MrAnderson

49ers diehard | LDS & natalism advocate | Passionate about fatherhood/masculinity & teaching | Tech enthusiast | Subscribe for faith & family tips!

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@jonathanplumb Hey. I love you brother. You deserve respect and the honor associated with a loving father who leads in righteousness. I'm sorry your kids are struggling with your return the the iron rod. Keep loving them. Hold tight to the rod and walk with your covenants in your heart.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

This is the correct take.

[Celestial Machines - Ezekiel's Wheel of Wonder @CerebralCereal0]

I think people are getting too upset with the Hegseth religion reclassifications. He actually put the real name of our Church which has Christs name in it already. We dont need the label. The rest of them need that qualifier of "Christian". Ours is explicit already. At least he didnt put "The Mormon Church" or "Church of the Lattet-day Saints"

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

Excellent article

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

https://t.co/WhJaBg8ess

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@FiredUpCoug That extra chromosome is the "Joy gene" as far as I'm concerned.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

If a cattle rancher doesn't set this up as a marketing campaign they have lost their minds!

[Brigham's Burner @FiredUpCoug]

Birthday Steak Calendar 2.0

I read your feedback that you wanted exclusively steaks in this calendar.

I got rid of the two pork dishes (ribs and ham) and replaced them with picanha and standing rib roast.

I can't imagine a certified carnivore being unhappy with any of these.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Manhattva @GovCox This feels too good to be true. I don't trust him.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Manhattva Yes... And rectangular metal and glass boxes of distraction and alienation.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

This must happen. But only if April gets Wagyu Ribeye.

[Brigham's Burner @FiredUpCoug]

My dumb idea of the day:

We should establish something like birthstones, but for men.

Instead of each month getting a gemstone, each month gets assigned a cut of meat.

January: New York Strip
February: Filet Mignon
March: Porterhouse

And so on.

You’d ask a guy his birthday and instead of saying, “Oh, you’re an amethyst,” you’d say, “Ah, February. Filet Mignon. Sensitive, expensive, and a little smaller than expected.”

I can hear the commercials already

“Celebrate his birth month with the timeless elegance of brisket.”

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Mormonger @WardRadioShow They are a joyful bunch at times.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

This is the kind of poetry that speaks to my soul. It is not metered, rhyming, or succinctly drawn. It is prose dripping in meaning and feeling.

[Kirk Rollins @nicoraytruth]

I've become a missionary with one message. Every time I meet a young person, the same words: have children, get married, build a family. I did not decide on this calling. It overtook me. And it overtook me for a single reason. I had no idea. I genuinely did not understand how much joy, how much meaning, how much sheer beauty pours out of a child until I was holding one of my own and felt the floor of my life drop into something deeper than I knew was there.

I grew up white, affluent, secular, comfortable, and insulated. That world does not put babies in front of you. None of my friends were starting families. Out of my whole circle, almost no one has a big one. We were not formed by the presence of children. We were formed by their absence, by the strange quiet of homes built for two careers and no cradle. And a person believes what his world shows him.

So we believed.

What we believed was a lie.

It is a lie with an author, and that the author is the enemy of joy himself.

It is the gospel of the world, and its commandment is wait. Wait until you are older. Wait until the career is built and the savings are stacked and the twenties are properly spent. Enjoy your freedom. You are not ready. It does not arrive sounding like temptation. It arrives sounding like wisdom, like prudence, like the responsible thing, and that is exactly why it works.

The most effective lies are the ones that wear the face of virtue.

And the maddening thing is that it collapses from every angle at once. It is not rooted in biology, because the body is made for this work precisely in the years we are told to postpone it. The flesh keeps a calendar the culture pretends not to see.

And it is not rooted in theology either. You will not find this deferral anywhere in the Christian imagination, in any of the fathers, in any of the scriptures. So choose whatever lens you like. Take the cold secular measure or the ancient sacred one. By either light the counsel is rotten. It is bad for the body and bad for the soul and bad for the society downstream of both.

