No Coincidences

Tag: religion

  • Wheat and Tares

    Wheat and Tares

    Christ gives the parable of wheat and tares in Matthew 13:24-30:

    24 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:

    25 But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.

    26 But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.

    27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?

    28 He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?

    29 But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.

    30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

    In Doctrine and Covenants section 86 Christ gave an explanation of this parable. Here are His words:

    1 Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you my servants, concerning the parable of the wheat and of the tares:

    2 Behold, verily I say, the field was the world, and the apostles were the sowers of the seed;

    3 And after they have fallen asleep the great persecutor of the church, the apostate, the whore, even Babylon, that maketh all nations to drink of her cup, in whose hearts the enemy, even Satan, sitteth to reign—behold he soweth the tares; wherefore, the tares choke the wheat and drive the dchurch into the wilderness.

    4 But behold, in the last days, even now while the Lord is beginning to bring forth the word, and the blade is springing up and is yet tender—

    5 Behold, verily I say unto you, the angels are crying unto the Lord day and night, who are ready and waiting to be sent forth to reap down the fields;

    6 But the Lord saith unto them, pluck not up the tares while the blade is yet tender (for verily your faith is weak), lest you destroy the wheat also.

    7 Therefore, let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest is fully ripe; then ye shall first gather out the wheat from among the tares, and after the gathering of the wheat, behold and lo, the tares are bound in bundles, and the field remaineth to be burned.

    Quick rundown:

    Verses 1-3 explains the great apostasy that occurred to the church after the apostles “have fallen asleep” (aka were killed).

    Verse 4 reminds us that we’re now speaking of our day.

    Verse 5 tells us, “the angels are crying unto the Lord… to reap down the fields.” That can be interpreted different ways but basically the angels want to start with the harvest. The harvest can be considered the gathering of souls at the end of times. This leads to

    Verse 6 where the Lord tells the angels to hold off on the harvest because He doesn’t want to destroy the wheat. The wheat are the righteous, those followers of the Lord. The tares are those who oppose God.

    Verse 7 we learn that wheat will grow alongside tares until the end. Then the wheat will be separated from the tares, and the tares will be burned.

    I believe the most telling part of those verses is in verse 6 where it says, “for verily your faith is weak.”

    The Lord doesn’t want to pull up the tares because the wheat is still “tender” with weak faith.

    I’ve heard this parable many times but for the first time a thought occurred to me. What would it mean for the angels to reap the harvest and pull up the tares while the wheat is still weak? The tares being pulled up signifies the evil people of the world being taken away. The wheat would be too weak to handle this, the wheat is too intertwined with the tares. Wheat and tares, of course, represent people. What does it mean that the wheat is too tender for the tares to be taken? The thought that occurred to me was that the wheat, or faithful people, would have their faith shattered if the tares around them were taken. Could this represent the tares of some friends, family, and people we care about? What if God let loose the angels and took up the tares. How many faithful people would lose loved ones? 

    Are you a wheat or a tare?

    Is our faith weak or strong?

    In Matthew 13:38 Christ says

    “The good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one”.

    Christ doesn’t detail the ok seed or the middle ground seed. We are good seeds or we are tares. We are working for Christ or working against Him. We are faithful or we lack faith.

    One day the wheat will be separated from the tares and the end will come. When that day comes, which side will we be on? The side of the wheat or the side of the tares? It’s not enough to be lukewarm as the adversary intensifies his attack. Wheat is nourishing, tares are not. There’s no middle ground. You are either a wheat or a tare.

    Which are you?

  • Ivy and Jesus with the Light

    Ivy and Jesus with the Light

    I was working on my laptop and Ivy saw a picture. It was an abstract-looking drawing of a long-haired individual meditating.

    Ivy said, “It’s Jesus.”

    Her and Sage say this if they see pretty much any image of a long-haired individual.

    It makes me happy every time.

    I chuckled.

    Then Ivy said, “Show Jesus with the light.”

    I paused like you often have to do when talking with 4-year-olds to figure out what she meant.

    Jesus with the light…

    Hmm…

    Then it came to me what she meant. I pulled up this image and showed it to her:

    “Yes! That’s it!” She looked fondly at the picture.

    My happiness turned to joy.

    This picture has a special place in my heart as it was once an answer to prayer that I’ve remembered ever since.

    When I was just returning to church, I attended a fireside one Sunday evening. I dragged Chris along with me. As he and I were walking around the church building halls before the meeting got started, we paused at the above picture, which is present in so many of our church buildings.

