Since I blacked out my site today in protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills in congress right now, and spent a good amount of time today linking to related pages on the subject, I figured I ought to write my own thoughts as well.  Also to give a bit of an explanation of *what* it is about these bills that is so terrible as to cause as much upheaval as it has.

First of all I feel that the most important thing for me to note is that I am VERY anti-piracy.  It is my opinion that if you wouldn’t take it off the shelf at Best Buy and hide it in your backpack, you shouldn’t be pirating your friend’s copy or bit-torrenting non-free software/videos/games/music etc.  I know that is an unpopular stance among my peers, but just because something is in a digital format and it is easy to steal doesn’t make it any more right to steal it.

However, even while I believe that intellectual property rights do need to be protected and that piracy needs to be addressed, the SOPA and PIPA bills that are in Congress right now are totally the wrong way to address these problems.  I hope you’ll indulge me while I illustrate my oppositions with two major scenarios that this bill would make possible that should not be a reality in a free country.

Scenario 1

Suppose on an international-domain website I were to be selling t-shirts and I had a competitor t-shirt seller that had decided I was taking away too much of their business and wanted to get some of that business back.  Under the laws that are being considered, all my competitor would have to do is file for an injunction that I had copyrighted material on my website that did not belong to me.  Whether or not that claim was true, or even if the material in question was put up there by me (as opposed to a commenter on my website or some other 3rd party) the granted injunction would go to all US-based search engines and payment processors who would immediately be forced to sever all connections to my website completely.  No chance to clear up the misunderstanding or warning to me.  Now my website is down until I can go through the process of disputing that claim.  This means no one can easily access my site or buy my t-shirts and my competitor is stealing all of my business.  My credibility would be ruined among my customer base and my whole business is sunk.  For a claim that wasn’t difficult to place, and might not even have any veracity.

Scenario 2

Sometimes I like to use Google Talk to have a video call with my parents.  It’s a nice way to show off the kids and enjoy feeling close to family even though they’re 704 miles away (yes, I did just check :) ).  If I were to have some music playing in the background while on this call and someone were to report me for it I could face felony charges and a 5-year prison sentence. Not a misdemeanor or a speeding ticket-esque fine, felony charges.  You know, like they hand out for rape, murder, grand theft auto?  Somehow forgetting to turn of your stereo just doesn’t seem worthy of those consequences (even if my mom didn’t like the music I was listening to :P ).

Now, the writers of these bills would say “that’s not the intention of these bills” or “nothing like that would ever happen”.  Which is a nice thought, but if that’s not their intention then they need to write better legislation.  The whole point of laws is that they’re a contract between citizens and government that outlines the expected behavior and the consequences of not living up to that behavior.  If the contract doesn’t include internet censorship, or felony charges for minor infractions, then the contract needs to be written up differently.  Like I said, I’m all for intellectual property protection, but they need to do it correctly, and not by putting people in harm’s way who don’t deserve the harm.

If you agree with these sentiments and haven’t already taken action please go to http://americancensorship.org/ and contact your congress people and let them know that you do NOT support SOPA/PIPA legislation.  I’d also recommend reading Eric’s post on the subject.

• Add 1 new vegetarian meal per month to our family’s meal plans – I’d really like to find ways to make our family’s meals more nutritious and less meat dependent, but I have a very difficult time finding reasonably simple, yummy looking, vegetarian recipes (any recommendations for good recipes would be VERY welcome!)
• 100% Visiting Teaching
• Attend the temple at least once a month
• Plan to have at least one couple over each month (excluding family) – Eric and I have become hermits, and while we love our hermetic life we really need to get out of our shells and have more social interaction.  I exclude family from this goal because we aren’t too bad at having family over and just need to increase our interactions with those *not* related to us.
• House clean enough for company before church each Sunday – I’m an abysmal house keeper.  But if I can have the house totally cleaned up at least once a week then everything else seems manageable.

So there you have it.  Nothing real fancy but those are the things I would most like to accomplish this year in terms of things that are quantifiable and achievable.  Ready, set, GO!

