3 Major Church Events To Be Held Tomorrow

Hello. Just wanted to do a quick reminder post that there will be 3 major Church events held tomorrow. President Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the First Presidency, and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles are currently in New York preparing for the Face-to-Face Event for the youth of the Church that will be held at around 10:00 AM MST. During the event, youth of the Church around the world will be able to submit questions and have them answered in real time. This is the first such event to be held in English this year, and the focus of the questions will be set around the event of the First Vision and on James 1:5-6, which is not only the passage of scripture that led to the First Vision, but also the designated theme for Mutual this year. I love the idea that the Lord will give wisdom to those who ask for it. I have sought for and received such wisdom when I lacked it several times.

That said, as part of this post, I wanted to mention the preparation for the process of asking for and receiving wisdom. Some have the erroneous idea that answers will come just for the asking. But it is only after we have followed the scriptural injunction to "study it out in [our] minds" and then ask that the answers come. As many apostles have observed on numerous  occasions, if the Lord just handed us the answers without us doing the work to be informed on an issue, it would lead to us becoming weak, relying on the Lord for guidance when He trusts us to use our own wisdom and judgment, and to our failure to govern our own lives sufficiently. And generally, at least for me, I have found that my best inquiries of the Lord have come when I have already settled on a course of action, rather than expecting Him to do the choosing for me. The Lord's answers do not come in response to multiple choice questions. Once we have decided what to ask and how to ask it, our ability to clearly get the answer He is willing to give us comes into play. This is precisely why I had little or no patience for the journalist that recently griped against the Church Public Affairs Department for not being more transparent: if he had done his research, the questions would not have been necessary.

That aside, the other two events are the groundbreakings for the Arequipa Peru and Rio de Janeiro Brazil temples. I have on good authority that while construction is set to begin almost immediately on the Peru temple, the one in Brazil will be joining the one in Winnipeg in the category of temples that have had a groundbreaking, but will not progress further until some other undisclosed and unknown issues are properly dealt with. That said, it is entirely possible that both of these temples will be finished around the end of 2019, as one is bigger and more complex in size and design than the other. (I will have to double-check to find out which is which).

So it will be an exciting day for the Church. Within a period of roughly four hours, all of these events will have taken place. What a privilege it is to live in this wonderful era when so many exciting developments are taking place at around the same time.

Thanks for reading this. Any comments are welcome and appreciated. Stay tuned for a full report on these events coming at some point tomorrow.