    We both looked at it.

    “Why do they look the same?” Chris asked.

    Huh. I’d looked at this picture at least 346,000 times but never really realized or thought about it. They did look the same. I didn’t know the answer.

    Chris shrugged and moved on. I was kind of annoyed I didn’t know the answer to a question I felt I should know. Or at the very least something I should have noticed in my 346,001 viewing of the painting.

    We went into the fireside.

    The speaker was introduced and he stood to speak. He powered on a projector and an image was displayed behind him. 

    Drum roll please.

    You guessed it.

    The image displayed was none other than the painting Chris and I had just been observing in the hall.

    The speaker began, “Does anyone know why the figures in this image look so much alike?”

    My head jerked to look at Chris next to me. Was he hearing this?!

    The speaker went on to explain that the scriptures tell us that Jesus Christ is in the express image of His father. Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father look alike. Makes sense, He is His Son, after all.

    I can’t remember why the speaker talked about this. It wasn’t a major point. It was something I think he assumed most of us knew (I didn’t!). He proceeded onto his main point that I can’t remember.

    I was shocked.

    Chris asked a question. We received an answer.

    I considered this a miracle.

    I think Chris shrugged and thought, ‘what a coincidence.’

    I have joy today because I came back to church. I have joy today because I consider every day what Jesus Christ did for me yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I have joy today because Ivy and Sage say “Jesus!” every time they see an image of a long-haired man.

    NoCoincidences.

  • Why we REALLY don’t Drink Coffee

    Why we REALLY don’t Drink Coffee

    Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abstain from tea and coffee, along with other drinks and substances. We refer to this as the “Word of Wisdom.“

    The question often comes up, “Why don’t you drink coffee?” This seems to be the one that really hangs people up. Abstain from cocaine? Makes sense. Alcohol? People can see it. COFFEE?!?!?!!?! People are befuddled.

    This isn’t an easy question to answer, but I wanted to write my thoughts on it. The REAL reason we don’t drink coffee.

    Do we not drink tea and coffee because it makes us healthier? Do we avoid coffee because it’s addictive? Do we avoid coffee for our body’s health?

    Maybe.

    Is that the primary reason we don’t drink coffee?

    NO.

    Why do we pay tithing?

    Why do we partake of the sacrament on Sunday?

    Why do we avoid going to the store or other activities on Sunday?

    Why do we do any number of things the world finds peculiar?

    It’s because we have made covenants with God to obey His commandments. That’s it. That’s why we do what we do. To be obedient to God.

    Maybe it makes us healthier, maybe keeping the sabbath holy renews our spirits, maybe not swearing keeps our minds clean, maybe tithing brings us blessings. But are any of these maybes the real reason we do anything? It shouldn’t be.

    We do these things because we love the Lord and have covenanted to follow Him. End of story. The world might call it restrictive, but from my personal experience, it is the EXACT opposite. It is freedom.

  • Ignorance and Spontaneous Generation

    Ignorance and Spontaneous Generation

    Do you know what spontaneous generation is?

    Spontaneous generation is the outdated idea that living organisms can spontaneously come from other living organisms. For example, it used to be believed that a horse was how bees were created. People used to observe that a horse would die, and bees would “spontaneously generate” from the corpse. Crazy huh? Of course, now we know better. I wrote the below for a discussion post in my Science 301 class, Understanding Formal Processes.

    The once prevalent fallacy of spontaneous generation goes to show that we can be extremely wrong about simple and obvious things by relying on what our eyes tell us. When I initially started reading about spontaneous generation in Bondeson’s book, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History, I could hardly believe that spontaneous generation was debated into the 1800s (Bondeson, 2014, p. 248). As I thought about it more, though, I understood how this theory took hold of observable logic and persisted for so long. An animal decays in the sun and maggots appear. Where did they come from? An obvious conclusion was the decaying flesh of the animal created the maggots.

    Scientific progress is filled with examples of people being sure of something that ends up being absurd. The relationship between observable scientific knowledge and the scientific method is that as the scientific method is improved upon, meaning, as theories and ways of experimenting on those theories improve, scientific knowledge grows in proportion. It’s interesting to note what Herman van Booerhave said of the brilliant mathematician Girolamo Cardano, that he was exceptional when correct in his theories but, “When he advocated erroneous theories, he surpassed them all in folly” (Bondeson, 2014, p. 197).