Today was our ward’s fast and testimony meeting.  As I was standing bouncing our baby during the sacrament I decided that I would like to get up and bear my testimony today.  However, before the sacrament ended I had to take that baby out to feed him and the line on the stand never dwindled enough for me to feel like I ought to get up.  So I promised myself that I would at least come home and share my thoughts here.

December 31st marked a major milestone for me.  It marked the end of the first year since 2002 that I had began and finished in the same ward.  Over the previous 8 years I had been in 10.5 wards (I’m counting Eric’s BYU singles’ ward as a half since the semester we were engaged I attended with him more frequently than not, even though my records remained in my geographic ward).  For me that was a very difficult thing.  I like to think of myself as a friendly person, but the truth is that I am seriously shy and it takes me awhile to adjust to new situations.  During those 8 years it would take me about 6 months to start to settle into a new ward. which we were then in for about 3-6 months longer before moving on again.

As I was standing in our ward’s chapel bouncing our baby I was able to look around and I realized that I actually *knew* most of the people in our ward.  Not only that, but they are people that I like and feel privileged to be around.  They’re the same people that I see at the park and in joy school or at the grocery store.  I’ve served with them in nursery or primary or at least served with their children there.  I can honestly say that I love our ward and can’t think of any place I’d rather be.

I feel so blessed to know that our Heavenly Father loves us and is watching out for what we need, and what will make us happy.  When Eric and I were engaged we decided that we could live anywhere, but we really didn’t want to end up in Utah.  Five years later Utah is (of course) exactly where we are and we don’t have any intention of leaving (except to go to China for awhile if the opportunity should arise :) .  I thought about some of the other plans we’ve made that I’m so glad didn’t work out for us.  Growing up I was adamant that I was going to the University of Utah – but going to BYU was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.  When Eric and I got married we said we were going to wait 3 years before we started to think about having children – 8 months later we’d changed our minds and less than two years later we had Sam.  As we were getting ready to settle down we tried desperately to get out of Utah.  When we realized we were staying we set the criteria for our house that we wanted to be close to everything – if you’ve been in our neighborhood you know that we’re far away from just about everything.

I’m so grateful for personal revelation.  I”m grateful that the Lord can help us know the things that will be best for us, and not just let us have the things that we want.  I’m grateful for the wonderful place that we’ve ended up.  Left to our own devices there’s no way we would have chosen the place we did, but we couldn’t be happier with it.

I know that our Heavenly Father loves us and is watching over us. I know that He hears and answers our prayers and that if we follow his guidance and commandments He will lead us to the best situations for us.  I know that the gospel taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true.  I’m so grateful for it in my life.  I write these things in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

In last April General Conference I was listening to the Priesthood session and was struck by President Monson‘s talk.  President Monson said that the saddest part of his week was reviewing the cancellations of temple marriages. His remark was that most of those marriages didn’t have to end that way. He had two thoughts that I thought were particularly poignant “Choose your love, love your choice” and “Committment in marriage is absolutely essential”.

For those of you who know the story of how Eric and I got together, you might be surprised to find out that neither of us believe in “the one”. Meaning, neither of us believe that there is that one and only person out there that you are destined to be with and can’t be happy with anyone else. Now, this might be surprising because the short version of our story is this – Eric asked me on a date on Sunday, we decided to start dating on Thursday, we went on that date on Friday (no I don’t have those two out of order), I met some of his family on Sunday, he met my dad on Friday, he asked me to marry him on Sunday, we were married 6 months later and we’ve been happily married now for 4+ years. So, the question that begs to be answered is how do you decide to marry someone after just 9 days of dating them without feeling like you have an unshakable conviction that they are “the one”? Easy, after 9 days we knew each other well enough to know that we loved each other and we were willing to do whatever it took to make it work.

