Lessons in Efficiency from 1 Nephi

I gave this talk earlier this year, after spending a year in what felt like an inefficient and confusing place. I hope that it can provide a comfort to anyone frustrated with life's inefficiencies as it has for me. 

We live in a world that loves efficiency. We love high-speed internet, machines washing our clothes and dishes at the same time, and someone else doing our taxes. We hate red lights, going to the grocery store twice in the same day, and accidentally choosing the slow line at Target. Sometimes, because I value efficiency in my days and life, I assume that God would value the same thing for me. This hasn’t been a conscious thought of mine, but I think my subconscious logic has been that God wants what’s best for me, and what’s “best” is efficient, so God will help me make my life efficient.

Changing gears for a moment: the story of 1 Nephi has always been a strong example for me of a story that God guided. This family had to flee for their lives and wander for almost a decade in the wilderness to get where they needed to go, but along the way they experienced numerous moments of miraculous guidance, including a compass that appeared outside their tent one day and gave clear instruction on how to continue on their journey. In hindsight, it seems God must have guided that journey in full. 

It is with these two seemingly unrelated pieces of understanding that I entered my most recent reading of 1 Nephi: one, that I love, and therefore God must love, efficiency, and two, that Nephi was guided by God throughout his life. 

But let’s review how Nephi’s story actually goes down. 

First, God commands Lehi to take his family, leave their home, and head into the wilderness. Nephi later describes this departure this way: (1 Nephi 2:4) “And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness. And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents.” 

Nephi doesn’t directly say that his father was sad about this, but I am struck by the thoroughness of that list. (1 Nephi 2:4) “And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents.” This could not have been easy for any of them, but they did what the Lord said. 

Three days later, they make camp. I imagine that at this point that they are all emotionally and physically exhausted. For Laman and Lemuel, this manifests in murmuring. For Nephi, it manifests in desperate prayer. It’s not so clear what Sam is feeling, but he is humble enough to rely on the combined words of his father and brother, and continues without complaint. 

In this place of only semi-stability, 3 days walking distance from Jerusalem, Lehi says, “Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem. For behold, Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy 

of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass. Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brothers should go unto the house of Laban, and seek the records, and bring them down hither into the wilderness.” (1 Nephi 3:2-4). Wow – this to me is hard to hear. They’ve been walking for 3 days! They just left their home and all of their belongings behind, thinking they would never see them again. And now they have to go back. Nephi’s exhaustion again manifests in determination, as he says: (1 Nephi 3:7) “I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.” 

So the brothers gather together and off they go, likely relying on a pep talk from Nephi that the Lord will prepare a way. So they send Laman in to Laban’s house with a kind request, “Would it be okay if we took those plates? They’ve got our family history on them.” Moments later, running for his life, Laman returns. They didn’t get the plates, and they had journeyed for 3 days backwards to try. Nephi remembers that at this point they “began to be exceedingly sorrowful,” and that his brothers were ready to head back to their camp in the wilderness. 

Unwilling to give up, Nephi pushes them to try again. This time, they realize that all of the gold and silver they left behind is still available to them, and they can use it to barter for the plates. Of course, we know that this failed too, and now Laban’s armed guards were out to get all of them. Where the first failed attempt lead to sorrow, the second led to fury. Laman and Lemuel were so full of disappointment, confusion, rage, and exhaustion that the best solution they could come up with was to try to beat Nephi with a rod. 

Nephi, meanwhile, decides to give this one more shot. He leaves his brothers hiding in a cave outside of the city, and just starts walking towards Laban. He explains: “I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” (1 Nephi 4:6) Finally, it works. The boys take the plates and start on their multi-day journey back to camp, where their mother has been worried sick because what she expected to be a 1-week retrieval journey has turned into much more than that, and she thinks they must have died. 

Fortunately, the family is all together at this point, and Nephi bears testimony of the plates: “And we had obtained the records which the Lord had commanded us, and searched them and found that they were desirable; yea, even of great worth unto us, insomuch that we could preserve the commandments of the Lord unto our children. Wherefore, it was wisdom in the Lord that we should carry them with us, as we journeyed in the land of promise.” (1 Nephi 5:21-22). 

