatever arbitrary social media accountability metric we decide collectively matters to measure quantitatively how accepted something is.

I think everyone, religious, non religious, in the LDS church, exmo, whatever false dichotomy we want to divide the world by... if we could all spend more of our limited time on this earth - a bigger section of the pie chart of our total brain usage - to build up ourselves and our communities; maybe we could spend less of that precious resource seeking external validation from others to satisfy our own insecurities (we all do social mirroring!) and more time reflecting and becoming our best self and creating a world that is better tomorrow than it was today for yourself as well as each individual that you interact with.

Recently trending on Facebook thoughts--

"Same-sex marriage is a social experiment, and like most experiments it will take time to understand its consequences."

NY Times post that I discuss, including the above quote
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Thoughts to throw out there:

I'll begin by setting a few expectations

I don't know exactly how a study like this can be made reputable. I'm pretty sure most children that grow up in a homosexual household come from a background of divorce, so it's hard to separate causation. The study mentioned seems to only have mentioned homosexuality in the household as a peripheral. Since this article in 2012, I think there has been a change in the way a homosexual household can be conducted.

I will also add as a caveat that I am speaking strictly from a general standpoint. Probability states that a coin has a 12.5% chance of being flipped tails 3 times in a row. No matter the outcome of the first two flips the last flip still has a 50% chance to land heads or tails.

At an individual level, there will be strong homosexual households as well as broken ones. At an individual level, my personal friendship is extended to all no matter the way they live. Currently though my thoughts run along the first train of thought - general statistic trends.

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We know very little of where recent social trends will lead us. Any long-term studies that have been conducted on homosexual households and their effect on those they influence are basically obsolete at this point because of how rapidly the sphere has shifted over the last five years or so. How will history be affected? How will culture change?

There are pioneers in the homosexual community that for the first time are willingly fighting to be able to go into the unknown. Like the early Mormon pioneers, they are being persecuted and fighting back and using their legal right to vote. They are taking ideas that are dear to them and attempting to live by them.

And like the LDS pioneers, they have no data that their mission is sustainable or will succeed. They just know that they are happy doing what they are doing, to hope for better life.

I firmly believe we should give groups room to be able to exercise freely their ideas, to iterate upon ideologies, to fail and succeed. Let the history books be written, compiling and analysing data, only after testing has been completed. We should be failing fast and failing often to find little nuggets of truth.

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My opinion:

That being said, please let my little group do the same. Let us fail and succeed. Let us iterate our ideologies, to exercise freely our ideas. We have held to certain principles now for almost two centuries, and they have worked. They have turned a small utopian-Zion society into one of the fastest growing theologies in the world.

The sun will still rise tomorrow whether or not a new Star Wars trailer comes out or the LDS church releases a new policy statement or I drop my ice cream cone. Tomorrow I know I will wake up founded on principles of success that have been proven and tested. As for my little "utopian" society that I'm a member of: I will continue to support the lifestyle that it clings to so tightly. It has helped and continues to facilitate my creating a foundation for my life that will let me feel happiness now, leave a lasting legacy, and that I believe will extend into eternity.

As for each of you: choose for yourself, and cling to what you know to be true. There will be differences, but that's ok. It's what synergy and human development is made of.

Obedience - Principle and Practice

I was peeking through my study journal during church yesterday and came across this study that I had completed during my mission. It struck me again as true, so I'm reposting it on here with a few additional points added since then.

Mission Musing - Personal Study 5/29/13

President Thomas S. Monson - Obedience Brings Blessings

"He that keepeth [God's] commandments recieveth truth and light, until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things" - Doctrine and Covenants 93:28

• Obedience is a set of checkpoints that keeps us on the right path
• Willful obedience is God's plan. Forced or coerced obedience is Satan's plan.
• This statement should be a thought of its own
• "Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man" - Eccl. 12:13
• "The great test of this life is obedience" cf. Abr 3:25

Even in a largely different world then that of any time before, it is still obedience that charts the correct course.

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• Obedience is based on eternal truths

• Obedience is the standard by which we can stay the most spiritually sensitive. Less disobedience to commandments, or sin, means less time our spirits are offended by the acts of the flesh.

• God's commandments reflect truth.

• God is the source of all truth. Therefore, the commands He gives to us reflect a perfect understanding of the world, others, and ourselves. Living in "the dispensation of the fullness of times" (Eph. 1:10) means that we have all necessary knowledge of commandments.

• By searching God's commandments, we get a glimpse into God's (therefore the true!) view of the world

• Because of our access to the commandments of God, we have a clear sight into the results of His divine plan for us. While we still may not always know the "whys" of God, we do know the "whats": the commandments. The commandments, if we let them, will shape our paradigm of the world; we will be able to see the world more like God sees the world - the truth.

Obedience is the key to gaining a knowledge of truth.

Living for a Better Tomorrow

I was asked recently by a friend, McKann, for whatever thoughts I had for a missionary that is returning home, so I wrote out a short little blip on the subject and thought it fits well here. Really, I believe a lot of this applies to any time we are developing into a new stage of life. That means it's applicable all the time. Every new day is a new chance to live a new life. So here it is,

"My best advice is probably a cliche but meant a lot to me when a member said it to me just before I went home: "If you ever come back here and call your mission your best two years, you need to get your life back in order". Seriously life only gets better... you don't plateau after your mission unless you start losing the "spiritual center" that you've found.