If you watch Disney movies or any chick flicks you will see lots of examples of people having these “fairy tale” romances, where they find this perfect person and when the movie ends you are left to believe that “they all lived happily ever after.”  While that’s a nice thought, I believe there’s no such thing as “happily ever after”.  What comes in the “after” is lots of work.  Good work, enjoyable times, love, laughter and LOTS of good things, but work.  Marriage is not, nor was it ever meant to be, sunshine and rainbows and romance.  What I’ve come to realize is that the most important element in a marriage is not that fluttery feeling when you look into each others eyes, but it’s the commitment that you made to weather any storm together that you made on your wedding day.  Quite frankly, it doesn’t even matter if you don’t even like your spouse in a particular moment, the important thing is that you committed to one another that you would love them and work together with them no matter what.  Love is an expression of caring for another person above yourself and you can do that even if you don’t like the person at the time.  Of course, it is best if you can like your spouse as well, and a lot of that comes down to attitude.  Obviously, there were lots of things you liked about your spouse when you married them, and it’s important to focus on those things that you do like rather than letting temporary annoyances get in the way.

I want to close this post with an awesome quote from Dallin H. Oaks’ talk from April 2007 conference.  He says simply pretty much what I wanted to say:

“In all of this, we should realize that a good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection. President Spencer W. Kimball taught: ‘Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage . . . means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all’ (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball [2006], 194).”

So I’m thinking of starting a project for a Christmas present for Daniel.  I want to make him a quiet book for church.  I’m thinking though to keep the project a little bit easier I would see if anyone else wanted to do it with me.  If you’re interested here’s how I’m thinking it would work -

Each person will make two pages.  I’ll buy fabric for each person’s pages this week and get it cut to the right dimensions and distributed to whoever is interested.  Then each person duplicates their pages 16 times (assuming there are 16 people who want to participate) and returns their completed pages to me.  I will then redistribute the pages so that each person gets 16 full spread pages, or 32 pages for their quiet book!  Then all you need to do is sew a cover for your book, sew the pages together and sew the pages into it and you’re done!

I’ve even already found a bunch of great ideas for quiet book pages so you don’t have to come up with your own ideas, just make some pages! Here are some of the ideas I’ve found -

• http://www.mormonchic.com/crafty/quietbook_church.asp
• http://servingpinklemonade.blogspot.com/2011/01/quiet-book.html
• http://quietbook.blogspot.com/
• http://www.familysafemedia.com/quiet_book_-_quiet_activity_bo.html

If I get enough people who are interested by this weekend then I can get the flannel while it’s on sale and it would only cost each person <$5 for the pages themselves plus whatever you spend on buttons, felt pieces etc to finish off your pages.  Ideally I think I’d like to find 16 people who are interested since that makes the fabric buying easy.  Here’s the guidelines I’ve come up with (although I’m open to suggestions depending on what people would like to do):

• Each person will get page spreads that are 10.5″x16″ to work with, please make your page spread include two separate pages that don’t need to be facing one another (i.e. You will need to split up your spread into two 10.5″x 8″ pages, but those pages might be pages 1 and 32, or 7 and 25 depending on how the pages get sewn together)
• Leave at least a 1 inch margin in the center of the spread (dividing the pages) to ensure enough space to sew the pages together and onto the cover
• Leave at least 1/2 inch on the edges of your pages to allow space for binding
• All pages should be returned to me for assembly no later than December 1st
• Each page should have some sort of interactive element – i.e. buttons, snaps, velcro, shoelaces etc.
• Ideally it’d be nice if each page was gospel themed in some way.  It doesn’t have to be real specific, but like there was one page I saw that had roads and a car, if the destination was like from home to church or the temple that’d be nice, or even something simple like adding the words “I’m grateful for seasons” on the top of a seasons page.  I figure these will mostly be used at church so keeping a gospel theme would be nice :)
• Each person will be responsible for making their own cover so feel free to do whatever you’d like!