And yet, almost as soon as the brothers got back to their parents, scriptures in hand and ready to hit the road,, Lehi hears from God once more. Nephi explains “it came to pass that the Lord spake unto him again, saying that it was not meet for him, Lehi, that he should take his family into the wilderness alone; but that his sons should take daughters to wife, that they might raise up seed unto the Lord in the land of promise. And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that I, Nephi, and my brethren, should again return unto the land of Jerusalem, and bring down Ishmael and his family into the wilderness.” (1 Nephi 7:1-2) 

Oh man, the inefficiency is causing some physical pain for me at this point in the story. For the sake of comparison, let’s imagine what I like to call the drive-through version of 1 Nephi. I imagine it like this: God commands Lehi and his family to leave Jerusalem, and as they are leaving, he adds that they need two things: scriptures and wives. Lehi sends two of his sons into Laban’s house for the plates at the perfect time when all of the guards are in a drunken stupor, and sends the other two to swing by Ishmael’s house to ask Ishmael for his daughters’ hands in marriage. The whole group gathers outside the walls of Jerusalem a few hours later, and off they go. 

Doesn’t that version feel more efficient? And isn’t it clear that God could have pulled that version off if he had wanted to? So at this point I am left with the clear realization that the story of Lehi’s family is not only led by God, but was also totally inefficient. It took a long time for them to get their journey off the ground, and they went on to wander for years through broken-bow hunger and storms on the sea. The story is jam-packed with inefficiency. 

There’s good news in all of this for those of us who get to read their story, though. We can use this story as a way of understanding why what we see as inefficiency might be the best way for God to accomplish his purposes, and we can take specific learnings from it about how we might handle our own winding paths and setbacks. I’d like to highlight 3 key strategies that I learned from this most-recent reading of 1 Nephi. 

The first is fairly straightforward: Recognize that inefficiency happens. I think we can all look back with hindsight and see that Lehi was being guided by the Lord, but the guidance he received came line upon line. He didn’t know when they left Jerusalem that they would need to come back for the plates, nor for Ishmael’s family. God guided him, but only one step at a time, and in a way that made for a much longer story than my drive-through version. 

Similarly, we will all find moments in our lives where we look back and think we could have done things faster if only we had realized everything we would eventually know sooner. Andy and I often joke about this, because we were in the same ward for 4 years before we really spoke to one another, but then once we did, we were married less than a year later. If only we had known, we joke, we both could have saved time and energy and money spent on dates with other people. But we also feel strongly that those years prepared us for each other. However inefficient it might seem, we needed that time. Looking back, I see that our story started before we even realized it started, because all of our years apart were critical precursors to our years together. This in mind, I must acknowledge that sometimes what looks like inefficiency is actually the best path to success. 

The second strategy that I learn from Nephi is to trust the overall trend of God’s goodness. I see this most clearly in the story of Nephi’s broken bow. At this point in their journey, the family has the Liahona, which Nephi describes as “leading [them] to the more fertile parts of the wilderness.” Thanks to this, they are finding much success in hunting... until Nephi breaks his bow. Suddenly, they stop being able to find food. Not long later, almost everyone in the group is both physically exhausted and extremely hungry, and on top of that, they’re scared that they will never find a way to stop being hungry again. Nephi says “they did suffer much for the want of food,” and adds that even his father “began to murmur against the Lord his God” and that they were all “exceedingly sorrowful” (16:19-20). 

Knowing how I react to hunger on an average Tuesday when dinner is a couple of hours later than expected, I can really resonate with Nephi’s family here. They have given so much to this journey, they are exhausted, and now they are scared it’s all for naught and they’re about to starve. So how does Nephi rise above this fear and hold on to faith? I think he saw in the moment, as we can see in hindsight, that this wasn’t the end of their story. He knew that God had led them out of Jerusalem, sent them back to get scriptures for their posterity, and then sent them back for wives so that they could have posterity, and then led them for years towards the promised land. Would God do all of that, just to let this little family die of hunger due to a broken bow? I don’t think so. 

