Tuesdays with Muerte

Gooooooo, Mighty Cou-gars! The 2013 Holy War is upon us, Cougar & U of U fans!   It's time to [ appropriately ] show our school spirit in anticipation of the last, rivalry game for two years. (View it: Saturday at 8:15pm on ESPN2.)  BYU's student body is getting especially excited, as evidenced by some of the new shirts seen around campus.  One particularly bright, BYU tee stood out to me, as I was strolling up the ramp by the Tanner building.  At a distance, it read Loyal, Strong and True —the mantra from the BYU Cougar fight song. But as  I neared Asian wearer, I noticed that the "L" in Loyal  had been replaced with the letter "R" for  Royal. Justification Preface Before I continue, you should know that I had just spent the afternoon reading an article on cultural competency , which cited examples (and non-examples) of how designers of global instructional materials need to be sensitive to language and cultural differenc...

The following was directly taken (or paraphrased) from chapter two of Clayton Christensen's book, The Power of Everyday Missionaries . One metaphor that helps me [understand how God answers questions] is to imagine that God has constructed massive libraries in heaven.  The shelves of these libraries are filled with books that are packed with truths, insights, and answers.  Most of the books have never been checked out. Why, you might ask, are these stored in these libraries, rather than having been distributed broadly to people on earth?  The reason is that people learn when they're ready to learn, not when we're ready to teach them.  So if God directed a heavenly librarian to get the answer to question #23 off the shelf and send it down to some random person on earth, the answer would simply not be noticed.  But when we ask a question it is as if we put a Velcro pad in our brain where we need the answer.  When the answer is then delivered, it sticks its...

Sleep Paralysis My Story To most people, this will sound crazy. When I was in high school, my alarm woke me up at 5:40am for seminary as usual. But this time, I felt paralyzed—like my body was playing a practical joke on itself!  In my early morning dilerium, I thought I must be dreaming and my first reaction was to rollover and fall back to sleep.  But then I realized I was conscious and literally couldn’t move.  I attempted to rationally assess my situation.  It seemed logical that the Devil, who wanted to keep me from attending seminary, had somehow gain power over my physical body and had pinned me down on my own bed.  " GET OFF ME, SATAN! " I cried out in my mind (as I was unable to speak out loud).  The moments following my auto-exorcism are still a bit fuzzy.  But ultimately, I ended up in my bathroom, showering the sleep out of my eyes and praising God. I shared the experience later with my seminary class.  They probably all though...