My dad is a CPA, as such he taught me early on the importance of tracking your spending and reconciling all of your credit card statements etc.  He and my mom always used Quicken to track all of their spending.  I remember every month when my mom would get have to go through and make sure they had entered all of their transactions and reconcile their credit card bills.  So, when I got old enough to have my own computer it also came with a copy of Quicken and I started to track my own finances as well.  I think i did pretty well through at least the first few years of college, and then when Eric and I got married I kept meaning to get us all set up with Quicken and never did.

Finally, after we’d been married for about a year I went online to see if I could get an updated version of Quicken.  It seemed like in the 5 years since I’d first installed Quicken there was probably a version that at least ran faster.  I was in for a surprise!  Not only did they have newer versions of Quicken, but they had an online version that could be used for free!  Since I’m a big fan of things that are online and free, and Quicken is a brand that I trust I decided to check it out.  I fell in love.  All I had to do was enter in credentials for our various bank accounts, 401ks, credit cards etc. and all of my transactions were imported instantly.  No more reconciling statements, my statements were imported, and categorized automatically!  I was thrilled.

Within a few months Quicken bought out a company called Mint.com and started having them take over their online financial tracking solution.  What was already awesome got even better, better budget tracking, setting up goals, better algorithms for automatically categorizing transactions etc.  I immediately started telling my family that they needed to get set up with Mint.com.  My brother and sister did so and also loved what they found.  I actually thought that my mom had switched over to Mint from their desktop Quicken solution until a few weeks ago.  I had spouted off to her many many times about how much I loved Mint and how wonderful it was, but apparently she hadn’t entirely believed me.  A couple weeks ago my mom called me up and said “Why didn’t you tell me how easy and useful Mint is?!?”  The answer was… I had :)  She had fallen behind on their Quicken tracking and it was time to either start over with Quicken or switch to Mint.  She decided to give Mint a try and was instantly hooked.  She had it all set up in less than an hour and was able to look at their budget in a whole new way!

So why do I love Mint so much?  Here’s a basic overview of what Mint can do:

Spending Trends - Have you ever looked at your bank balances and wondered where all of your money went?  Mint provides easy to read graphs that break down how your money is being spent.  When I first got this set up I was shocked to see that we had spent over $400 one month on eating out.  Granted I was working full time and pregnant and sick with Sam at the time, but I was appalled to see how the nights that I hadn’t felt up to cooking added up.

Budgeting – So, now you know how much you spend, how to fix places where you’re spending too much?  Mint makes it really easy to set up a budget and stick to it.  They even suggest amounts based on your current spending so you don’t have to guess what a reasonable amount is.  You can set up budgets that occur every month, or on any sort of schedule during the year.  You can set up your budgets to roll over each month or not.  They also keep track of whether your budget amounts exceed your monthly income.  Plus you can set up your account to email or text you if you go over budget in any category.

Goals – We all have financial goals.  Whether it’s paying off credit cards, saving for a house or building up your emergency fund there’s something that you want to do with your money.  Mint makes it super easy to track these goals and help you make a plan to achieve them.  Just decide what kind of goal you have, pick an account to associate it with and then make the plan.  Mint will help you decide how much you need to budget each month to achieve your goal and tell you if you fall off track.

Another reason I use Mint is it helps me detect any fraudulent charges on my accounts.  Back in February I was going through our accounts and noticed a charge from Match.com – which obviously if either Eric or I were signing up for was a bit of a problem.  Someone had gotten a hold of our credit card numbers and was making charges to fake companies.  They weren’t huge charges though so if I hadn’t been paying attention I probably wouldn’t have noticed $30 here and $15 there.  But because I was watching we were able to put a stop to those charges before they escalated.

One of the major questions I had when I first found Mint is how are they making money off of this?  Nothing on the internet is truly free, someone is paying for it somewhere, and before handing my financial information over to someone I wanted to know what the “catch” was.  Mint makes it’s money through targeted advertising.  They’ll notice if you have an old 401k account that’s charging you maintenance fees an make a suggestion for another company that won’t charge you fees.  Or if you’re spending a lot in a particular category they might recommend a credit card that gives you higher rewards for purchases in that category.  And of course, they’ll suggest using TurboTax when tax season comes around.

