Hi! So I was kind of wondering on if you or anyone in tumblr stake had advice on what to do if garments feel overstimulating? Is there a specific type/fabric that helps with that???
From the standard fabric options, I understand the most recommended fabrics are Stretch Cotton or Cotton-Poly because they offer breathability and minimize synthetic irritation.
One option that may work for you is to buy looser garments and wear something else under them. Garments do not have to touch your skin. Many members have been told by others that this is not allowed so I'm including screen shots from the Handbook
Another thing most members don't know is that if standard options cause severe irritation, the Church provides special-order garments tailored for medical or sensory needs.
Distribution Global Services: 1-800-537-5971
They’ll verify that you’ve been endowed first, but then they’ll walk you through all of the options available. I've heard they are very helpful. For example, I've heard of them having the seams sewn so they are on the outside not inside.
You are supposed to feel comfortable in your garments, so don’t be afraid to do what it takes to get there.
This Good Friday I want to share my favourite poem by Jay Hulme, a queer, trans and Christian poet
God as a carpenter. Jesus as a familiar to wood and nail. The beauty of all Creation evident and true even in pain.
image and image description taken from Jay Hulme on Twitter
Hey random fun fact: out of all of the 2025 conference talks, Elder Kearon is responsible for 26 out of 145 (18%) of the exclamation marks used. That's a lot.
To put that in context, there were 66 talks this year. Kearon gave two. He makes up about 3% of the body of conference talks and 18% of the exclamation marks. That's statistically significant
(This is so long, I'm sorry, I kept trying to make it shorter but it is so long. I was worried that if I took too much off the top the connection between thoughts wouldn't be there and it wouldn't make sense, but that might be the case anyway so if you have any questions about what on earth I'm talking about please feel free to ask.)
I also don't believe that God wanted or desired the violent genocide of anyone. What happens a lot in reading texts from other times and cultures (I need not tell you, but I can't just suddenly jump towards my points without some transition) is that that text is recontextualized into that new culture. The header does say discovery and colonizing of America, but that was not put there by an ancient prophet, that was put there by a scholar who was probably afraid of the communists invading America and drunk off the centennial in 1975. Someone put their context on a complex chapter of scriptures written by someone who had received a huge amount of information, some of which was horrific and (in the actual use of the word) triggering.
Three main things are happening: 1) there is a use of translated cultural terms, 2) Nephi is obsessed with Isaiah, 3) all information is coming through Nephi who is very clearly describing his vision through his experiences (and trauma).
I am not trying to be That Person, but I also think it's important to note that Nephi is not talking about his seed, the people of Nephi are not present. They are all dead, they are slain. Nephi just found out that the children of his abusive older brothers who tried to kill him several times essentially won and all of his descendants are functionally dead. This, and who Nephi is writing the information for, has an effect on the way the information is given.
First, I think I can give important context on wording because of my experience with historical records and historical word usage, etc. Because of the Book of Mormon's modern translations (with some edits), we might assume the word usage is uniform throughout. In other words when someone is described as white and fair it's the same usage as in "black or white, bond or free" but this is not really the case. (It's also an assumption that that passage is referring to skin color because of the "bond or free" giving American associations with slavery, but there wasn't racial slavery in the ancient Americas in the way we mean it in modern America. That might have been added for the modern day, wouldn't be the first time we got a yikes from an ancient prophet, but skin color wasn't a thing in the Ancient Americas in the way it is in The West TM so there's a chance it doesn't at all, so shrug emoji.)
Because of experience I had with the Family and Church History Department (I worked with someone who once tripped and almost threw the original design for the Kirkland Temple across the room which is a very short story I love to tell) I know that the word white has been changed in different editions of the Book of Mormon - specifically in Nephi - to be "pure" and then back again at different times. In Nephi, any time you see "white" it's safe to assume that he means spiritually pure and when he says fair he means lovely. In the same way a person described historically as having dark thoughts, a dark countenance, or even being a dark man are not of African descent, someone being described as white by Nephi is spiritually pure not pale. An example of this is Nephi using the same phrasing to describe Mary the Mother of Jesus and his own people, neither of which had pale skin like a European might.
