Kirk Rollins
@nicoraytruth • 3,352 subscribers
lawyer, father, husband, pragmatist, christian thinker
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This is real. Just got posted on the official LDS Church Instagram account.
Kirk Rollins77,646 views • 1 month ago
Dear Mormons, If you are a Saint today, you descend from the pioneers, by blood or by the grafting that makes you no less their child, and that means there is iron in your bones whether you have learned to feel it yet or not. You come from people who buried their children in the snow and kept walking, who were driven from state after state and did not break, who crossed a thousand miles of nothing and built a civilization out of salt and sand on the strength of pure covenant. That inheritance is not metaphor. It is in you, the same marrow, the same refusal, the same fire that no mob and no winter and no extermination order could ever put out. So let the haters on hate, let them sneer from their screens and their safe little distances, because they are screaming at a people who have outlasted far worse than them and forgotten more courage than they will ever own. You carry the essence of a covenant nation in your chest, and a people who know how to make cities rise out of a wasteland are not a people who bow. Stand up straight under what you were handed, square the shoulders this Church was built on, and remember in your bones that you were forged from the unbreakable.
Kirk Rollins119,792 views • 3 months ago
Gordon Hinckley says it best. Please just listen to his prophetic voice.
Kirk Rollins116,063 views • 3 months ago
My mormons, "You are not a member of an organization. You are a member of a people, and you forget the difference at your peril. An organization has employees and customers and a mission statement. A people has martyrs. A people has graves it can point to, ground soaked with its own blood, stories that begin with "your fathers" and mean it. The world will tell you that Mormonism is a religion you happen to hold, a set of beliefs you could set down tomorrow and remain exactly who you are. The world is lying. You cannot separate the faith from the people who bled for it, because they were never two things. The pioneer past is not the backstory of Mormonism. It is the body of it. Carthage is not history you learn. It is inheritance you carry. The handcart companies are not an episode in a manual. They are your dead, your line, your tribe, and the covenant that binds you to God binds you just as surely to them. This is the thing the modern Saint has forgotten, and the forgetting is a kind of orphaning. We speak of "the pioneers" as though they were someone else's ancestors, figures in a diorama, a heritage month. They are not someone else's. Whether your blood crossed the plains or your baptism grafted you into the vine last spring, they are yours now, fully yours, because that is what it means to be sealed into a covenant people: their story becomes your story, their martyrs become your martyrs, their dead become your dead. The convert from Manila and the seventh-generation rancher from Cache Valley stand in the same line, heirs of the same graves. Joseph and Hyrum did not die for an institution. They died for a people that did not fully exist yet, a people they could see only by faith, and you are that people. Their blood is in your spiritual veins. When you take the sacrament, you take it as one of them. When you enter the temple, you enter on ground their sacrifice purchased. You cannot claim the gospel and disown the tribe that carried it, because the gospel came to you inside that tribe, wrapped in its stories, paid for with its suffering, handed down grave by grave until it reached your hands. And a people who know they are a people cannot be broken the way scattered individuals can. This is why the world works so hard to convince you that your faith is private, personal, just one option in the marketplace of beliefs. A lone believer can be picked off, worn down, embarrassed out of his convictions one awkward conversation at a time. A member of a tribe with martyrs cannot, because he does not stand alone, and he knows it. He stands in a line that runs back through the valley and the plains and the frozen rivers to a jail in Illinois, and the line stands in him. So claim your people. Say "my martyrs" and mean it. Say "my dead" and feel the weight of it. Take your children to the graves of the pioneers and teach them that these are not strangers, these are ours, this is who we are and what we came from and what it cost. Because the day you understand that you belong to a people, the mockery of the world loses its power over you entirely. They are laughing at your tribe. And your tribe buried its children in the snow and kept walking, and outlasted every mob and every extermination order and every laughing generation since. You come from the unbreakable."