I could go on and on, I love reading their financial blog, their customer service is pretty darn good and they email me a summary of my accounts every week! But really, for you to understand how awesome it is, you’re just going to have to try it for yourself :)

So I got this idea when I used to follow the $5 dinner blog.  Every so often I have what I call “Leftover Awareness Month” (she calls it “Pantry Challenge”).  Basically the idea is for a month (although sometimes just a week) I try to eat only what we have in the house and go to the grocery store as little as possible.  I decided to do it again this month for a few reasons:

1. Next month here in Utah we have lots of case lot sales and I want to have some extra space in my budget and my kitchen to take advantage of those sales to  build up our food storage.
2. Our freezer and pantry were getting seriously overloaded with random stuff. I sometimes end up buying random things at the grocery store that never get used so this is a good chance to force myself to use them.
3. I’ve been analyzing our budget and noticing that we were spending more money each month on food than I had expected.  I was trying to figure out where the extra money was going and we noticed that we were throwing away too much food because our leftovers would go bad before getting eaten. So we wanted to focus on making sure we go through all of our leftovers.

So, this month my personal challenge is to make our meals as much as possible from food already in my home.  I’m going to the store for things like milk, bread and produce but the basis of our meals must come from things that we had in our pantry or freezer.  Since I’m finding things in our pantry and freezer that have gone through 6 moves with us I think it was probably time…

Anyone care to join us in cleaning out the pantry?

Last night we had a little baby shower for my niece (yes, somehow I’m old enough to have a niece old enough to be a mom, weird huh?).  While we were there I let her in on the secret of Amazon Mom.  One of my sisters-in-law was so sad that I hadn’t told her about this sooner that I decided it ought to be my first “Smarter not Harder” post.  Here’s the secret – if you go to Amazon.com and go to their Amazon Mom page (or just click on the banner at the top of this post) you can sign up to have diapers auto delivered to your house, at a price cheaper than I’ve seen in any store.  Plus you get Amazon Prime benefits (i.e. Free 2 day shipping) for one year after you start your membership.  It doesn’t cost anything to join, they won’t auto-enroll you in an Amazon Prime membership at the end of your year or anything like that.  You just order the kind of diapers that you want and they deliver them to your home.  For me I’m signed up to get two boxes of Daniel’s diapers (Pampers Swaddlers Diapers Big Pack Size 1 92 Count - $17.14/19 cents per diaper) every month, and 1 box of Sam’s diapers (Pampers Baby Dry Size 4 Diapers Economy Pack Plus 192 Count - $30.73/$0.16 per diaper) every other month.  You get a 15% discount for enrolling in Amazon Mom, and another 15% discount for signing up for their auto-ship program.  If you don’t like it you can even cancel the auto-ship immediately after ordering.  It’s awesome, not only for the savings, but also because I never run out of diapers and I never have to sit at the store wondering if we have enough diapers to make it until our next Costco run :)

Anyways, that’s my cool trick of the day. If you have a child in diapers you really ought to be signed up for Amazon Mom. It’s way less hassle than couponing, and from what I’ve seen couponing doesn’t give you nearly the savings that this does.  Oh, and did I mention they deliver the diapers to your house?!  It doesn’t get much better than that!

So I’ve been meaning for a long time to write posts about things that I use in my life to make it easier/cheaper/healthier or in any way better.  I finally have come up with a list of things to write about that’s so long that I could have a weekly post for 3 months before I even had to think again about what I was going to post.  And all of the ideas/products/services on the list are things that I’m so passionate about that if you live with me you know that I live by these things.  So I’ve decided it’s time to get these posts written up and posted.  I’ll try to post one a week until I run out of things to post about.

I’m calling these posts “Smarter not harder” because it’s one of the mottos that I live my life by – work smarter, not harder!  I feel like there are so many awesome resources out there and we tend to make our lives too complicated.  You’ll probably find that I post about lots of technology-type resources – websites, machines etc – but that’s probably about what you’d expect from me :)  I think it’s good to use the resources that are available to us to make all of our mundane daily tasks easier so that we can spend more time focusing on the things that are important.

