Well....  From the first eight verses of this chapter, I could write pages.  The first verse itself is a great testament to the veracity of Jacob 4:13, which states that the Holy Ghost "speaketh the truth and lieth not". Because we all can be under the influence of the Holy Ghost (and worthy members have the opportunity to ha...

Imagine for a moment you had no idea about the atonement of Christ. Now imagine you sitting there and listening to what I have to say. And the first thing you hear are the words, "God demands perfection for salvation." Not sure about you, but for me, that creates a sort of sinking feeling inside...  I put "perfection an...

About a week ago, I began thinking I needed another project.  I really was getting to thinking about how I spend my time, and how I can better use the time I have. Nothing popped out at me, until yesterday. Yesterday, I got a call from one of the people in my ward, and he asked me if I would teach the 15-16 year olds in their gospel doctri...

In the beginning of this chapter, I didn't realize that the book to which the verses were referring was the Book of Mormon. I guess this chapter answers the question, "What is in the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon?".  The answer is quite simply found in verse 10:  "...for behold, they reveal all things from the foun...

Ya know, I sure am glad that Nephi wrote verse 22 of this chapter.  In all of scripture, this is the only chapter which uses the word "flaxen" to describe the way Satan tempts us. Flax is a fiber from a plant which is used to make linen.  Linen isn't known for its strength. Satan indeed does "lead us" with very ent...

First thing I noticed in this chapter is verse 1.  He tells his children that Christ will show himself unto them.  How is this possible if this was written approximately 550 years before Christ would come?  Very interesting...  I'll have to research that. Verse 7 pops out at me like a bolt of lightning.  I've been lookin...

It feels quite refreshing to be able to understand more than just a couple of verses again.  As I was reading tonight, I realized how much could be written about this chapter.  It's quite full of good doctrine. Here's what I noticed tonight: From verse 1 until 6, Nephi seems to be trying to explain the "hard to understand" n...

I find it interesting how Satan is described throughout scripture. In this chapter, through verses 13 - 20, Satan is seemingly exposed as the weak fraudster he really is.  Verse 16 is quite potent, written from the standpoint of people who were tempted by him, when shown his actual person, are amazed at the frailness of Satan.  They say...

All I gotta say about this chapter is man, I do not want to be on the wrong side of things when the 2nd coming of Christ is ushered in. Verses like 16 and 18 really hit home on what we're in for. I can only assume the destruction of Babylon can be typed as a metaphor for what is coming when Christ comes again....

Surprisingly... I'm not sure if it's because of my attitude or what, but I believe I got a bit more out of this chapter than I have for the rest of the Isaiah stuff. I'm not 100% sure what the branch is that comes out of the root of Jesse, but I've been told that is refers to the prophet Joseph Smith (D&C 113). I also believe that when it s...

I've been working a bit on adding the possibility of video journaling to ILoveMyJournal.com. I'm not 100% sure if it will work well enough for those who are less technically inclined, but today I was able to get a proof-of-concept working. One of my journal entries now has a video (the video is of the UVSC Car Show put on yesterday). Just to ...

I've been fighting with my computer for the past hour to get gentoo to import the contents of an SD card in a card reader (announces itself through USB as "07cc:0500 Carry Computer Eng., Co., Ltd"), and was unsuccessful. As such, I have lost all motivation and energy to work on getting the journal entries for the 3 days of Rat Fink (Ed ...

I decided to get back into reading the scriptures now that I've finished the last conference talks. This has nothing to do with Mosiah 3, but one thing I neglected to write about was the last gospel doctrine class I attended.  Our wonderful teacher, Ryan Anderson taught again, and made a wonderful parallel out of Amalickiah and Satan. We...

Man... At work, I've got .... well.. I was gonna say dilemma, but... it's not a dilemma because I know of a way out. My dilemma is, I've gotta have a website functional by Friday, which means I've got two days to get it to work. The database we're connecting to (postgres on gentoo, thank heavens) has a table with more than 12 million rows in it....

 What a horrible, yet extremely personal and hopeful chapter.   The nature of it reminds me of the psalm of Nephi (2 nephi  4:15-end).  What horrible, horrible things were going on at the end, but it just amazes me, the strength of Mormon, and his constant prayers for Moroni - and his pleading to God for his soul to be brought b...