This is why I have come to see it as one of the central tragedies of my generation. Every age carries its own wound. The Great Depression was a depression of bread, a scarcity in the world of matter, hunger you could measure.

Ours is a depression of a different order.

It is a famine of the spirit in the middle of abundance.

We have more than any people who ever lived and we are starving in a way our ancestors would not recognize, because the thing we are refusing cannot be bought and cannot be banked. The ones most made to give and receive this love are quietly declining it. They are walking away from the one inheritance that actually compounds, and the cruelest part is that they do not feel the loss as loss. You cannot grieve what you were taught not to want.

That is the deepest cut of it. The lie does not only steal the thing. It steals the capacity to know the thing was stolen. A man can spend his whole life on the far side of a door he never knew was a door, mistaking the wall for the edge of the world.

Because this beauty is not ordinary beauty. It is not the pleasure of a good meal or a clear morning. It is participation in something that comes down from above, the same generative love that spoke everything out of nothing and called it good.

To make a person, to be undone and remade by loving that person more than your own life, is to be drawn for a moment inside the very act that holds the cosmos together.

A child does not merely add to your life. A child reorders the soul. It teaches you what you are by asking everything of you, and you discover, kneeling there exhausted at three in the morning, that you had a capacity for self gift you never suspected, a depth in yourself you had no other way to reach.

In the Gospel of John, on the last night, Jesus prays, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. And I have come to understand why family is the road into that fullness, why it is not one path among many but the one most fitted to the shape of the promise.

Consider who is praying. Christ does not come to us as a lone figure dropped out of the sky. He comes out of a family older than the world, the eternal communion of Father and Son, the love between them so total and so alive that theologians dared to call it a third person.

Before there was anything, there was a family. The deepest fact about reality is not a force or a law or a void. It is a household. It is begetting and being begotten, giving and receiving, a Father who is only a Father because there is a Son.

So when Jesus speaks of joy made complete, he is not pointing away from family toward something higher. He is pointing toward the very thing he came from, the life he has known from eternity and came to share. His joy is the joy of belonging utterly to a Father and pouring himself out for those he loves.

When you marry, when you bring a child into the world, when you wear yourself down in the small unseen labors of a home, you are not stepping outside that divine life. You are stepping into a small image of it. Your family is a created echo of an uncreated one.

The love you give your child rhymes with the love the Father has for the Son. The exhaustion, the tenderness, the way a parent would tear the sky open to protect a sleeping infant, all of it is the heavens pressed faintly into flesh, the eternal household leaving its fingerprint on yours.

That is why the joy is not merely added to family but completed in it. We were made in the image of a God who is, at his very root, relation and gift and generation. To found a family is to do the most Godlike thing a creature can do, to participate from below in the begetting that God does from all eternity. Your home becomes a window. Through it, dimly and imperfectly, you glimpse the country you came from and are going to.

And now a word for the young people reading this, the ones who do not yet have children. I want to tell you what it is like from where I stand.

When I am out somewhere, a restaurant, anywhere, and a large family comes through the door, the noise and the chaos and the small bodies of them, something happens in me on two levels at once. The first is joy. A pure gladness at the sight, the way you feel watching something good and alive. But underneath it, almost in the same instant, a sadness reaches up and takes hold of my heart. Because I know now, at my age, after my own years of waiting, that I will never have that. I will never know the particular fruit of a family that large, the fullness of that table, the weight of all those lives gathered under one roof. The door to it has quietly closed, and I felt it close.

And I am telling you plainly, because I love you and have no reason to lie to you: you will feel this too. You will. The day will come when you see what you passed up, and you will recognize the ache for what it is, and it will be too late to answer it.

So please, learn from a man who got it wrong.