Kirk Rollins52,733 views • 1 month ago
I've become a missionary with one message. Every time I meet a young person, the same words: have children, get married, build a family. I did not decide on this calling. It overtook me. And it overtook me for a single reason. I had no idea. I genuinely did not understand how much joy, how much meaning, how much sheer beauty pours out of a child until I was holding one of my own and felt the floor of my life drop into something deeper than I knew was there. I grew up white, affluent, secular, comfortable, and insulated. That world does not put babies in front of you. None of my friends were starting families. Out of my whole circle, almost no one has a big one. We were not formed by the presence of children. We were formed by their absence, by the strange quiet of homes built for two careers and no cradle. And a person believes what his world shows him. So we believed. What we believed was a lie. It is a lie with an author, and that the author is the enemy of joy himself. It is the gospel of the world, and its commandment is wait. Wait until you are older. Wait until the career is built and the savings are stacked and the twenties are properly spent. Enjoy your freedom. You are not ready. It does not arrive sounding like temptation. It arrives sounding like wisdom, like prudence, like the responsible thing, and that is exactly why it works. The most effective lies are the ones that wear the face of virtue. And the maddening thing is that it collapses from every angle at once. It is not rooted in biology, because the body is made for this work precisely in the years we are told to postpone it. The flesh keeps a calendar the culture pretends not to see. And it is not rooted in theology either. You will not find this deferral anywhere in the Christian imagination, in any of the fathers, in any of the scriptures. So choose whatever lens you like. Take the cold secular measure or the ancient sacred one. By either light the counsel is rotten. It is bad for the body and bad for the soul and bad for the society downstream of both. This is why I have come to see it as one of the central tragedies of my generation. Every age carries its own wound. The Great Depression was a depression of bread, a scarcity in the world of matter, hunger you could measure. Ours is a depression of a different order. It is a famine of the spirit in the middle of abundance. We have more than any people who ever lived and we are starving in a way our ancestors would not recognize, because the thing we are refusing cannot be bought and cannot be banked. The ones most made to give and receive this love are quietly declining it. They are walking away from the one inheritance that actually compounds, and the cruelest part is that they do not feel the loss as loss. You cannot grieve what you were taught not to want. That is the deepest cut of it. The lie does not only steal the thing. It steals the capacity to know the thing was stolen. A man can spend his whole life on the far side of a door he never knew was a door, mistaking the wall for the edge of the world. Because this beauty is not ordinary beauty. It is not the pleasure of a good meal or a clear morning. It is participation in something that comes down from above, the same generative love that spoke everything out of nothing and called it good. To make a person, to be undone and remade by loving that person more than your own life, is to be drawn for a moment inside the very act that holds the cosmos together. A child does not merely add to your life. A child reorders the soul. It teaches you what you are by asking everything of you, and you discover, kneeling there exhausted at three in the morning, that you had a capacity for self gift you never suspected, a depth in yourself you had no other way to reach. In the Gospel of John, on the last night, Jesus prays, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. And I have come to understand why family is the road into that fullness, why it is not one path among many but the one most fitted to the shape of the promise. Consider who is praying. Christ does not come to us as a lone figure dropped out of the sky. He comes out of a family older than the world, the eternal communion of Father and Son, the love between them so total and so alive that theologians dared to call it a third person. Before there was anything, there was a family. The deepest fact about reality is not a force or a law or a void. It is a household. It is begetting and being begotten, giving and receiving, a Father who is only a Father because there is a Son. So when Jesus speaks of joy made complete, he is not pointing away from family toward something higher. He is pointing toward the very thing he came from, the life he has known from eternity and came to share. His joy is the joy of belonging utterly to a Father and pouring himself out for those he loves. When you marry, when you bring a child into the world, when you wear yourself down in the small unseen labors of a home, you are not stepping outside that divine life. You are stepping into a small image of it. Your family is a created echo of an uncreated one. The love you give your child rhymes with the love the Father has for the Son. The exhaustion, the tenderness, the way a parent would tear the sky open to protect a sleeping infant, all of it is the heavens pressed faintly into flesh, the eternal household leaving its fingerprint on yours. That is why the joy is not merely added to family but completed in it. We were made in the image of a God who is, at his very root, relation and gift and generation. To found a family is to do the most Godlike thing a creature can do, to participate from below in the begetting that God does from all eternity. Your home becomes a window. Through it, dimly and imperfectly, you glimpse the country you came from and are going to. And now a word for the young people reading this, the ones who do not yet have children. I want to tell you what it is like from where I stand. When I am out somewhere, a restaurant, anywhere, and a large family comes through the door, the noise and the chaos and the small bodies of them, something happens in me on two levels at once. The first is joy. A pure gladness at the sight, the way you feel watching something good and alive. But underneath it, almost in the same instant, a sadness reaches up and takes hold of my heart. Because I know now, at my age, after my own years of waiting, that I will never have that. I will never know the particular fruit of a family that large, the fullness of that table, the weight of all those lives gathered under one roof. The door to it has quietly closed, and I felt it close. And I am telling you plainly, because I love you and have no reason to lie to you: you will feel this too. You will. The day will come when you see what you passed up, and you will recognize the ache for what it is, and it will be too late to answer it. So please, learn from a man who got it wrong. Let my regret be worth something by becoming your wisdom. Do not wait yourself into a grief you cannot undo. Choose now, while the door is open, so that you may step into a joy that does not end.
