Hey y’all, I’m back from my June vacation. Lots of deep, deep thoughts to share, but they will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, I heard a rumor while I was on my vacation, and I was wondering if anybody else had heard it. The rumor is that the Church is beginning to ask all wards in the U.S. to house missionaries with members rather than continue to pay rent for the missionaries to live in apartments. Apparently, in one stake in Colorado this is already happening: during sacrament meeting, it was announced that the ward has to find a way to house the missionaries with the members. During High Priests, I was told confidently that this is a new Church-wide policy. I have no idea if this is true. Sorry if I’m bringing up a subject that has been discussed elsewhere. In the meantime, is this rumor true?

Due to a billing error on the part of our hosting service, the M* website was accidentally deleted from our hosting server. We are working on restoring the comments and posts. In the mean time all comments have been closed. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: It appears that our soon-to-be-former hosting service is foolish enough to run its automatic account deletion process before it runs its nightly backup processes. As a result all posts and comments made after 6/12/2006 at 1:00am have been permanently lost. We are very sorry to all who composed thoughtful posts or comments that have fallen into the abyss of inept technology.

We hope to move to a more responsible hosting service in the very near future. Comments have been re-opened and posting will resume. Feel free to recommend a good hosting service.

The post below on the Church and FMA has taken an interesting turn, and I think it’s worth constructing a new thread on this issue. The question at hand is: who is more of a threat to the Church, leftist secularists or right-wing Christian fundamentalists? In this post I will argue that right-wingers are more of a threat in the short-term but that ultimately secularists are the far bigger threat.

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I’m guessing M* was knocked out of service over the weekend by the huge debate over at T&S on, yes, you guessed it, Same Sex Marriage. The debate was so raucous that its effects rocked the entire Bloggernacle, temporarily disabling our server. But, we’re back.

In any case, the Church statement was supposed to be read over the pulpit on Sunday but was not in my ward. I imagine that was simply an oversight by our bishop, not a political statement of any kind. Our bishop supports the First Presidency’s position, as do I. People looking for more information on this issue should visit this website.

(In case anybody doesn’t get my sense of humor, the above was not the reason we were out of service over the weekend.)

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Regardless of whether you support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you should be able to support the idea of showing appreciation for our troops. I do this in very small ways: when I see troops in uniform (almost always returning from Iraq or Afghanistan), I thank them for their service in protecting me and my family.

So, with Memorial Day coming up on Monday, would you be willing to share appropriate ways to show appreciation? Perhaps it is something so small as writing a letter to a friend who is serving overseas, showing him or her you care. This article from the CSM talks about some ways communities are showing they are concerned about the troops. Check it out.