Similarly, in our own lives, we can step back and see the overall path that God is guiding each of us on. We can see that he is leading us to good things, good work, good people, good faith. This overall trend can then serve as a reminder that even in the moments that seem to take us backwards, God is actually carrying us forwards. He will help us through the hard times. We might get hungry, but we don’t have to give up and starve. 

The third strategy I took away for handling inefficiencies and setbacks is to develop my own testimony by going directly to the source. Nephi consistently goes to the Lord to humbly ask for more knowledge, where Laman and Lemuel, in the same situation, say that the Lord hasn’t explained enough to them for them to know whether the Gospel is true. It is clear throughout the story that these two opposing attitudes make a world of difference in these brothers’ lives. Nephi works to build his own testimony consistently, so that when the time comes and he needs to rely on it, he can. Laman and Lemuel, meanwhile, listen passively to Lehi and Nephi, sort of ignore an angel, and claim that it is the Lord’s fault that “the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us” (15:9). Clearly, it is our responsibility to study the scriptures and pray to know the truth! 

In closing, I’d like to bear my testimony that this life is going to be inefficient, winding, and full of setbacks. But because of that, and more importantly, it can be a time of strengthened faith and miracles, if only we choose to make it such. In Nephi’s words: “the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.” (1:20). If it is by faith that we are chosen, then faith is our only requirement. I believe that the Lord can help us, and will help us, as we continue to take action and look towards him. 

Learning to Listen

I gave this talk in my ward recently on the day that I was set apart as the Relief Society President. It is rooted in my hope that we can help all people to feel welcome in this Gospel, and especially in my hope that we can help each other to see the good that is already in us. 

Good afternoon, friends.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Chloe. I moved into the ward almost exactly 4 years ago for my freshman year at Stanford, thinking that this place would just be “where I went to college.” Instead, this place has become my home, and that is due in large part to the relationships that I have formed with members of this ward. The friendships I have made here have carried me through times of fear and doubt, and lifted me into times of faith, hope, and improvement. For this and about a hundred rides to the airport, I feel indebted to this ward.

Several weeks ago, I sat in my pew and looked at [our previous RSP] on the stand. I remember the day that she was called two years ago. She had just moved into the ward, and the bishopric barely knew her. Our Bishop had been thinking about who to call to Relief Society for a while, with no answers. When she moved into the ward, it became clear that the answer hadn’t come previously because the answer hadn’t arrived yet. Our ward needed [RSP]. She was the answer.

Although our Bishop bore a powerful witness of his surety that [RSP] was who we needed, I admit I felt confused. I didn’t understand how such a powerful answer could come about someone who had only just arrived in the ward. We didn’t even know her yet, and I was apprehensive about the decision.

As I watched her several weeks ago, I realized how grateful I am for our Bishop's inspiration and willingness to trust his prompting, however unexpected. [RSP] has been a gift to me individually, and to this ward. She has served diligently at every level, ministering to the one and the many. Whenever I look at her, I find myself wondering what it is like to be 3 inches from heaven all the time. And several weeks ago as I wondered that, I also thought about how it would be a steep ask to replace her.

I don’t remember if that was one week or two before the Bishopric asked to meet with me. And, while I could never say no to a request to serve in this ward, I cannot pretend to feel qualified for this calling. Luckily, I know I don’t have to do this alone. Each of you has so much to give, and I know that we will be able to continue increasing our faith and love for the Savior together. I also believe that as we strive to create goodness in our Relief Society and ward, God will magnify those efforts. He will fill in the gaps. And I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to take part in that process.


With my remaining time, I’d like to speak about the way God fills in those gaps; the ways He speaks to us and then works through us.

I’d like to dive into what it means for God to “speak” to us, because I find it to be an area full of terminology that we don’t often step back and analyze. Turning to the scriptures, we have several different examples of how prophets describe hearing from God. Nephi explained that the Lord “did visit [him] and did soften [his] heart” such that he could believe the words of his father (Nephi 2:16). Alma taught that as we allow the word of God to be planted in our heart we will begin to “say within ourselves—it must needs be that this is a good seed… for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me” (Alma 32:28). Joseph Smith explained that upon reading James 1:5 the passage came “with more power to [his] heart” than any other scripture had ever come to any other person’s heart (JSH 1:12).