Kirk Rollins78,104 views • 3 months ago
"Men do not stay for platitudes. Platitudes do not carry a soul through the winter. When the child is in the ground, when the marriage is in ruins, when the diagnosis comes back and the floor drops out of the world, no one was ever held up by 'be kind and stay positive.' They are held, if they are held at all, by something with iron in it. By a witness that the heavens are real and open, that God still speaks, that the dead are not lost, that there is power on the earth greater than the darkness. The early Saints had that, and they knew they had it, because they had felt it in their own bodies. They were healed under hands. They spoke in tongues. They saw visions and buried their children in the certainty of resurrection and crossed a continent on the strength of a fire they could not have faked. That is what converts a man and that is what keeps him, not a well managed self-help program, but the living evidence that what we preach is true. So the cure is not complicated, and it is not new. It is to be again the Church of our fathers. Stop apologizing. Stop trimming the glorious truth into something the world will pat on the head. Speak with authority and with the hammer, the way Joseph spoke, the way Brigham spoke, the way men speak when they actually believe the heavens have opened over them. Reach again for the gifts of the Spirit, and stop pretending they were a founding era curiosity, because a testimony built on argument crumbles in the first storm and a testimony built on the manifest power of God does not. And above all, live as though the heavens are open, because they are, and they have only ever felt closed to a people who stopped expecting them to answer. The Saints are not leaving because the gospel is too much. They are leaving because we have made it too little. Make it glorious and demanding again, and watch who comes back through the door. The hungry have not gone anywhere. We simply stopped setting the table."
Kirk Rollins63,131 views • 3 months ago
By the end of his life, President Howard W. Hunter's body had become a catalog of suffering. A massive heart attack. Coronary bypass surgery. Bleeding ulcers. Kidney failure. Back surgeries that left him leaning on a walker or sunk in a wheelchair. And finally the prostate cancer that would kill him. Few men have been asked to carry so much for so long. He did not complaint about any of it. That was the man. A stoic, quiet resilience that never once curdled into self pity. He simply bore it and kept moving. In April 1988, he came to general conference on a walker to bear his testimony before the whole Church. The doctors had told him he would never stand again. He stood anyway. Partway through, his body gave out and he fell backward, hard, breaking three ribs in front of the entire congregation. Three men lifted him to his feet. And then, with cracked ribs and every eye upon him, he finished his address as though nothing had happened. Afterward he only smiled. He was strength. You need men still willing and ready to drop the hammer on disobedience. Mercy without discipline is not mercy. It is indifference wearing mercy's coat. A church that will not correct does not actually believe anyone can be lost. Authority that flinches teaches the flock that nothing is truly at stake. Men answer to the voice of authority, not to weakness. The masculine soul does not rally to apology or to endless accommodation. It rallies to a command worth obeying, to a father confident enough to ask everything. Strength is not cruelty. It is the refusal to apologize for the truth. Hunter could not stand on his own legs. He stood anyway. He fell, and he rose, and he kept speaking the word of God. That is the measure. Not a body that never breaks, but a will that will not quit, a faith that will not negotiate, a church that will not soften the words God gave it to speak.
Kirk Rollins53,552 views • 3 months ago
religious institutions thrive on high social and spiritual demands rather than cultural accommodation.. "soft" churches, those that lower their standards to align with modern secular values, inevitably collapse because they eliminate the costly sacrifice that fosters genuine belief.