"It doesn't mean I've always felt as spiritual now as I did on my mission at all. You will feel different. Just know it's because you're not bearing your testimony every waking hour of the day.

"They only way I've found to keep myself on a spiritual high is just to live in a prayer. Logically: if prayer is defined as an alignment between child and Father, then I try to live my life in a constant alignment process; a repentance process I guess. And if the foundation of your life is leading a better life tomorrow, how can tomorrow not be better than today?

"So just set goals and create key indicators for "vital behaviors"; things that you know will help you get over the things that before your mission were hindering you from being where you're at now. Hold yourself accountable to your fulfillment of these vital behaviors often.

"Those are the things that have kept me sane from the mission anyways! :) The best compliment I've received since I got home was when I attended a mission farewell of someone I knew in the mission. A member I haven' seen in a full two years, after remembering I was "Elder Chandler", asked me if I was just on exchanges and why I wasn't wearing my tag anymore. After I told them I had been home for 4 months, they told me "I never would have guessed - you still have that missionary look about you". It doesn't get any better than that!"

Semantics and the Gospel

Today as Brannon and I were walking to the WILK after a great regional conference with Elders Nelson and Scott, we were discussing the idea of consecration. As we were trying to explain how the idea of "divine centering" and how it relates to consecration, we started by explaining what the ideology of consecration is not. A common one we discussed and is common here around BYU is dating. We don't date to date - we date to find an eternal companion.

(Now I'd like to add here that dating for fun is definitely still has it's place. It's just when people become obsessed with "dating so they can say they go on dates", the point where it takes up most of your time and energy... that's what I'm speaking of here.)

But neither of us felt like that exactly expressed how we felt about the idea. After trying a few more phrases, one stuck out that I felt expressed what I felt spiritually impressed by in words:

"Because I know Jesus Christ is my Savior, I date."

As an expression of perspective and divine-centeredness on a subject that is generally highly emotional and stressful, that is a powerful statement on its own. As a pattern of life, I feel the semantics behind this phrase are even more implicative.

1. "I know that Jesus Christ is my Savior"

         A statement of knowledge, gained by experience and interaction with the Holy Ghost. This knowledge is real. It is more foundational then knowledge gained by scientific method, as it is sourced from an omniscient loving Heavenly Father. At its core, this is a statement of Faith. It is a statement, more than just belief, born of speaking in the language of the Spiritual. The basis, the root, the foundation, the ground upon which we build everything in our lives are these statements of Faith, the I Knows.

2. "Because"

         "Because" has always been one of the most interesting words used in scripture to me, especially after taking Discrete Structures my freshman year at the Y. The word "because" is a statement of implication ( x => y). It is a connector word. It makes what would be a simple sentence by definition into a complex one. It adds depth and thought. In this case, "because" is the implication that our Faith means something more. Our Faith applies to the real word. It means that what you've learned has changed the way you approach situations. "Because" implies Repentance.

         It follows then that Repentance is not the "I date" part of the sentence. As Elder Holland would say, that's like trying to stuff a turkey through the beak! Repentance is not the actions that we do; it is the process of connecting our faith to our eventual actions. It is the "change in the way we see God, ourselves, and the world". (LDS Bible Dictionary, Repentance) Repentance is the more silent work we do; it is the internal connections that we make to apply our Faith to our life.

3. "I date" (or any other action)

        Action is definitely a defining part of Christ's call to us in the gospel He taught. We are taught in Galatians the Law of the Harvest; we reap what we sow. This is a universal law. A garden full of faith must by law bring forth the fruits of faith - good works. By founding our actions upon our Faith and Repentance, we are "built upon a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall". (Helaman 5:12) We are growing gardens that can spring up any number of good and delicious fruit. By pruning and taking care of our gardens, we can keep out weeds and other undesired growth.

        Inversely, works built upon any other foundation will not ultimately lead to our desired results. We can still go on dates without being centered on our Faith, but then we will be reaping results in our dating other than those sown by seeds of Faith! It's fake-able for a while, but when the time of the harvest comes, and it most assuredly will, we will reap what grew from the seeds we sowed. The only way to make sure that the fruit (the actions) are what we'd like them to be are by sowing only seeds of Faith (nothing else!). This process and plot of gardening is what I like to call my Covenant garden. It is my trust that, as I sow and tend to my garden and overall try to do my best to make it a beautiful place, that my God will return back to me a plentiful harvest of goodness and love that I need to live a successful life.

My wish for myself is that my thoughts and speech are permeated with statements of Faith, Repentance, and Covenants; that these may become the center of a healthy life.

As I write this blog, I hope to continually take overarching religious concepts and make them directly applicable to our lives. This will not be done by prescribing band-aid fixes to issues, or in other words by trying to reap certain actions without sowing. It will be done by delving into planting new seeds--what an exciting idea! My hope is that, together, we can find new seeds of truth to grow that all are rooted in the one supernal truth - that Jesus Christ is our Savior, and that He lives.