It's always interesting reading old posts in this blog. The last couple of times I have posted, I was pretty disaffected. I guess my heart has softened some since February. I really enjoyed the March issue of the Ensign, which really collected together a lot of doctrine about Christ in one place, where I really needed to hear it. My daughter was out here a couple of weeks ago and I became kind of reconverted to the extended family aspects of the church. Which, granted, don't save us, but it's still pleasant to be a part of.

I read a run of conference talks from the October conference that seemed very shallow to me early in the year, and I just had to put the Ensign down for a couple of months. Lately I've been working on the Sunday sessions from last October, and there were a lot of really powerful talks in that conference. And IMHO a couple of clinkers, but in general it seemed like the right things were said.

I had a nice experience in the temple this evening, plus I listened to an uncut version of an NPR "Speaking of Faith" interview with Robert Millett:

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/insidemormonfaith/index.shtml

He pushes all the right buttons with me. He's open about the fact that he doesn't understand some things, but for him it's more about the process that Joseph Smith started rather than the lurid details about Joseph Smith himself.

I went to the temple with my daughter a couple of weeks ago and had a good experience. Tonight was good because there were some odd disruptions in the session that left me with a lot of time to think. I really enjoy that feeling of separation from the world I get in the temple. I remember reading (really skimming) a book on Heaven once written by Baptists with varying opinions on what it would be like. I realized that I know exactly what heaven will be like. It will be just like the temple, with people dressed in white moving about in quiet reverence. I'm coming to believe that I needed to go through a process of tearing my testimony down to the chassis and rebuilding it, in order to get rid of all the cultural mormonism and to replace it with what the scriptures actually say and what you can find the general authorities teaching. I still don't understand why some of the history happened the way it did and why the church obscures its origins so much, but I guess I just find the doctrine too compelling to walk away from. In many ways I think Evangelical churches do a better job of explaining the bible, and Anglican churches do a better job of pure worship. As a doctrinal package, though, I seem to be stuck with being LDS. It just reflects what I believe and is the best approximation I can find right now of biblical community.

Check back in a couple of months and I guess I'll be disaffected again, but for now I'm enjoying what I have.