Let my regret be worth something by becoming your wisdom. Do not wait yourself into a grief you cannot undo. Choose now, while the door is open, so that you may step into a joy that does not end.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Jennifer376061 @Hotchkiz @Truth_matters20 @joshwhitlatch Wonderful...better to be a heretic and right than be wrong and accepted by bigots.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

I legitimately have no issues with Jeff's conclusions. They're up for interpretation so I don't think they are hard data that does anything other than give us a glimpse into the lives of those who responded to a survey. It says nothing about the church or the gospel just the reaction of the respondents.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Jennifer376061 @Hotchkiz @Truth_matters20 @joshwhitlatch Except it requires your presuppositions to be true in order for it to evidence... So yeah ...

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

When I see people like this get like-ratioed in the comment section I know they're being intentionally provocative in order to make a few bucks off of the engagement of faithful #SaintsOnX . I'm not going to suggest we stop engaging. But we need to make sure that we understand we're likely supporting them in their financial ability to attack us.

[Capturing Christianity @CapturingChrist]

Mormons: “We’re Christians! Call us Christians!”

Also Mormons: *systematically deny the Trinity*

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

Your ignorance on our theology is showing. There is only one God the Father and He is co-eternal with all that exists. He was God when he had a mortal experience in precisely the same way that Jesus was God in His mortal experience.
The King Follett sermon is not doctrine because we have roughly 1/6th of the context in written form. A 3 hour sermon was not accurately or reliably contained in text that can be read aloud in a speech in 30 minutes. Using the KFS as some sort of "foundational" text is false. The idea of an infinite regression of Gods is nothing more than speculation and is not a doctrine. Your ignorance on the actual revealed doctrines that we have is proof that you'd rather misunderstand and be bigoted than understand and be loving.

Is Christ God? Does He have a God? Does Christ have a body? Gods have bodies...God the Father and God the Son have bodies. This is basic biblical teaching. The fact that you lean on a post-Biblical creed to reinterpret what is plain in the text doesn't make you Christian to the exclusion of those who don't use a creed to understand the plain text.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@emuse1955 If this is your debate prep you're going to have a rough debate.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@Jennifer376061 @Hotchkiz @Truth_matters20 @joshwhitlatch Neat... You presuppose your correctness rather than generate evidence.

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@DavidLeeGenesis @RestoredTruth8 Yes. And when I do show that level of love (if you love me keep my commandments) I'm promised exaltation... Not mere salvation from sin. Salvation is the bare minimum... Who wants the bare minimum?

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

@ShaunMcKnight Diabetes skillet

[MrAnderson @cnctNow]

I feel compelled to share my experience.

It was a dream in my mid-teens. I had a girlfriend and a few other girls I was interested in and while my girlfriend occupied my thoughts nearly every moment I still had a wandering eye. Teen boys be like that.

The dream was profound because it gave me a glimpse of some things that I didn't know I desired until that dream.

There was a massive storm that caused severe anxiety and darkness across the entirety of creation. The clouds burst into massive tornados and winds blew violently. I was driving along a familiar road in my area and had my wife and two daughters in the car. Remember, I'm a teenage boy... Wife and two daughters were way too far down the line to be real or desirable but in that moment I knew they were more important than anything. Their terror as the winds seemed to pummel us was my responsibility. My words only held so much calm as I was equally terrified.

Then, a ray of light burst through the most ominous funnel. Then another, and more and still more until the skies seemed to be a fight between light and dark and the light was finally making headway.

I found myself pulling the car over and getting out in the middle of one of those rays of light.

I noted a figure that my LDS upbringing confirmed was Jesus Christ. I immediately realized the heaviness of my sins and fell to my knees as He began to walk toward me...yes toward me. As He approached I heard Him tell me to rise. The voice destroyed the weight of my sin so quickly that I felt as though I took flight for a moment in rising to see His face.

It was then that I embraced my Savior and felt as @nicoraytruth the magnificent abundance. So strong and profound that my heart literally began to race and I awoke.