These moments they describe, no doubt moments of revelation for each of them, are hard for me to understand academically. What does it mean to have your heart softened? What would that feel like? How about soul-enlargening, or thoughts becoming delicious? And what does it mean for words to hit the blood pumping organ with more power than words have ever hit any other person’s blood-pumping organ?

I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I do want to drive home a point: revelation is a fairly intangible experience. And even when it is strong enough to feel tangible to an individual, it becomes difficult to describe that experience in a way that would make sense and carry meaning to others. It’s like describing the taste of chocolate to someone who has never had it. Wouldn’t it be more effective and more fun if we all just tried chocolate for ourselves?

This lesson brings context to something I have heard from several sources throughout my life: that the most important skill any of us can learn is how the Spirit speaks to us, individually. No description anyone else ever offers will be sufficient to build our testimonies: only we can do that.

And beyond that, I’m not convinced that anyone else’s description of inspiration will ever match our own experience. Our thoughts and feelings are unique to each of us, and revelation must then be equally unique. Learning to understand personal revelation is necessarily an individual journey.

As I have pondered this idea, I have found it to be empowering. Before, I would often ask myself how I should feel in my moments of seeking revelation, based upon what I understood from what others had said they felt. Now, I am trying to replace that with a different question: how do I feel? Let me give you an example of what I mean from my recent experience:

A couple of weeks ago at Stake Conference as I watched one of the speakers, I could see that he spoke with undeniable conviction. His words were truth to him, and I knew that. At first, I asked myself how I should feel, and thought that because someone was bearing their testimony of truth, that there should be a warm, burning feeling in my chest region.

But I didn’t have that experience that day at conference. I wondered: Am I broken? Testimony-less?

I wasn’t sure, but I continued to sit and wonder throughout conference that weekend. I listened to the words of the speakers. Soon, I found myself making notes in my journal — partially based on the talks I heard, and partially based on the thoughts I was having then that have since led to this talk.

As I looked back on my notes from conference, I realized: I didn’t feel the spirit the way I thought I was supposed to. My emotional state was rather regular and without fire. But I was able to take on a new perspective and form a new connection. In 2 Nephi, we read: “For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little” (28:30). I now realize that for me, the little nugget that God needed to teach me came through the ideas that I had that day, and that it would be rejecting truth to complain that I had not instead felt a burning in the bosom.

I don’t share this story because I believe that it is wrong to feel a strong emotional reaction to the spirit, nor because note-taking idea-formation should be the new measuring stick for feeling the spirit.

Instead, I share it because I hope you will allow yourself the same room. Please don’t box yourself in, or feel that your own experience isn’t valid because it doesn’t sound exactly like how someone else is describing their experience. In your moments of seeking answers, turn to God through scriptures, prayer, trusted friends, conference talks, the temple, time in nature, or whatever it is you need. And when you have found a safe place and you feel that you are angled toward Him, ask your question, and then listen. Listen with your ears for a whisper, with your heart for a feeling, with your mind for an idea. Give it some time, and allow yourself to see the world in new ways. Write your thoughts down, and notice how they change: do they become calmer, clearer? Do you have a next-step you can now take, even if the whole path is not yet clear?

This — all of this — is revelation. Moroni says it better than I can: “everything which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.” So please, if something is inviting you to do good — embrace it! Embrace revelation exactly as it comes to you at your particular stage in life, and don’t worry that it is different than someone else’s or even a different stage in your own life. And then remember the promise in D&C 50:24: “That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light growth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.” As we make an effort to recognize inspiration, we will be blessed with increased sensitivity to it.

It is our opportunity and responsibility in this life to learn how God speaks to us. No one can take that opportunity away, and no one can do it for us. It is our work to do. And only as we do that work can we begin to allow God to work through us.


