Light and Truth

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...

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...