Nancy's Musings

A member of my congregation whom I admire posted a link to this today. It's an amazing site, and one I look forward to utilizing - especially the  At the Pulpit  online resource, which offers excerpts and discourses by women in General Conference. The man who posted it prefaced the link with this quotation:  President Spencer W. Kimball said: "Someday, when the whole story of this and previous dispensations is told, it will be filled with courageous stories of our women, of their wisdom and their devotion, their courage, for one senses that perhaps, just as women were the first at the sepulchre of the Lord Jesus Christ after his resurrection, our righteous women have so often been instinctively sensitive to things of eternal consequence" ("The True Way of Life and Salvation," Apr . 1978 General Conference). I imagine it was something discussed in the BYU-Idaho devotional this morning. I'm not affiliated with the university in any way, officially or unoffic...

I have been very frustrated lately. I have been ill for more than a week, and unable to do the things I usually do. I can't babysit, fulfill my religious duties, or earn my keep in the house. I dreamt last night that I couldn't pay rent, and that I was being kicked out. (There's no real fear of that, I promise). I have been functionally unemployed (read: self-employed) for several years now, living on student loans and the generosity of others. Not only do I feel pressure to earn money to survive, but I have a desperate emotional need to feel and be useful. These feelings usually make me look around myself for a need I can fill, but everyone's needs seem to be met by others much more suitable. I don't have the social connections to people that would make my ministering to them natural and beneficial. All my connections seem so awkward and disjointed that if I tried to be useful, I would only be tolerated, for my own sake. I don't have money: I am in need. ...

As a follow-up to my previous post, my friend and I are still negotiating friendship. I have discovered that for my emotional health, I need verbal affirmation. I need someone to say nice things because the voices in my head are unusually cruel, and I don't have the self-confidence to fight them on my own while under the pressure of near-constant low-level rejection (and the bitter shrieking of professional rejection). Anyway, I brainstormed some nice things to say to mitigate the pain of rejection, and since I put a lot of work into it and some of them made me laugh, I thought I'd share some. Feel free to use them if you yourself are ever called upon to give me bad news. "I don't love you, but . . . . . . When you fall in love with someone else and leave me behind, there won’t be enough cookies to fill the void.” . . . If things were different I’d ask you on a real date, because I don’t find you repulsive and I think we’d have fun.” . . . I will admi...

Background: So I'm in love with a man who isn't in love with me for some unspecified (or unspecifiable) reason, and normally I'd just drop the acquaintance and look for someone else. Or become satisfied on my own (which I was, for a long time). But he wants to stay friends. This is new territory for me. I don't fall in love often (ever?), and staying in a painful situation is not really my M.O. either. But I'm sort of trapped, and I need to make this work. I'm also feeling vulnerable about admitting that I've been rejected, because it categorizes me. I'm one of the "rejected" rather than the "rejecting." But this is not a real distinction, and pooh to anyone who thinks that way. Anyway, this is some advice I wrote for him, and for other people who find themselves in his awkward situation, needing to hold a friend at arm's length, but still wishing to keep them close. *     *     * “She is tolerable, I suppose, but not ha...

It's not even noon yet on January 1st of this fresh hell of a year. (That's a Dorothy Parker allusion. I am not personally ready to condemn a whole year yet). So far in 2019, I have been grossly hurt by a woman with untreated bipolar disorder, and have seen other people be hurt as well, and seen their reactions which could also be hurtful. Perhaps it means nothing that eleven hours into the shiny new year, the pain is overwhelming everything else. I paid my bills. That was also painful. Telling my debtors that I can't pay them next month (or, like, ever) will also be painful, but I'm not going to do that today. Because it's a holiday and they probably won't answer their phones. I hope they don't. It's a holiday, and call center workers need holidays. Lots of them. I wanted to turn this into some resolution about forgiveness or something - some way to make this a positive, but I'm not ready yet. The inner turmoil is too fresh. I don't have a...

I'm hoping this post is really, really short. Because it's extremely late and I'm exhausted. I cannot tell the difference between opportunity and distraction. I am at a place in my life where I have been left desolate by the absence of opportunity - not the absence of privilege. I got that in spades, but the absence of specific opportunities that usually accompany my types of privilege. I have debts and obligations, and no way to fulfill them, and then along comes this offer. . . The only offers I have gotten, including the one that enables my current living situation, are well below my value, and don't even begin taking advantage of my specific range of acquired skills. They wouldn't pay a quarter of my obligations, even before tithing and taxes. There was a time when you just took any work you could get to keep yourself and your family alive. My dad tells these stories all the time. Do whatever you can. I remember going with him on a paper route at obscenely...

I very recently blogged about miracles. I'm very adamant about my belief in miracles. And yet just the other day I read an article titled "'By Small Means': Rethinking the Liahona" in which the authors posit that rather than the ex nihilo wonder we have accepted as true, the Liahona was both a common astrolabe, and a dowry from Ishmael to Lehi's family. I don't see that it's outside the realm of possibility, but I did not find the paper unproblematic. From a scholarly standpoint, its Book of Mormon exegesis was acceptable, if not compelling. It was perhaps dismissive of passages, choosing which ones it favored because they supported the argument. That's shaky logos, but a necessary part of putting the idea into the historical conversation, and it's an idea that shouldn't be dismissed simply because the more spiritual passages of scripture seem to favor a more "magical" explanation. The problem I had with the article begins...