To me, allowing God to work through us means acting on the promptings we receive. Once we learn to identify the spirit, we will be able to identify this particular kind of inspiration that asks us to reach out to serve those around us. These promptings may often feel much smaller to us than to the people we serve — but the Lord knows what is in their hearts better than we can.

To illustrate this, I’d like to share a personal experience from last December, when I was asked to conduct a Q&A fireside with Elder Bednar.

In order to understand my experience at the fireside, you have to have a little bit of context about my faith journey. For me, questions about women in the church started brewing early, but the concern that I felt associated with them peaked in the spring of my freshman year of college. I had never felt an easy, natural connection to our leaders, and in the midst of so much concern about women in the church, I got to a point where I did not trust male leaders to understand the experience of women. Conference became a very difficult weekend for me, as I entered each conference with an extreme sensitivity for references to gender. The distrust I felt did not hurt anyone but me, but it certainly did hurt me.

In the midst of that hurt, I knew I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. My heart had been closed off, in a way, and it was difficult to open it back up. Slowly, and with the help of friends, I worked to embrace hope over fear. By the time I got to the Q&A with Elder Bednar, I was not too scared of leaving the event feeling hurt, but I also had no real expectation of leaving the event feeling loved. Though this statement of neutrality may sound a little bit absurd, it was a victory for me in comparison to the negativity of times prior.

During the meeting, Elder Bednar received questions anonymously on his iPad and answered a selection of his choice. Several questions into the meeting, before reading the next question, he turned to me and said, “Chloe, would you do me a favor?” After a moment of confusion, and then a recognition of the fact that I was, indeed, the only Chloe one the stand, I found myself standing next to him at the podium. He then read a question that I later learned was posed by a dear friend of mine: “How can we, as disciples of Christ, make sure women feel valued and important in our wards and with church callings?”

He finished the question, looked to me, and backed up to sit on the side of the stand, leaving me alone at the microphone.

My first thought was: How did he know? How could he possibly have known how much I wanted my voice to be heard in this church? How much I worried that women’s voices weren’t heard? How often I wanted to hear a woman’s voice? And how did he know to trust me — know that I wouldn’t take a political twist on this moment at the pulpit, or express feelings of anger?

I think the answer must be: he didn’t know. But he felt a prompting that he should select that question to answer, and that he should ask me to take the first stab at answering it. And in that moment, I knew that God knew me, and had known me. He knew my fears, and he knew my efforts to overcome them. In a blog post I wrote soon after the fact, I wrote that it had been as though Heavenly Father said to me: “Chloe, I hear you. I love you. I know what you need. Through me, these leaders can hear you, and love you, and know what you need, too.”

Elder Bednar took a prompting he received and turned it into a moment that I will always remember as having felt God’s love for me. Because he knew how to recognize when the Lord spoke to him, the Lord was able to reach me and show me His love through Elder Bednar. I am forever grateful that he acted on that prompting.

I am also reminded of the importance of acting on promptings by the story of the woman who anoints Christ with expensive oils just before his death. His disciples ask why he would ever allow such gifts to be wasted on him, when they could instead be sold to give money to the poor. Christ replies: “Why trouble ye the woman? For she hath wrought a good work upon me… Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.”

This is one of those moments in the scriptures that I feel I can see Christ in a new way. Even this perfect, endlessly-serving Savior could not anoint himself with oil. He needed the service of someone else. And while there are not many details about her expressed in the scriptures, I don’t think she gave this gift as an assignment, or because someone told her to, or because it was her job. No, I believe she was a woman who knew what it felt like when God spoke to her, and who had the faith and determination to act on those promptings, however challenging. God knew he could access His only begotten son through this woman, and Christ demonstrated gratitude and praise unmeasured for the woman who acted on His father’s loving request.

Just as Elder Bednar did for me, and just as this woman did for Christ, we can all be Christ’s hands on this earth as we learn to recognize and act on the promptings we receive to serve others.

And so, this is what I hope for our Relief Society and our ward: First, that we may support each other on our individual journeys to learning how the spirit speaks to us by openly sharing our own experiences and by embracing the diversity of others’ experiences. Second, that as we come to hear God’s voice in our lives, we become increasingly able to let him work through us as we act on our promptings to serve those around us; both within this ward and those without.