Jarom, for some reason, didn't seem all that inspired to me, this time around. The only thing which caused me to question was verse 2. To me, it seems that Jarom didn't want to write "much" for two reasons:  1. Because the plates are small, and 2.  They are being written for the benefit of the Lamanites. I guess I can u...

Here I am again, in my bed typing in my journal on my laptop. Ya know, life is really good. Life has dealt me a bunch of cards which I interpret as being quite possibly the "straight flush" of life. Has it been easy? Nah. But I can't complain - nope, not one bit. Now, then.. on with the story. In my last entry, I briefly mentioned that my g...

Once quite awhile ago, my brother came to me and asked me why we go to church, and where is the doctrine concerning church attendance.  In addition to Moroni 6 : 4-6, I also gave him Alma 6 : 6. Other than that, this seems to just be a transition verse from preaching in Zarahemla to preaching in Gideon. It also speaks about membership of t...

I know a lot of the posts this year have been on the spiritual topic, but, I write about the events of my life, and so I guess this is what ya get. Today was awesome. If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that today I sang in the choir, gave a talk in sacrament meeting, and taught the 15-16 year old doctrine class. It was wonderful. ...

So, when I started the re-design of my studio website, I knew I would need sliders, but I didn't realize how many unconfigurable, and generally static sliders were out there.  I must have gone through 5 iterations of sliders before I found one that matches my needs (and probably will be the go-to slider for any project I work on in the future)...

Today I anticipated changing the clutch on Ryan's 1995 Mustang GT for about 3 hours.  I got up at 7:30 to do it, and I'm writing this about 2 hours after we finished.  Needless to say, it was an all-day adventure - and holy cow, were we dirty. I didn't have the sense to take a picture of both of us before I took a shower, but I did of ...

Okay...  First question about this chapter which really intrigues me is this:  Why would Moroni immediately assume wickedness on the part of the Nephites as soon as Nephihah was taken over? I don't ask this question rhetorically, or sarcastically because if I were him, I guess I could think of a thousand other reasons why a city would g...

Man...  I've been having mixed emotions about the oncoming trip to California for a number of reasons.  I mean, this trip really has been putting both me and my wife through the ringer.  First, I got a new job, and am being quite challenged by my new tasks there.  Taking time off to go on a vacation right now isn't the best idea...

 This was a good chapter.  Starts out stating that worthiness is necessary in order for baptism into the Lord's church: bringing forth fruit of worthiness (not entirely sure what this means, specifically) having a broken heart and contrite spirit, showing a witness of true repentance taking upon yourself the name of Chris...

Setting your heart upon the glory of the world has always seemed like a bad idea to me, but then again, for most of my life I've been kind of the odd-man-out.  heh..  My own siblings have mentioned to me that they "don't get me".  Most people would consider this a bad thing, but for me, it's been life.  The desire to &...

Okay. I've gotta write this down for two reasons: So I don't forget what I just figured out. I hope to high heaven someone doesn't have to go through what I just did to figure something THIS SIMPLE. On with the story. Well, about 2 months ago my server started acting strangely. The most notable symptom of this strangeness was manifested by a...

Very interesting that they took the time to tell us that Ammon not only rehearsed what King Benjamin said to the Nephites, but that he then explained it to them that they might understand it.  Not sure why that struck me this time, but it did. (verse 3) According to verse 13, a man who can look into and see (and translate), is a seer.  ...

Interesting Alma used the phrase "my heart began to sicken" when he heard about what the Zoramites were doing.  That is such a descriptive word, and I can almost feel what he described as I read... I also find verse 5 interesting at this point in my life.  It seems that Alma confirms that sometimes, when moved upon by the spir...

This chapter was good to read.  I felt the spirit quite a bit.  Some insights I had this time around were interesting... I really wish I knew how much Alma knew about the Gospel before he was converted by Abinadi.  Regardless of how much he knew, it's interesting that each decision Alma makes with his little city of people he broug...

 Woo, baby, am I tired! One thing that I often think about while pondering the Gospel is how blessed I am to live in a time where the fulness of the Gospel is available - and not only available, but I was born into a practicing family, and have made the life choices necessary for me to continue worthy to obtain the blessings given to God's c...