I heard a story once that was attributed to Brigham Young.  I hate posting things that I don’t have sources for, but I so liked the principle that I’ve decided to post it anyways with the disclaimer that it’s likely false doctrine  :)  The story goes that Brigham Young was talking to one of his daughters one night and she asked how the temple work would ever get completed for all of the spirits who had previously passed on.  There were just SO many people to do the work for and she couldn’t conceive of how the Saints would ever find the time to do the work for ALL of them.  Brigham Young allegedly told her that he foresaw a day when there would be many conveniences that would make people’s lives easier so they would have the time to do the work.

While I don’t always use all of my free time to do temple work, I still feel like by making my tasks in the home easier I open myself up to being able to do service for others, serve in the temple or spend time with my kids.  I almost feel like it’s my responsibility to use these resources so that I’m using my time wisely so that I’m available to do other good things.  It doesn’t benefit anyone for me to do things the hard way and I can benefit many others by doing things in an easier manner :)

Anyways, be on the lookout for future posts on this topic.  I have a few past posts that would go into this category as well if you’d like to whet your appetite:

• Using technology to improve your gospel study
• Paying tithing online

I just finished listening to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  If you haven’t read it before and you’re someone who enjoys reading I highly recommend it.  It’s an interesting story about a young man who grew up in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded and took control of the country.  He flees with his father to America and returns later during the Taliban rule.  I don’t want to give too many details because I think the fun of reading a book is experiencing it for yourself (ironically this is discussed in the book as a very American attitude).

Coincidentally I also recently challenged myself to read through the entire Old Testament as it is the one book of scripture that I can’t say I’ve read cover-to-cover.  I’m pretty sure I’ve read almost all of it at one point or another, but I can’t actually say I’ve read every page so I’m working towards that.  I haven’t made it very far and I just read last night most of the story of Abraham (Genesis 15-21).  Reading that story while listening to a book about the unrest in the Middle East and the Muslims there led to some interesting thoughts which I figured I’d write about here.

One of the first things that struck me is that if Sarah hadn’t given Hagar to Abraham to wife, none of the problems in the Middle East for the past thousands of years would have ever taken place.  Which makes me wonder if the world would have been better off if Sarah hadn’t done that.  The whole feud between Muslims and Jews wouldn’t have existed because there wouldn’t have been any Muslims to begin with.  I’m not trying to say that the world would be better off without Muslims, just that the way that Sarah and Hagar dealt with each other afterwards has created an animosity between those two peoples that has endured through many centuries.  Perhaps under different circumstances Hagar would have married another man within Abraham’s camp, raised those children peacefully alongside Issac and everyone would have lived happily ever after.  I know that’s a big what if and it doesn’t even do any good to speculate on that issue, but I had a different insight that I thought *was* worthwhile to think about.  What if Sarah had kept her faith in God that He would keep His promise to Abraham and herself rather than doubting and giving her handmaiden instead?  Perhaps all of the turmoil that has happened ever since that point could have been avoided by exercising greater faith.

I’m not necessarily saying that what Sarah did was wrong, perhaps she was even commanded to by the Lord (which was what I had thought originally, but in reading through last night I didn’t see indication of that, please let me know if I just missed it).  I definitely think that it was a HUGE sacrifice on her part to give another woman to her husband to wife.  I’m probably too jealous of a woman to do that myself.  However, it was just a reminder to me to have even greater faith in what the Lord is capable of and allow him to do great things through us.  I think a great example of the converse is Nephi.  When the Lord asked him to build a boat he didn’t ask where he could find a boatmaker, he asked where to find ore to make tools and then let the Lord make him into the boatmaker.  It made me wonder in what ways I’m limiting the Lord’s power to make me into an even better person by accepting things as they are.