Kirk Rollins18,807 views • 1 month ago
Your faith was forged in people who would rather be exterminated than assimilated. A soft version of it, eager to be liked and desperate to fit in, is not the thing they died to hand you. So stop striving to be liked. Stop angling to be loved by a world that drove your fathers into the snow. That world would think no better of the gospel today than it did in 1838. Stop trying to file down every peculiar and glorious edge of the Restoration until the world finally finds you acceptable. It never will. And the wanting of its approval is the slow death of everything your people bled to preserve. I am thinking of the proclamation on the family, and of how many have quietly gone looking for a way around it. Some say it aloud now. Some march under the world's Pride banners and tell themselves it is only love. They have done the quiet arithmetic and concluded that if they give the world this one doctrine, the world will finally stop hating them, finally let them belong, finally call them good. It does not work that way. It has never once worked that way. Understand what the world actually hates, because it is not a single teaching about marriage that it cannot abide. It is the claim. It is the unbearable, scandalous claim that the keys of the priesthood were restored to the earth, that there is a prophet who speaks for God, that this and no other is the authorized house of the Lord. That is the offense. That is what it cannot forgive. You could surrender every doctrine the world finds distasteful, one after another, and you would not buy a single hour of peace, because the thing it objects to is not your position on this or that. It is that you claim to hold the authority of heaven, and it intends to see that claim humbled. The doctrine is only the doorway it is pushing on. The house is what it wants. Embrace the truth. Embrace the battle that has always come with it, because there has always been a battle, and there is one now. It is the oldest war there is, good against evil, light against the dark, and you were born onto its field whether you wished to be or not. You did not inherit a museum. You inherited a war, and a banner, and a people who never once surrendered it. You are a Mormon. The blood of the persecuted is in you, and the truth they died for is in your hands. You are not tourists. You are not spectators. You are the heirs of warriors, and the line they held is now yours to hold. So plant your feet on the ground they bled for. Lift the banner they would not drop.
Kirk Rollins30,483 views • 2 months ago
There was a parent who lost a child to the needle. Not lost to death, which at least lets you grieve and one day stop. Lost to the street. To the years of disappearing, the phone that stops being answered, the front door left unlocked every single night for a decade on the chance the child might finally come through it. And the parent never stopped. Did not move on. Did not decide the child was too far gone. Drove to the worst parts of town to scan the faces under the overpass. Searched for years, going gray with it, burying the hope a hundred times and digging it back up every morning, because a parent does not get to stop loving a child just because the child is lost. And then came the day it finally happened. The child, hollowed out, certain they were beyond all loving, looked up, and there was the parent's face. And neither of them could speak. They just held on, and they wept, the kind of weeping that has years of grief and years of longing pouring out of it at once, the child sobbing the only word they could find, sorry, sorry, and the parent saying the only word that mattered, which was not "where have you been" and not "do you know what you did to me," but only, over and over into their hair, you're home, you're home, you're home. Now understand. That is not just a real story about a parent and a child. That is God, and that is humanity. No one is forgotten by the Father. He did not fold His arms and wait at home for you to crawl back and prove you were worth it. The moment you were lost, He came after you. And the cost He paid to reach the very bottom of your pit was not patience, and it was not effort. It was His Son, sent down below all of it, so there would be no depth where His face was not already waiting for you to find it. So hear this, wherever it finds you. You were never forgotten, not for one second, not in the worst of it. The door has been unlocked every night since the day you left. He is still driving the worst parts of town. He is still scanning the faces under the overpass. He is still weeping over the ones who are certain they have fallen too far to ever come back. And the moment you turn around, you will not hear "where have you been." You will only hear, said over and over into your hair, the one thing that has been true since before the foundation of the world: you're home, you're home, you're home. Stop running. Come home.
Kirk Rollins21,168 views • 2 months ago
Took me 20 years to comprehend Joseph Late in his life, hunted and persecuted, Joseph Smith returned again and again to a single image of what his whole work was finally about. It was not a doctrine of separate souls saved one at a time. It was a welding. He saw the human family as a chain reaching back through every generation, and he saw the work of salvation as the forging of that chain. Link by link. Father to child and child to father, until not one soul was left hanging alone at the end of the line. Heaven was not a gathering of individuals who happened to be saved in the same place. It was one welded family. And the binding of it, the sealing of parents to children across the whole length of human time, was the very thing the restored gospel had come into the world to do. "There is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children… For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect." (D&C 128:18) Postmodern America has built a secular civilization of separated souls. Every person sealed behind his own eyes, wired to everyone and bound to no one, more connected than any generation in history and lonelier than nearly any that came before. And beneath the loneliness sits a quiet assumption we have half swallowed without ever deciding to believe it, that the isolation is simply the truth about us. That we arrive alone and leave alone, and spend the middle as fundamentally separate selves, straining across an abyss that cannot be closed. This is the whole modern portrait of a person. An individual standing by himself, autonomous, complete in his solitude, a self for whom relationship is something added from outside rather than the very thing he is made of. The LDS welding doctrine says that portrait is false at the deepest level there is. You were never built to be a single soul. You were built to be a link, bound on every side, your own perfection tangled up in others and theirs in yours, so that not one of you arrives without the rest. The isolation you feel in the worst hours is not your nature reporting in. It is your exile from it. It is the felt weight of the scattering, the ache of a family not yet welded back into one. Joseph demolishes, in one stroke, the lonely picture of salvation, the idea that you get hauled out of the water one soul at a time while everyone else treads on their own. No one is saved alone. Joseph put it in words I still cannot get all the way through in a single breath. We without them cannot be made perfect, neither can they without us. The chain comes up whole or it does not come up. I cannot be made complete without my fathers, and my fathers cannot be made complete without me. The living and the dead are bound into a single body that has to be welded back together, link by link, before any part of it can be carried home.
