First, read this quote from James Talmage’s Jesus is the Christ, which is quoted (among other places) in the Doctrines of the Gospel manual (published in 2000):

“For over seventeen hundred years on the eastern hemisphere, and for more than fourteen centuries on the western, there appears to have been silence between the heavens and the earth. Of direct revelation from God to man during this long interval, we have no authentic record.”

Then, read this quote from Elder Ballard’s 1994 General Conference talk:

by Elizabeth Pinborough

Elizabeth Pinborough is a freelance writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Dialogue, Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets, and Wilderness Interface Zone. 

I learned about The God Who Weeps when I was invited to a blogger Q&A with Terryl and Fiona Givens at Deseret Book in Salt Lake City about a month ago. I quickly picked the book up, reading half of it, along with Ben Parks’ and Jacob’s and Julie Smith’s initial reviews, before the event. The God Who Weeps is a beautiful little book. Aside from its comparatively slim 148 pages, there is nothing remotely little about it. It is impressive in its scope and literariness. Its prose is sparsely elegant and accessible. And it is lovingly written. Most of all, though, the book is beautiful in what it aspires to do. The Givenses said that they wrote the book out of respect for the “sanctity of doubt”: that is, for real faith to exist, both reasonable grounds to believe and reasonable grounds to disbelieve must exist. Within the “context of reasonable doubt” the Givenses created their book with strugglers in mind, the number of young people who are leaving the church perhaps because they do not understand the principles of Mormon doctrine. The book functions as an extended and heartfelt letter to a doubter and “a prose hymn to the reasonable gospel that Joseph Smith articulated.”

Six months after she was called as the new General Relief Society President, President Linda K. Burton spoke tonight.

I thought her talk was worth the wait. The thesis of her talk and the chosen focus of her presidency is the Atonement. She repeated this powerful statement a few times in her talk, “all that is unfair about life can be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.” I love that this is a message of hope, love, and acceptance. I love that it is doctrinally-deep and universally-applicable.

Seeds

I want to bear my testimony. I hope this church is true, for the most part.  I also hope that a few bits of it are not. Some people are knowers and others are believers.  I am a hoper.

I hope that the seeds of faith I have planted will grow, but my seeds of faith aren’t pine seeds—they don’t grow into a tree that becomes bigger and stronger with time.  They grow more like perennials—ever changing with the seasons. Sometimes faith completely disappears in frigid weather but it’s still alive under the ground, waiting to spring up again.  I hope someday my faith will become more evergreen, but I just don’t know.  There are many things I don’t know.

I never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea,
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a billow be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven.
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the checks were given.

Emily Dickinson

I figure there are two approaches to this lesson. 1) you can tell the faith-affirming stories of George Albert Smith and ask your class for their own stories of faith and how it has grown. If you choose this approach, I hope you’ll consider reading or summarizing Emma Lou Thayne’s magnificent essay, “Seeing Without Seeing.” I cry every time I read it, starting with “Someone asked her [Helen Keller], “Do you see colors?”,