By the way if you’re interested in another book about Abraham and Sarah one of my very favorite books that I’ve read recently is Sarah: Women of Genesis by Orson Scott Card, it was excellent and I recommend it even more so than Kite Runner, but obviously they’re totally different books so it depends on what you enjoy reading :)

The other thought that I had was how much we are all really the same.  If you look at Christians, Muslims and Jews we think of those religions as being SO different.  However, we each branch off at tiny intersections.  Muslims and Jews came from the same spiritual heritage, are both the offspring of Abraham.  They just branch a little bit when Ishmael and Hagar are sent away from Abraham’s camp, but still at the roots and essence of Islam, they believe in basically the same things, and they’re worshiping the same God although by different names and in different ways.  Again Christians and Jews come from the same spiritual heritage all the way up until the birth of Jesus.  Then we differ in that we believe Jesus is the Christ and that He has already come, whereas the Jews are still waiting for the Christ to come.  But again we’re still the same at our roots and worshiping the same God, just in different ways.  I think we can often focus too much on our differences than on our similarities.

Now, that isn’t to say that the differences that we have aren’t important.  I think one of the things I see most frequently are people who say that we’re all good so don’t worry about how we’re different.  I strongly believe that it is very significant that Jesus is the Christ, that He suffered for our sins and was resurrected and that because of Him we can be forgiven of our sins and live again.  Eric was told by many people on his mission that there are “many roads that lead to the top of the mountain”, meaning it doesn’t matter what you believe we’re all going to end up in the same place.  I do believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only church on the face of the earth today that has the complete truth.  It’s why we believe in doing missionary work and that it’s so important to spread the truth to others.  What we have *does* matter, and we should be doing all that we can to share it with others.  However, that doesn’t exclude any other religion from having any truth.  Nor does it give Latter-day Saints a monopoly on God, I believe God loves all of His children regardless of race or religion and He will answer the prayers of a Muslim or a Jew or anyone else as readily as a Christian, so long as they’re asking in faith and with righteous desires.  Most importantly I don’t believe that people are simply damned for not accepting the fullness of the gospel in this life.

What I believe is best expressed in C.S. Lewis’ book The Last Battle (I know, lots of different book references today, what can I say, I love reading ;).  In that book  there is a young man who is a Calormene (i.e. not a Narnian or the equivalent of Christian) and he fights vehemently throughout the book for Tash (the Calormenian god) against Aslan and the Narnians.  At the end of the book **SPOILER ALERT** everyone dies and they have “judgement day”.  When they get to judgement day the Calormenian young man steps aside with Aslan for a little bit and they have a conversation where Aslan basically says – you missed it by a little bit and were fighting for the wrong side, but your intentions were correct, you are a noble and just person and if you will accept this path you still get to come and live in Aslan’s kingdom.

That’s the best explanation I can think of for how I believe things are going to be on the other side.  Yes, I think it’s absolutely important that Christ is the Savior of mankind and that the pathway to eternal life and exaltation means that we need to accept His atonement in our lives and do those things that will help us return to and become like Heavenly Father.  But if you were a faithful and good person in this life I fully believe that in the next life you’ll be told – you’re awesome, way to be faithful, here are the steps that you need now to gain eternal life and exaltation.  It’s why we do work for the dead in temples.  It’s not to force our faith upon people who have passed on or to tell those people that they were evil.  Quite the contrary, it’s simply to give them the opportunity to accept those things they might not have known before and have the chance to progress onward.

Which isn’t to say that it isn’t important to accept the gospel in this life if given the chance.  I think one of the most important things to realize about what happens on the other side is that we will still be the same people we are now – just dead.  We won’t suddenly be a completely different person with different desires or abilities.  If you weren’t going to accept the gospel in this life and feel inclined to do those things that the gospel requires, you aren’t likely to do so in the next life. (See Alma 41 for a more eloquent explanation of this)

Anyways, I know a lot of this is fairly off topic from the book itself but they’re things that I’ve thought about in the past and have meant to write down and post, this just provided a good jumping off point :)  As always, you can feel free to add in your two cents below.