My eyes were wet. The tears of a dream fully formed in the world of awake. There were words shared with me in that dream that I do not share with anyone. They sustain me in the darkest moments of trial, they offer me perspective that sees beyond mortality.

As a teen I had an experience that ensures my focus will be on eternity and the giver of that most precious gift is Jesus Christ. Light cannot be held back. No darkness is deep enough that He will not walk to you and lift you if that is the desire of your heart.

[Kirk Rollins @nicoraytruth]

I am going to share an experience that is real. It's how I ended up seriously exploring the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in my 20s.

I have told five people. A Mormon bishop's family in Colorado, a Roman Catholic priest, my wife, and a good friend. I don't tell others. When I told the bishop's family, they laughed because it is unbelievable to some. I understand that. I am telling it anyway.

I was in law school, and I was under immense stress. I had started the semester after spending the summer in the holy land.

I was split down the middle on what to believe. Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, a half dozen other faiths, reading everyone, believing no one.

So I asked God to do the one thing I could not do for myself. I asked him to reveal himself. Not an argument. Not a sign I could explain away by morning. Himself.

I was lying on the couch. I went under, and then I came back up fast, the way you do when something is wrong, because something was standing over my face.

I could feel it. A real presence, right above me, close, deliberate. I opened my eyes and there was no one. The room was empty.

And I was awake.

This is the part people want to take from me, and I will not give it up. I was awake.

Then it came. An embrace. My body physically moved. Not the feeling of being loved — the love itself, with arms. Love beyond love.

I keep saying it because there is no better way, and there is no way at all. Every word I reach for falls short and keeps falling. Abundance beyond abundance. More than I had room to hold, and more coming, and more behind that. Ineffability and inexplicable.

It was so much that it frightened me, not because it was dark, but because it was too much light for one body.

I said stop. I actually said it. Stop.

And it stopped.

I have lived a whole life since that couch. It never came again.

The answer to my prayer did not come as a name. It came as love. I asked a question of theological doctrine and I was answered in a different language entirely — the way a father answers a frightened child, not with a syllogism but by picking the child up.

Whatever was in that room had no interest in winning my theological argument for me. It had an interest in me.

Notice second that I could not produce it, sustain it, or survive it at full strength.

I said stop and it did, and that tells you two things at once. It was greater than me, because it overwhelmed me. And it was gentle with me, because it relented the instant I asked.

That combination, overwhelming power that yields to a single weak word from the person it is overwhelming, is the whole grammar of grace.

Power that listens. Vastness that is also tender. I was not crushed. I was held, and then released because I asked to be, and the releasing was as much love as the holding.

Notice third that it never returned, and I no longer think that is abandonment. I think it is the point. I was not given a practice or a feeling I could go back to and refill. I was given one thing, once, in the difficult stretch of my life, and then I was sent back to live.

People want the experience to repeat so they can be sure of it. But a thing that happened once and changed the floor I stand on does not need to repeat. The fire on the mountain burns once. The man carries it down for the rest of his days.

You cannot be argued out of love beyond love once it has been poured into your own body. There is no counterargument to a thing you were inside of.

The doctrines kept shifting under me for years, because doctrines are downstream. But what came in through the experience itself, not through my reading, held — and it held precisely because I did not reason my way to it. It was given.

Two things were given. The first was a closing of doors. I went onto that couch torn between Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and the rest, and I did not get up neutral.

I came up knowing that Islam is not true. That a number of the other faiths I had been weighing are not true either. Emphatically not.

I cannot hand you the proof, because it never came to me as proof — it came the way the love came, given and total, not the conclusion of an argument but the removal of a question.

The second was what stayed standing once the doors had closed.

God is love. That is the whole of it.

1 John 4:16 became my compass: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

Everything I have read since, every tradition I have walked into and out of, I have measured against that one line — because that one line did not come from a book.

It came in through my own skin, on a couch, in the worst year of my life, and it has never moved.

And this love survives in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This I believe.

I don't know the rest, but that's good enough for me at this point in my life.