    Often, we see how outlandish proposed experiments can become. Take Paracelsus’s proposed experiment to create a human being by mixing excrements, semen, broth, and nutritious fluids (Bondeson, 2014, p. 196). While seemingly absurd, scientists have always been ridiculed for outlandish theories, and those theories only go the direction of proven or disproven by what Paracelsus proposed: an experiment. Even the most outlandish experiment using the scientific method is an improvement on assumptions based solely on simple observations.

    When I was in 7th grade my science teacher gave us a very simple assignment. The assignment was to take something, anything that we could test, and observe each day, make a hypothesis, then keep the data and see if our assumption was correct. Many of my classmates repeated a couple simple observations. I wanted to be more creative. I chose to check the thermostat in my home each day and monitor the fluctuations in temperature. My hypothesis was that as it got hotter outside during the summer, the temperature would go up in my home. This seemed an obvious assumption to a 7th grader.

    I was shocked when I learned, from checking the temperature every morning, that it was 72 degrees in my home every morning, no matter what. My hypothesis was foiled by the scientific progress of a simple thermostat. A device I always assumed to simply tell the temperature, I learned, was actually monitoring the temperature and turning on cool air as it got hot, or hot air as it got cool, to always keep our home at a consistent temperature. I learned from this how something that can seem obvious can be so wrong when ignorance exists. The ignorance here was a 7th grader who didn’t yet understand the simple workings of the things around him. We see in society every day how detrimental ignorance is. Ignorance exists in science, religion, everywhere around us. As we experiment and try new theories, our ignorance is lessened as we come to better understand the world around us.

    What seems so ridiculous now, spontaneous generation was an obvious observation given the tools available to science at the time. In a world that debates all things spiritual – the after-life, the soul, and all things we can’t see – science ridicules theories that can’t be proven. Because science can’t prove the existence of the soul, it says there is no soul. Like those who could observe that maggots spontaneously appeared but couldn’t know how because they didn’t have the tools and capacity to do so, one day all things we still don’t understand will be proven. This includes premortal existence, the soul, spirits, resurrection, and the after-life.

    There’s this secular belief that spiritual things inherently non-scientific. Those with faith understand that one day all these spiritual concepts will be proven through scientific methods. It will all be so clear to us one day, when our eyes are opened and we are given additional knowledge and understanding. What a day for science that day will be.

  • Purpose and What Did You Eat Last Week

    Purpose and What Did You Eat Last Week

    I recently did a meditation that I couldn’t get myself into, I disagreed so much with the premise. I can usually go with the flow with any guided meditation, at least the ones I’ve done. Often the guided meditations lead to spiritual thoughts. This meditation led to a spiritual thought, but not in the normal way.

    The voice leading the meditation stated, basically, that we are on this big rock floating through space. None of us know why we’re here or what the true purpose of all this is. The meditation continued advising to set that aside for a moment and focus on your breathing, etc.

    I stopped right there. In my mind I thought, but I do know why I’m here, I do know the purpose of all this. I couldn’t get behind the premise. It’s a common theme of my writing. Where we come from, why we’re here, where we’re going. It hit me that 99% of people listening to that meditation probably don’t bat an eye at that statement. Most people probably gloss right over it like, “Yeah, I don’t know what the meaning of all this is.” That makes me sad.

    I just started a new book that talks about the temporal nature of this life and how silly it is to one, not believe in the things we can’t see, and two, put so much stock into the things we can see, even though they’re so temporary.

    The book asked what I ate 2 weeks ago. I had no idea. It made an interesting point. Food and water are the most critical thing to our survival. We can’t survive without them. Yet, what did you eat 2 weeks ago? You don’t even remember. What about the car that you love then 8 years later is a clunker. Or the house you cherish but inevitably becomes dirty, beat up, and cluttered with other stuff that is inconsequential. The book talked about how much stock we put into these things.

    How many of us consider why we’re here or where we’re going? How many in the world live in complete ignorance, not wanting to consider these great questions? It amazes me.

    We can’t see or describe heartache, fear, doubt, love, the wind, and yet they exist. Faith exists. Our soul exists. Eternity exists. God exists. These are the things that matter. I wish our society could spend a little less time with a Netflix special they won’t remember a year from now and consider more the purpose of this life. 

    The purpose of this life is God’s plan to make us stronger, better, and more like Him. We knew God before we came here. We will remember Him when we leave here. This life is so important. Not for food, or water, or cars, or homes, or Netflix, but for the faith we build, the experiences we go through, and the families and relationships we cultivate. I wish this is something we could all remember more.