Light and Truth

Ever since I became a father of young children, my wife and I have put a good amount of effort into making the most of holidays by establishing traditions centered on the meaning of those holidays. One of our intentions was to at least highlight the meaning of the day instead of just letting it be a day off of work or school. Naturally, this lead me to study in depth before each holiday about the meaning. Recently, as the month of June 2021 came to a close, I began looking forward to the next upcoming holiday that we enthusiastically celebrate as a family: July 4th, which is also called Independence Day. As I asked myself what the meaning behind this holiday is, I came to the rather quick conclusion that it is the American values of freedom and liberty that we celebrate, among others. And yet, something about this didn't seem to sit well with me. For nearly my whole life I had heard in the news, on social media, and in personal conversations a heavy focus on one, and only one, part...

 As the very challenging year of 2020 finally began to come to a close, the wonderful day of my birthday at the end of November came around. Along with many other wonderful gifts, I received a telescope from the Stewart family who lived a few blocks away and were among our best friends in New Haven, Connecticut. Having always been interested in astronomy, which was certainly evident in the research I was doing at Yale in pursuit of my Ph.D., such a gift filled me with excitement. What amplified that excitement was finding out within a couple days that Jupiter and Saturn were going to align closer than they had in over 800 years on December 21st, less than a month away. What a beautiful opportunity to use my very own new telescope! I immediately began preparing for this upcoming opportunity. My wife, Bethany, and my nearly-two year old son, Aaron, helped as I put together the telescope in our very own living room so that I could have a practice at assembling the pieces well in advan...

In the early spring of 2019 I was in the midst of my second year at Yale University pursuing a Ph.D. in Statistics & Data Science. With my wonderful wife, Bethany, and our newborn son, Aaron, things were going very well for us in many aspects. But fatherhood and graduate school can certainly require a large amount of energy and time. Consequently, I attended the local Institute of Religion class on Tuesday evenings for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I found to help me relax and focus on things that matter most. At one such class the teacher, Randy LaRose, shared a quote from one of his friends who served as secretary to the  First Presidency  of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Paraphrasing the quote, I remember it indicating that the mindset of the members of the First Presidency is much like the advice given by the professional American entrepreneur Jim Rohn: "Focus on the solution, not on the problem." The moment Brother LaRose s...

During the morning of Saturday, February 29, 2020 I woke up rather excited about leap year day! But of course, with no plans of how to celebrate this unusual 'holiday', I proceeded the way I typically do on a normal day. After eating a good breakfast and feeding my young one-year-old son Aaron, we read the scriptures as a family, and I began my own personal study of the scriptures. Feeling the need to learn from the second book of Nephi in The Book of Mormon, I opened up to a chapter that I had long loved: chapter 28. As I read, I came upon a pair of verses that caught my attention in a way that had never previously occurred. "For the kingdom of the devil must shake, and they which belong to it must needs be stirred up unto repentance, or the devil will grasp them with his everlasting chains, and they be stirred up to anger, and perish; For behold, at that day shall he rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good."...

No more than a couple months ago was the time of New Year's ringing out 2019 and welcoming the new decade with 2020. In New Haven, Connecticut with my wife and one-year-old son, we were excited about the new future that lay ahead. Yet, through various experiences that had just recently unfolded in the previous months, I had learned that there was at least one very critical piece of knowledge that I absolutely needed to improve upon in order to ensure a truly successful future: how to receive true revelation from God. Throughout the past couple years the Lord's living prophet President Russell M. Nelson, and many other church leaders, had made it clear that, "In coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost." He furthermore said, "I urge you to stretch beyond your current spiritual ability to receive personal revelation..."  (Revelation for the Church, Revel...

Ever since I was a young boy, well over a decade ago, I have enjoyed riding a bicycle. As a teenager I would pedal through the hills of Bountiful, Utah to my grandparents' house to mow their lawn, to Bangerter Farms to help in their summer harvest, to my part-time job at Nielsen's Frozen Custard, and many other places. My father and many siblings also greatly enjoy biking, enough so that it almost seems like a family tradition. And the tradition continued on my mission as I rode a bike around the towns just outside of Westpoint, New York, and once even through Manhattan for an activity. Upon returning home from being a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the end of 2013, it was time to start school again. But with minimal amount of money, and no straight-forward way to obtain a scholarship, my educational pursuits at The University of Utah needed to be accompanied by some form of part-time employment. Miraculously enough, my older brot...

About a year ago in the summer of 2018 my wife, Bethany, and I were in the early stages of preparing to be parents. We had just found out a couple months earlier that we were expecting our first child to be born into the world. At this time, we were also in the midst of graduate school at Yale University, living very happily next to campus on Mansfield Street in New Haven, CT. Of course, learning that I would soon reach the milestone of being a father, one that for many years seemed as if it might not be a reality for me, coupled with the privilege of studying at one of the world's best universities made for quite an exciting time of life. However, we also knew very well that this was definitely a time of tight finances for us. New Haven, and Connecticut in general, was much more expensive in every way than the cost of living that we had a year earlier in Utah. Additionally, as every prospective parent eventually learns, pregnancy and childbirth are certainly not the cheapest lif...

