Last summer I had the honor of speaking at Sunstone Symposium along with my research partner Marylee Mitchum. Our topic was on Sephardic Jews. I would like to share with you, dear friends, important information with exciting new research that is currently being done in genealogy and Sephardic Studies. In the upcoming weeks, I will reveal the information we shared at Sunstone. I will teach you the knowledge to search for and possible locate hidden Sephardic Jews in your heritage. Lets get started.
Tag Archives: LDS
Guest Post: Dearscriptures.com
After joining a LinkedIn group for returned missionaries, I encountered a web site created by one of the group members that I thought was worth sharing. I invited the site owner/creator, Steve Lloyd, to share a little more about his site with our M* readers.
Steve Lloyd is an Idaho farm boy born and raised in Malad, Idaho where his
father worked for a local dairy farmer. After graduating from Malad High
School he went to Utah State University for one year before serving a
mission in Seoul, Korea. Afterwords, he attended BYU and graduated with a
Business Management Major/Entrepreneurship emphases.
For the past 15 years, Steve has worked in the software industry in
Quality Assurance, Automation, Build Configuration, and Software
Development. An inventor at heart, he is always working on a side project
to in an effort to help others and make the world a better place.
I would like to introduce you to a site I recently launched. It is called http://www.dearscriptures.com and is a site where you can read, study, listen, annotate, take notes, search, lookup a word’s dictionary definition in multiple online dictionaries, and lookup the Greek or Hebrew translation of nearly any word in the Old Testament or New Testament using Strong’s Concordance.
Tears in Heaven: A LDS Perspective on Stillborn and Miscarried Babies
I have a box tucked in the back of a closet with his sonogram, a white Winnie the Pooh onsie he never wore, a statue of a baby angel, a sympathy card and the book Gone to Soon: The Life and Loss of Infants and Unborn Children by Sherri Devashrayee Wittwer. There is no other earthly record of his short life. Some might even debate whether he had been a life at all. Continue reading
Speaking evil of a neighbor
I have recently been troubled by a swirl of rumors and misinformation around an acquaintance of mine regarding a very personal and private matter. Sadly, this individual’s life has become fodder for gossip and evil speaking among neighbors.
Even more troubling is the possibility that information shared in confidence was disseminated to those who had no business knowing the information. Continue reading
Called to Serve: Red-Shirting Kindergarten for a Mission
I taught elementary school for a number of years and observed, while teaching in Texas, parents deliberately holding their boys back a year to give them the advantage of size in sports participation.
Sports reasons not withstanding; is there a trend, in the North American LDS church community to red-shirt* five year old boys with an additional year in Pre-Kindergarten; when they are otherwise ready to attend Kindergarten for reasons to do with serving a mission?
Jared** is a four, almost five year old LDS boy, who is attending a Christian based Pre-Kindergarten program in our small southern town. Jared, unlike most of his peers, will not start Kindergarten in August. Jared’s teacher Miss Mamie** was understandably perplexed as to the reason behind this decision. Miss Mamie believed Jared could attend with his peers and do just fine. Miss Mamie went to Jared’s parents for an explanation. Jared’s parents told Miss Mamie they were thinking ahead to fourteen years in the future when young Jared would be nineteen.
Starting Jared in Kindergarten when he was six rather than five, would delay his graduation from high school just as he turned nineteen. Theoretically Jared would march to Pomp and Circumstance straight on into the MTC.
I have witnessed nineteen-year-old young men, who have left for missions the summer after their senior year in high school. However these young men were held back as five year olds because of readiness issues. Similar to the sports minded parents in Texas, is there now a trend to red-shirt five year olds for missions?
I can clearly see the advantages in the argument to hold back for a mission. The biggest advantage would be avoiding the freshman year away in college with the temptations any young man would surely encounter. Perhaps you like me, have observed many a nice young man who after a year away from college came home full of sin, debauchery, and maybe remorse.
I also see the disadvantages. My younger brother, who served in the Toronto, Canada mission in the early 1990’s shares the opinion of his mission President, who believed a year away from home attending college was the best training for a prospective Elder. It was this year away from home the young man learned to sink or swim. This mission President believed it was better for missionary service if the young man learned adult responsibility on his own rather than on the Lord’s time. This particular mission President also believed Elders with a year of college had learned the study skills necessary to be an effective missionary right out of the MTC.
So, in your humble opinion, dear reader, do you think a year in college before a mission is an advantage? Or do you think the temptations a prospective Elder will likely encounter during the year between 18-19 is just not worth the risk?
Finally is red-shirting LDS five year olds a trend or a rare anomaly?
Inquiring minds want to know.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(college_sports)
**The names have been changed to protect the innocent