Miff Gift
Temperamental lemmings fall off the wrong cliffs
The rains came down and the Duckstacks came up
There is a rich danger in imagining. For example, imagine you are a duck1. By doing this, you have engaged in a fruitless exercise, and it is likely that deep down you recognize this, which is why in your mental picture, you didn't really put a lot of effort into it. In actual fact you probably didn't imagine it at all, you probably just thought the words “okay, I am a duck” which really demonstrates the overwhelming human capacity for laziness but no: you are a duck. Imagine it for real this time, through a ducks eyes. You are like 10 inches tall, your arms are feathers, permanently bent at an absurd angle from your body, your elbows somewhere near your neck, your mouth stiff and lipless. You are splashing in a pond and a giant person, me, comes stomping up, and he's/I'm like 8 times your height. You watch his approach and tension fills your muscles, fight or flight. You're not scared necessarily, just prudent. At any moment you may need to swim away using your powerful flippered feet, or fly using your horribly unnaturally bent elbows. Your tail (did you imagine you had a tail? Probably not, because you're lazy. Imagine your tail.) twitches in anticipation. But then it turns out he has bread. You don’t salivate, because you have too much dignity, and also because you don’t really have saliva glands. Imagine if you did! Okay now stop imagining that, because we want this imagination to be accurate to reality. You are stoically not salivating, which quickly rewards you because he doesn’t give you any bread, since he (I) know bread is not healthy for ducks. You have avoided overcommitting your desires. Does he have anything else? Yes. Grapes. He throws some on the ground, and dignity goes out the window.
What do you think? You could really lose yourself in a fantasy like this. It is a wonder you came back at all. And there’s the risk. What if you never came back? What if the scenario turned dangerous? What if you died in imagination? You would probably die in real life. The safest thing, therefore, is to never imagine anything. Keep it under lock and key, because you’re playing with fire here2.
The Parable of The Coconut
The Left has gone…. coconuts3
Once upon a time there was a coconut, and all he ever wanted was to be a bowling ball. On his desert island he would practice, rolling around and knocking over grass and things, hoping one day he would get a chance to one day fulfill all of his ambitions.
Eventually, a man in a long white lab coat appeared, and picked the coconut up. He told it, “I will brutally experiment on you and torture you for seven years, and then you will be ready to be a bowling ball.” “I also want to be an astronaut in space,” said the coconut, “and also I want to meet a dinosaur one day.” “Fine,” said the man in the white lab coat. And so he took the coconut back onto his yacht which had an evil lab in it and horribly tortured and experimented on the coconut for years. After about three years the coconut realized that it had horribly miscalculated how long seven years were, because coconut years are much shorter than human years and coconuts in general do not have a very good sense of time.
Finally, seven years had passed, and the coconut emerged from the lab. Its husk had been cut, sliced out, and sewn back on more times than it could count. Its inner coconut milk had been processed with various chemicals in a massive heart and lung machine for years, and was surely no longer fit for human consumption. Electronic coils and diodes lined its shell, and one of its coconut eyes had been drilled out and it had been given a mechanical eye, which glowed a bloody crimson in the darkness. Much of its body was more machine than shell, but it was ready.
The good doctor hooked it up to a catapult and launched it into space4 . It arrived at a primitive planet still filled with dinosaurs, and flared white hot upon collision with the atmosphere, which was filled with volatile gasses and ignited the whole planet like a candle. The coconut connected to the ground with extinction level force, and the shockwave knocked all the dinosaurs over. A perfect strike.
The End.
Big God
Christ is a man, and God is a man, and you are an ant.5
What's it like, being God’s butler, do you think? Would you constantly second guess yourself like the 1 talent servant? The pressure would be immense. Would you feel comfortable innovating? Would you come to pester him for instructions in every little decoration choice? Would you, eventually, come to see him as a friend, and feel able to predict fairly comfortably what he would want?
It is not so different being a child, or an heir. Some error is expected during training. That's now. You get some tutors and stuff and place them throughout the childs life, and fill their life with lessons, hoping they learn them well. Its natural for a child to love his parent, but with the whole natural man situation, we generally have to treat God as more an adoptive parent, and that is someone you must learn to love6.
I’m sometimes a little skeptical when certain types of people proclaim their love for God, when I get the impression that they haven’t spent a lot of time with him. In my opinion it makes more sense to be scared, and I know I have definitely been scared to pray. Prayer takes a lot of courage, I think. Maybe not just sort of recited prayers, but a proper prayer involves God talking back, and that changes things quite a bit, because I am a speck7 on a really big rock.
And I go to pray and talk to God and then I quickly hang up the phone, because I’m afraid of what he might say back. What if he asks me to do something I’m not ready to do8? And secondly, at times I’m not confident in my ability to hear him correctly (which is the same as not confident in his ability to correct for your weakness- the simple diagnostic term for “not trying out of analysis paralysis” is “a lack of faith”) and I was thinking about it this week and I interestingly enough, the solution to the one is the other.
If you are afraid what he'll say, then just take it with a grain of salt, because “maybe I misheard it”
If you are afraid you'll mishear it, just focus on what he’s asked you to do and ignore the rest.
There are some who say God is found in the resolving of contradiction, in ascending the paradox, forged in the crucible of doubt and coming out the other side, and I’ve always thought that was really silly, at least in general, but in specifics there can be a lot of wisdom to that. He truly is the god of the gaps9, but through practice you will get to know the king.