Second, he seems to be talking about multiple events happening simultaneously and even related to each other but not necessarily causing each other as well as a type of event that happens several times. (If that's clear as mud.) Nephi loves Isaiah and Isaiah's writing was meant to apply to multiple time periods in the same passage revealing wider connections between events thematically. An Isaiah passage might refer to the literal captivity of ancient Israel, the bondage of sin in Messianic times, and a number of things in the modern day all at once. That's clearly what's happening here. With his emphasis that these Gentiles fleeing captivity were like his people, he is clearly setting up parallels - or perhaps foreshadowing the cycle that haunts the Book of Mormon like a great wheel. He is absolutely feeling a kind of way about the seed of his brethren and these Gentiles who are also escaping captivity and also like his fallen people and I'm sure that is effecting how this is being described. Trauma and abuse have a huge effect on the psyche and I imagine recent revelations have Nephi in a place where his personal feelings and what he's seen are overwhelming and intense.
All that's known timeline-wise is that God's wrath is upon the seed of his brethren - so it can't have been in Nephi's past, and there are people Nephi calls Gentiles - which could be anybody considering his cultural tentpole, there is a great and abominable church - which we know from modern revelation is a worship of power and pleasure so it may not be a religious organization at all, and that the Gentiles are in captivity. He makes a point of specifying they were in captivity several times - not hardship, not burden sore to be borne, but specifically captivity. Nephi and his family fled Jerusalem before its occupation. The word captivity meant something extremely specific to him, especially at this point in his life. With that in mind, Nephi could be talking about European colonization, but due to his phrasing its much more likely that he was talking about a pre-1700s event and connecting it to later migration and colonization. There were a number of conflicts and wars in pre-colonized America, the Cherokee had a huge war that restructured their government and weakened them before European settlers arrived, the Ancient Pueblos were all killed or fled, Central and South America were just Going Through It. The First Nations and Native American peoples are genetically diverse and varied, and God has shown a pattern of putting people on boats and sending them to the Americas it could have been anyone.
From my reading it seems like a number of things happened, though not causally. The Spirit wrought the Gentiles, the Gentiles escaped captivity, some of the Gentiles attacked the Lamanites, God allowed specifically the Lamanites to be smitten to a certain point specifically because of his wrath. This is an extremely focused in view of colonization that it does not make sense to focus in on unless you were Nephi who just found out the worst brothers in the world are going to win the fight for getting to be alive. In that context and knowing he's writing to his descendants about what is going to happen to them, the inclusion of what happened to the seed of his brethren is likely meant to be a very specific reference to justice and not at all a reference to the genocide of millions upon millions of totally unrelated diverse people living on the American continents. Because of Nephi's feelings from his context and how he shared that information, God wanted the Gentiles to come to America and God wanted to kill all the native people could be conflated, but they are not cause and effect at all and the second half isn't even true. These passages are not Nephi saying God wants native people to die, they are Nephi saying God cares that the seed of my brethren (my brothers) hurt my seed (me), but the thoughts are so stacked together it is easy to interpret them from a specific modern lens when Nephi doesn't even go to the same optometrist.
Third (hopefully this is coming across the right way, there is so much to read, it would suck if the weakness of my flesh destroyed what I was trying to say as it rested in my mouth) there is a theory that generally speaking everyone has A Story, or sometimes Some Stories. Everything they say is a version of that Story. Someone's core Story is that life isn't fair or that things will work out, or that they're lonely. From the little we have, it could be Nephi's story that he is flawed and God still values him, or that he is imperfect by God wrought something of value from him, but in these verses it feels like Nephi is saying I was damaged, and God cares about it which resonates with my experience of surviving abuse. These passages ended up in our hands, but they were not just written for us, and some of these verses may not have been written with us remotely in mind at all. Or in other words, Nephi had other problems which did not include us dealing with the aftermath of living in a nation founded in part on violence and genocide. 14 and 15 are not about white citizens of the United States of America massacring native people for their land, the verses are about the mercy and grace of the Lord, the resurrection, and about God seeing Nephi's pain and his people's loss.
When someone feels hurt, feels damaged, has been abused it is vitally important they have a sense of connection of feeling someone cares, feeling someone is mad about it. Abuse dissolves a sense of personal value on every level and having Someone Care, Someone Get Mad About It Heimlich maneuvers that poison out of the throat an resets the person back closer to sense. Additionally, it is a lot to hear your people are going to be wiped out, knowing God cares about that too means something.