Weak Things Become Strong

Please note: All quotations in this post are subject to the inaccuracies of human memory. I have told it in the best way I know how, but it is filtered through my own experience.

The first time I remember feeling frustrated about women in the church was during high school seminary. My teacher split the room up into boys and girls; the boys were to talk about how to develop a desire to serve a mission and then how to prepare for it, while the girls discussed the age at which they would like to get married.

I could explain the quantitative and qualitative differences in these tasks, but I will leave that up to you to ponder. Suffice it to say, I considered quitting seminary for a week. 

I hold onto that memory not to preserve anger (I do believe that seminary teacher was doing the best with what he knew, and I do believe he was and is a good man), but instead to see that my concerns about women in the church were brewing before I came to college. In college, though, they grew. By the end of my freshman year, I was asking longingly for my Heavenly Mother and mad at more than one conference talk's treatment of women. I was hurt in that deep, jarring way that can only be inflicted by the things you love enough to keep in the innermost part of your heart. I felt uncertain, fearful, and lonely.

Somewhere in that hurt, I concluded that the male leaders of our church could not possibly understand the experience of women in the church. That when they go to seek revelation, they do so through the lens of their own (male, 1960s) experience, and that couldn't include my experience. 

For many, loving and trusting the leaders of our church comes as naturally as breathing. Others, like me, look at our leaders and cannot find one that represents their experience in terms of race, culture, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, age, ability, etc., and find it difficult to understand how they can lead the church with us in mind. 

At first, I thought that this made me somehow a "worse Mormon" than those who had an easy, natural testimony of our leaders. However, my perspective changed upon reading D&C 21:5: "For [the Prophet's] word ye shall receive, as if from my own mouth, in all patience and faith." In this verse, I learned two very important lessons. First, God knew it was going to be difficult to follow his human mouthpieces, so He asked us to employ all of our patience and all of our faith in order to believe that their words come from His mouth. Second, He knew it was critical enough that we follow His prophets that He commanded us to do it, regardless of difficulty level.

In other words, I learned that it was not wrong for me to find it difficult to trust our leaders, but I needed to find a way to do it anyway.

In the days and years since my deepest feelings of distrust, I have been working to apply Heavenly Father's recipe for this struggle: patience and faith. In order to follow our leaders, I need to trust them, and in order to trust them, I need to believe that they love me, so I look for ways in which they demonstrate their love. So far, I have found that they do so by teaching me of a Savior who loves me perfectly, by expressing their hope for the welfare of my current and future family, and by asking me to participate and to love others in my local congregation. I am working to build my thought patterns around these actions being signs of love, rather than seeing comments about how more lipstick would get me married as signs of a lack-of-love. I can't say that all of my fears are gone or that the positive thought-processes come easy, but I celebrate the little victories and have seen progress.

With this particular struggle to improve myself in mind, I want to share an experience that I had recently that taught me just how aware my Heavenly Father is of my struggles and my efforts to overcome them.

God is Bigger: The Prequel

In February 2016 I wrote this talk on the "Markov Chain Model for Life," as I like to call it. The topics touched upon are similar to those in my prior post, and emphasize my belief that God's plan for us does not include being paralyzingly stressed about identifying God's plan for us. I still find myself wanting to reread and share this talk often, so I wanted to make it available here. I hope that as we all share pieces of our experiences with one another, we can continue to improve our understanding of the gospel and our Heavenly Parents' plan for us.

Convocation 2016: God Is Bigger

Every year, the LDS community at Stanford starts off the year with a religious Convocation. It is an opportunity for us to call upon God as we start the school year, and reflect upon what it means to be both disciples and scholars. I am just beginning my senior year, and I was asked to speak about the intersection of my academic and spiritual development in my time here at Stanford. I loved the chance to reflect on my college journey thus far, and now hope to use my remarks from yesterday's Convocation to kick off another journey I've been hoping to start: entering the blogging world. I hope this post and every post here can help others to find hope in their futures and in the future of our church. My faith journey has been the most joyful when I look for the good, so this blog is about seeking after the silver linings.