Light and Truth

 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...

After returning home from serving two years as a full-time missionary in New York for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was a very new 21-year old. It was December 2013 and my life had just been changed through 24-7 service in spreading the news of the restored gospel since December 2011. Of course, stepping off the plane in Salt Lake City was an obvious transition point from one chapter of life to another. But what was the next chapter of life going to entail? What did the future have in store for me? While I didn't know the specifics of what would occur in the upcoming years as my early-20s unfolded, I at least knew some of the things that should be part of the answer to these questions. I would be going to college at the University of Utah as a double-major in mathematics and physics. I needed to find a way to utilize what I'd learned on my mission to make missionary work an everyday lifestyle. And most importantly, I needed to work towards an eternal marria...