I think too about the word wrought and about how one of Nephi's formative experiences as a big beefy nerd who likes Isaiah and can't stop well, actuallying his abusive brothers who keep trying to kill him, is being told by the Spirit to kill a drunk guy laying defenseless on the ground. I think sometimes about the Sword of Laban and that he carried it the rest of his life and passed it down. How do you feel being a scholar born into the wrong body shaped and then discovering or hoping or hating that it was so you could survive and that you could protect your family from your brothers, your big brothers who were so tight and so resentful and so full of hate towards anything that made them even the slightest bit uncomfortable? It takes so long to be beaten and there's a certain point where you realise they aren't going to stop but by that point you're too hurt to do anything except protect your head as best as you can and hope someone else shows up and saves you and that happened to Nephi several times until he started hitting back
Did he ever hold the sword and think of himself as a tool, as a weapon in the Lord's hand. Did he think about how he was wrought by the Spirit? How often did he look out at the people attacking his family and know his brothers sent them and think about the Spirit telling him it was better for one man to die. He wrote so much, he quoted Isaiah - the nerd book of scripture, he liked to make rhetorical arguments for himself, he remembered the argument he used to justify Laban's death to himself years later, he was a little engineering student building his boat, his brothers tried to beat him to death, his brother's descendants killed all his descendants, and he was huge and he killed a man when he was passed out with a sword when he was a teenager. Where did the sword go, why didn't his kids just use the sword, the sword was supposed to protect them? The Spirit of God wrought upon the Gentiles, and the wrath of God, it was upon the seed of his brethren, the seed of his brethren were smitten. God speaks truth but Nephi repeats it from his mortal tongue and his tongue was so used to telling the same story - we were in captivity, I had to kill him, the spirit wrought, and the seed of my brethren, and obtaining inheritance - that he's telling this story through that lens. His people are going to lose everything on every level and God cares. Maybe that's why he was chosen to write down this story and maybe that's the story he made this into, but Nephi said wrought and that's what you do to a sword, that's what you do to metal to make it useful. The Lord will make up for all losses. His children aren't dead, they're exceedingly fair and beautiful and they're obtaining their inheritance.
So teal deer shot with a bow crafted in the wilderness, if the passages are written about the European colonization of the Americas at all, they very likely aren't talking about only that colonization, but instead a large pattern of Others coming to the land and then obtaining an inheritance in order to become Us. God wants people to come to the Promised Land to be there and become one, not to kill each other, it's only that there seems to be something in the water. In the middle of that was a mention untethered by specifics that a very specific group at a very specific time received justice for what they had done, but that is not indicative of other factors or of God's desire for a destruction of the broader peoples already living in the Americas. Instead, it seems to be the opposite, the use of the word captivity and explicitly comparing the gentiles out of captivity to the descendants of Nephi makes a point that there are no divisions to the Lord, the Nephites are symbolically the Gentiles and vis a versa the Gentiles are the People of God and so on. God loves people and wants more of them, and everyone is spiritually pure and exceedingly lovely.
One of the Night Vale First Ward's favorite congregational hymns is #255B, "Carrion". While it sounds nearly identical to hymn #255, Night Vale's members know that theirs carries a slightly different message. And what exactly is that message, you ask? Some say the song is a reference to Israel's blessing of dead quail in the wilderness. Others see the song as a way to let the ward's actual carrion feeders know they are welcome. The one thing everyone can agree on, however, is that it's always a joy to sing about the dead things we find in the desert.
I just woke up from a dream that tumblr introduced a horrible new formatting feature and I immediately made a book of mormon meme about it.
The feature was an option to add reblog commentary on the SIDE of the original post, rather than underneath--thereby forcing readers to scroll sideways in order to see the full post
The meme was "tight like unto a dish? no. wide. like unto tumblr's new formatting."
Here are paintings by the late deaf Korean artist Kim Ki-Chang, depicting Jesus in Korea in the Joseon era. Painted in 1953 while Kim was in anguish during the Korean War.
Shown: saving Peter, falsely accused woman, inviting Peter and Andrew, feeding the multitude, refugee flight, baptism of Jesus, the Nativity, the adoration of the Magi.
