Week 1

It was a little hard getting into the new lesson book this week. I ordered the "Joseph Smith's 'New Translation' of the Bible" book, but it hasn't arrived yet and I wanted to study the versions side by side without all the headache of switching pages all over the place.

So to keep myself busy I started reading the book "Following Christ" by Stephen E. Robinson instead. It is FANTASTIC! I've read 80 pages in two days! He writes in a way that reminds me of C.S. Lewis' writings (Mere Christianity to be exact). I love the way he puts things into parables that are easier to understand than what they would be on their own.

Here's a part that stood out in today's reading:

"Where once we lived and talked with heavenly parents for thousands, perhaps millions, of years, suddenly we have been separated from that divine influence. What comfort, what security must our parents have given us as we grew up under their loving care. How much a part of our lives they must have become in those premortal aeons. Now, like homesick freshmen, we suffer from a tremendous separation anxiety, a sense of loss brought about by the Fall, but because the veil has been drawn over our minds, we cannot remember what it is that we so desperately miss. The resulting condition might be called severe spiritual trauma, like being hit on the head, kidnapped, and waking up as a slave with amnesia in Timbuktu. In our spiritually more sensitive moments, we may feel that something isn’t quite right about all this, but until we find and accept the gospel of Jesus Christ we can’t really know what is wrong with this life or how to fix it. Somewhere deep within us, we grieve for the loss of a home and a life we cannot remember. We only feel the loss in our bones."