This post is more blatantly self-serving than most. Please humor me. I love Christmas music. I love it year round, though this year I haven’t really been listening to it much. I must rectify this horrible oversight. Growing up, I was forbidden to listen to Christmas music anywhere besides quietly in my room until after Thanksgiving (American Thanksgiving, not Canadian Thanksgiving). As far as I was concerned, this was a tragic limitation of great music, and as soon as I moved out, I listened year round.

So now we come to my request: I need more Christmas music.

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Robert Kirby’s humor column today is about post-mission readjustment. I’ve been trying to come up with a blog post on just this subject for a while, but his article is funnier than anything thing I probably could have done, so I’ll just link to it.

In college, a couple of my roommates and I found it entertaining to sit very close to a very recently returned missionary and flirt a bit, just to watch him sweat. Cruel? Absolutely. But also a lot of fun. Mostly, though, I just watched with a distant curiosity as the recently returned elders readjusted.

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While driving home from work earlier this week, I ran over something (that something is still a mystery) and ended up with two flat tires. I, of course, followed the only rational approach in such a situation – I panicked. When I thought it was only one flat tire, I reviewed in my mind how to put on the spare, all the while panicking. When I then saw that there were two tires rapidly deflating and one spare tire just wasn’t going to be sufficient, I immediately realized that this is why I pay for AAA, all the while panicking. I’m pretty good at working up a good panic. Call it a gift.

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Over the last two years, my approach to the Plan of Salvation has evolved quite a bit– in large part due to the thoughts I’ve processed and discussed on LDS blogs. The summary version of my current philosophy goes like this:

Life is not a crucible– it’s a chrysalis. Rather than being simply a test or a proving ground, the purpose of life is to teach us to become Gods.

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As many have probably already heard, the Church has removed all of its North American missionaries from Venezuela and reassigned them to other Spanish-speaking missions (see SL Tribune article). Political tensions being what the are between the U.S. and Venezuela right now, it seems to be a reasonable action. I don’t know much about the Church in Venezuela, but it seems to be quite strong there (a temple and 144 congregations) and perfectly capable of continuing on without too much of a blip as a result of the sudden drop in missionaries. I’m sure it will cause some short term difficulties in the missions, though, as people are shuffled. Hopefully, long term difficulties will be avoided.

I’m quite impressed that the approximately 400 missionaries were removed in 4 hours.

Thoughts?