To Contemplate....

"Just as one understands the difference
Between wishing to go and going on a journey,
The wise should understand these two,
Recognizing their difference and their order."

Doctrines, principles, applications

Doctrines, principles, applications
"As teachers and leaders, it is vital that we nourish those we teach and lead by focusing on the fundamental doctrines, principles, and applications emphasized in the scriptures and the words of our latter-day prophets" (Elder Daniel K. Judd, "Nourished by the Good Word of God," October 2007 General Conference).

Doctrines
Doctrines are statements/sentences.
For example, "We are all children of God."

Principles
Principles are not statements/sentences. (They seem to generally be nouns.)
For example, the first 2 principles of the gospel are faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and repentance.
Every principle is a "key word," because pondering a key word "unlocks" one's personal spiritual treasury and suggests to one's mind the associated acquired doctrines and experiences.
Applications

Applications are ways to implement doctrines and principles.
For example, Family Home Evening is one current way to implement the doctrine that parents should teach their children.

Credit to Elijan for this

Added to His Greatness

"My father had a unique experience when he was the age of a priest. There were no high schools where he lived, and he wanted an education. He received permission from his father to leave the farm and seek his education elsewhere, but he had to make it on his own. Arriving in Salt Lake City, he heard of an employment position being offered in the home of President Joseph F. Smith. He was hired to care for the prophet's two cows. . . .". . . The Smith family took this poor farm boy from Idaho into their home while he finished high school and attended the University of Utah. They included him in their family activities, around the dinner table, and at family prayer. My father shared with us his witness that the prophet Joseph F. Smith was truly a man of God: 'When I kneeled with the prophet, in family prayer, and listened to his earnest supplications for the blessings of the Lord upon his family and their flocks and their herds, I realized that those same humiliating cows were the subject of his blessings, my feet were brought solidly to earth. . . . Every common everyday act added inches to his greatness. To me he was prophet even while washing his hands or untying his shoes.' "

L. Tom Perry, "Becoming Men in Whom the Spirit of God Is," Ensign, May 2002, 39

Prison Temple

"Most of us, most of the time, speak of the facility at Liberty as a 'jail' or a 'prison'—and certainly it was that. But Elder Brigham H. Roberts (1857–1933) of the First Council of the Seventy, in recording the history of the Church, spoke of the facility as a temple, or, more accurately, a 'prison-temple.' Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) used the same phrasing in some of his writings. Certainly this prison-temple lacked the purity, beauty, comfort, and cleanliness of our modern temples. The speech and behavior of the guards and criminals who came there were anything but temple-like. In fact, the restricting brutality and injustice of this experience at Liberty would make it seem the very antithesis of the liberating, merciful spirit of our temples and the ordinances performed in them."So in what sense could Liberty Jail be called a 'temple,' and what does such a title tell us about God's love and teachings, including where and when that love and those teachings are made manifest? In precisely this sense: that you can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experiences with the Lord in any situation you are in. Indeed, you can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experiences with the Lord in the most miserable experiences of your life—in the worst settings, while enduring the most painful injustices, when facing the most insurmountable odds and opposition you have ever faced."

Jeffrey R. Holland, "Lessons from Liberty Jail," Ensign, Sept. 2009, 28

Topics: Faith

Man is a mystery to himself...

“Man is a mystery to himself, and but few of the inhabitants of the earth inquire into their own organization . . . A man cannot find out himself without the light of revelation; he has to turn round and seek to the Lord his God, in order to find out himself” (Brigham Young, JD 7:1, 4:271).

I hope that each of us, especially those who claim to be "spiritual" or "religious" spend time each day, if not in every moment, inquiring as to our "own organization." What am I? Who am I? This question is not to be asked once and then forgotten but should pervade our waking consciousness. In time, one will find that while his physical body sleeps, he begins to awaken in the dream state as well.