Most of the people I meet and become friends with eventually learn that it takes a really good book for me to like it enough to finish it. In fact, if the first couple pages don't catch my attention, the probability of me continuing any further is approximately zero. On very rare occasions, however, I am introduced to a book that greatly intrigues me, captures my full attention, and becomes a permanent life-changing literary source of mine. One of these books is  The Book of Mormon  . This book is one that I have read from such a young age, and never ceases to intrigue me with its stories and truthful teachings. Every time I read The Book of Mormon, one of the most memorable characteristics of the stories within is how often the people forget the Lord in times of prosperity. Whenever phrases such as "...and they were blessed beyond measure..." or "...and they began to prosper exceedingly..." appear, a red flag swiftly flies high in my mind with a reminder from...

Like many fellow friends and family, the older I get the clearer it becomes that rarely, if ever, do things in life happen by mere coincidence. Almost always, there is a lesson or reminder that the Lord sees the need to send us through mortal events and experiences which are divinely designed. And this, I've learned, is especially true when an event is unexpected, momentous, and/or unforgettable. One such occurrence unfolded in the evening of Friday, October 12th in 2018 for me. While living in New Haven, CT, my wife, Bethany, and I attended the monthly dinner date night hosted on this evening by the local Institute of Religion for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The theme this month was of course Halloween. So after a great meal of (scary) food, the group of about 15 people played the game Werewolf. As a summary of the game, everyone is secretly assigned to be either a werewolf or a villager. The werewolves win if they can together kill off all the villagers; th...

In December 2013, I returned home after serving full-time as a missionary in New York for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for nearly two years. Having served to the best of my ability, I stepped off the plane flight with many new lessons learned through experiences that were (at least to me) clearly orchestrated by the Lord. One of these lessons was, of course, the priceless value of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Prior to missionary service, the continual presence of the Gospel led me to deem it as normal and ordinary rather than of value beyond description. But by seeing, as a missionary, first hand accounts of so many individuals finding joy and purpose in life by coming to a true knowledge of their Savior, all of that permanently changed. Another big take-home lesson for me was that there is no such thing as a convenient conversion. I learned this through seeing the life-changing experiences of so many people, which were always accompanied with great sacrifices and c...

From the earliest of years, I have had a deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Although I have a very limited memory of my life before the age of 12, I believe that my math interest originated in elementary school. My best assumption is that this was at least in part brought about by some internal frustration with some problems on assignments in other subjects getting marked wrong without any explanation of why they were wrong. For example, some teachers would simply mark an answer of mine to a question on a reading assignment wrong without any reason of why it was incorrect. Other times they would provide an explanation, but not one that was convincing enough of why their personal interpretation was right instead of mine. On math assignments, however, there was always a way to show why my answer was wrong and why the correct answer was truly the only one. This aspect of mathematics where everything is provable and completely void of opinion was, and has remained to this day, the...

From a young age, I anticipated the time when I would serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With many close family members and friends having previously served as full-time missionaries, I had many opportunities to prepare for my own experience. Among the many aspects of this preparation was a desire to know what the hard questions might be, and how to answer them. Listening to many stories from returned missionaries, combined with pretty simple reasoning, I concluded that religious questions (both sincere and intentionally-confounding) were unavoidable as a missionary. One of the most common intentionally-confounding questions involved in the stories shared by my fellow returned missionaries was how any of The Church's modern-day scripture (and particularly The Book of Mormon) could remain valid within the presence of the warning at the very end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18-19. "For I testify unto every man that heareth th...

At the beginning of the year 2013 I was serving as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in The Bronx of New York City. As most people who serve in the capacity of a full-time missionary soon find out, it can be quite challenging almost all the time. The particular difficulty that my teaching companion and I faced at this time was retaining the religious investigators we found. It seemed as if no matter how much effort we put forth to pray for, stay in contact with, and prepare to teach the people who initially were interested in the restored gospel, it didn't seem to work. Within three weeks after initial contact, most of them would either not respond to phone calls nor texts, tell us they no longer had time to continue investigating, or inform us that they were no longer interested. Of course, this is nothing unusual as a missionary. And fortunately, I had learned at this point how to deal with disappointments like these. At this same time ...

As a young boy, raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by righteous parents who provided a gospel-centered home, I remember coming to a conclusion that certainly reflected my very young mind. This conclusion was that, since I had learned the importance of avoiding addictive substances such as alcohol, smoking, drugs, pornography, and gambling, I would never experience any form of addiction in my life. While I successfully avoided everything I - at that time - thought could become an addiction, I eventually met with disappointment in my later teenage years and early 20's. Through various circumstances and choices that are far too complex for me to recall entirely, I found myself struggling so largely with God's commandment of honesty. While I knew it to be true, this knowledge had not yet grown large enough to translate directly into action. While I knew dishonesty was sin, it seemed as if no matter how oft I repented that I always cycled back around sooner ...