I’ve developed some steps, I ran these like an exercise regimen on my mission, becoming practiced at hearing from God. Pray then listen, then write down whatever comes. Maybe its nonsense, but you can withhold judgement. Act on any direction, and then write down the results. This way, you can compare whether the long term results of the gibberish lined up with what you know about God. “is it encouraging me to follow Jesus? Does it bring about righteousness or keeping God’s commandments?” etc, there are many scriptures about how to test the spirits and prophets.
If you extend this on a long enough timeline, you can get pretty practiced at recognizing when a thought comes “oh that’s just me” versus “that sounded like things that have godly results usually sound like” and through this method you can begin to both hear and trust your creator. To borrow another framework, a relationship is developed by the five love languages- words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, touch, and quality time. You can find God speaking all these languages in the scriptures, but you need to foster a relationship with him yourself.
Are you spending quality time with Him? Is He spending time with you? Are you giving him gifts? Is he giving you gifts? Are you performing acts of service for him? Is he performing acts of service for you? Are you speaking words of affirmation to him? Is He speaking words of affirmation to you? Have you touched him? Has he touched you?10
I don’t think you can really serve God by following the Bible. Or the Book of Mormon or any other scripture, for that matter11. They just aren't sufficient for realtime decisions, there’s too much translating you have to do for all the principles to orient the map, and there is all too much human error in the process. You need living revelation, meaning a living prophet for the earth, and a living prophet for yourself, which is you. It only took like 20 words from the living God to alter Paul’s trajectory forever, something the mere scriptures could never do.
Chin Up, Kiddo
You must be able to do 🫲this🫱many chin ups to date
girls don't like you because youre short? thats not even in the top 10 worst things you could be:
dead
leporous
shorter
Smelly
A lawyer
A slug
vaporized
locked in cryostasis
A cannibal12
history
(in a small voice:) “hisry!”
“Papa hurry home I need to throw up and also I want mcdonalds”
“Mama are you cutting more things? Oh! What a bad time to come outside. Because I do not like loudness.” and then he closed the door.
“That’s a big package… Maybe a chain saw will help open it”
The toddler crawled in and locked himself in a dog kennel this week. In our yard. We didn’t realize he could open doors to get outside now. For what its worth he was really happy in there
Jethro is starting to pull his weight in the home, meaning he is starting to soak up some of the toddler’s attention and neediness. To Jethro’s chagrin. Nevertheless, it remains very fun to have Jethro running around the house saying things with a tiny lisping echo following along behind him.
Trade Imports
A ship comes into the harbor and unloads crate after crate of substack emails
Billionaire Psycho paints a very bleak picture of our current society, with some very aptly selected images and quotes to back it up. And of course while I do not agree with all of his excess (excess is sort of the Billionaire Psycho’s “thing”, after all) there are some very interesting concepts in here for male loneliness and the current state of things. It is a longer read but he opens with some extremely compelling charts, and its worth reading at least the first section and the section on Pygmalion. I also would caution (admitting that things within the church are comparably really good compared to outside the church) that women’s state is not quite as bad as he proposes as far as promiscuity and such things- while percent male virginity is approaching 30%, female virginity has actually risen also. Objectively, most women are not prostitutes. So for men disgusted by the general state of things, be careful not to be blinded by the outlier effect, where you think bad things are more common due to how impactful the outliers are. (for example, school shootings are less common than drowning, but have much higher emotional impact)
For my Christian readers I would put a mild content warning that he is not afraid of slurs, because that is how “the rabble” talks about these things. It nevertheless dovetails well off of some points I made in my recent dating substack- Most women want men to be heroes, but if you want men to be heroes, there has to be some sort of prize that makes self sacrifice worth it, and it is increasingly apparent that men simply do not have those sorts of incentives working for them anymore.
The most dangerous imagination indeed
Put the matches away kids, science class is over, no more imagination this year
for cocoa puffs
Most mad scientists keep catapults on their yachts IMO
and I am a duck
Mosiah 3:19 “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.”
The natural man is an enemy to God, but if he submits, then what? Then, he becomes a friend. I believe it is an issue of subordination and priorities, rather than tautological conflict.
A duck
God is known to stretch us, after all. So is it really so unreasonable to assume he is going to slam the accelerator and vaporize you by moving you from 0 to 100 mph in less than a nanosecond?
thats not what god of the gaps means bobdaduck you stupid idiot
“A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. Feel the prints of the nails in my hand and feet, and thrust thy hand into my side.”
For Latter Day Saints, there are other ways of touching God also, in his temples. There are in fact many ways to perform physical touch over long distance, and I would say the partaking of the bread and the water at communion also falls under this.
Brigham Young:
We consider the Bible … as a guide … pointing to a certain destination. This is a true doctrine, which we boldly advance. If you will follow the doctrines, and be guided by the precepts of that book, it will direct you where you may see as you are seen, where you may converse with Jesus Christ, have the visitation of angels, have dreams, visions, and revelations, and understand and know God for yourselves. Is it not a stay and a staff to you? Yes; it will prove to you that you are following in the footsteps of the ancients. You can see what they saw, understand what they enjoyed (DBY, 126).
We believe in the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants given by the Lord to Joseph Smith and by him to the Church. We also believe if we were destitute of the Spirit of the Lord, and our eyes were closed so that we could not see and understand things as they are by the spirit of revelation, we might say farewell to all these books, no matter how numerous. If we had all the revelation given since the days of Adam and were without the spirit of revelation to be and abide in the midst of the people, it would be impossible for us to be saved in the celestial kingdom of God (DBY, 128).
you have no idea how much research we did for this