Kirk Rollins20,982 views • 2 months ago
"We are not a creedal people. We have no Nicaea, no list of clauses you must recite to be counted among us. And yet in 1995 the leadership put the doctrine of the family on a single page, signed their names beneath it, and that one page has become our shibboleth. You know the word. At the fords of the Jordan the men of Gilead caught the fleeing Ephraimites by a single sound. Say shibboleth. The ones who could not shape the sh, who said sibboleth, were known in a heartbeat for what they were. A shibboleth is the syllable you cannot fake, the confession that reveals which bank of the river you are standing on. But here is the strange thing about ours, and it took me years to see it. Every other shibboleth in history was a word. A password. Something you said. Ours cannot be said at all. We have no creed to recite, so the test could never live in the mouth. It had to go somewhere the mouth cannot reach. It had to become a life. You do not pronounce this one. You build it, and the building shows. It is a man and a woman who took the covenant and then kept it, through the years and the dullness and the nights they wanted to leave and stayed, for time and for all eternity, while the whole world assured them the vow was a formality and the exits were always open. It is a house with too many children in it by the world's arithmetic, the family that refused to treat a child as a luxury to be deferred and took it instead as the entire point, the cord carried forward into the next generation, the one most of the world has now decided it cannot afford. It is the clean life. The thousand small refusals the world finds quaint or insane. The body kept. The appetites bridled. The Sabbath honored. The long sobriety of a people who say no to a hundred easy things on a Tuesday when no one is watching. These are not three rules. They are the welding itself, done with a body, in time. And none of it can be faked at the ford. You can sign the Proclamation in an afternoon. You cannot fake a marriage of forty years, or a table that loud, or a life that disciplined. The signature is easy. The life is the shibboleth. And so is the nerve to say it out loud, to stand up in the open and say that family is between a man and a woman, plainly, publicly, and where it costs you to say it, and to refuse to file the edge off the word because you would rather be liked, or because you have weighed the persecution and decided your own comfort is worth more than the truth. Anyone can affirm the parts the world still applauds."
Kirk Rollins20,366 views • 2 months ago
Happy Pride Month 🏳️🌈 “There are those who would have us believe in the validity of what they choose to call same-sex marriage. Our hearts reach out to those who struggle with feelings of affinity for the same gender. We remember you before the Lord, we sympathize with you, we regard you as our brothers and our sisters. However, we cannot condone immoral practices on your part any more than we can condone immoral practices on the parts of others”
Kirk Rollins22,526 views • 3 months ago
This is my last post on X, and I wanted the last word to be one that matters. The very first commandment God gave in Eden was to multiply and replenish the earth, and the Restoration placed the family at the burning center of the whole plan: the unit of the celestial kingdom, the reason for the temple, the very shape of God's own life. So when a covenant people quietly stop bearing the next generation, they have not merely made the reasonable lifestyle choice the world applauds. They have begun to set down the first and oldest commandment ever given, and a people who set down the foundation should not wonder why the house begins to sink beneath them. The Book of Mormon shows you how it happens, and it shows you in slow motion, over and over, until no honest reader can miss it. A people are delivered and made prosperous. Prosperity breeds comfort. Comfort breeds forgetting. And the forgetting always wears the same face: they come to love the world and its ease more than the covenant and its cost. They set their hearts on riches and on the praise of men, they grow quietly ashamed of the strict and demanding ways of their fathers, and they trade the weight of the covenant for the lightness of the age. The empty cradle belongs to that same trade. Children are heavy, and faith is heavy, and sacrifice is heavy, and everything the covenant has ever asked is heavy, and a people who have fallen in love with their own comfort will not carry what is heavy for long. So do not mistake what the numbers are telling you. The collapsing birthrate of the Saints is not a sociological curiosity to be smoothed over with better messaging. It is the scriptural pattern arriving on schedule, the visible fever of a covenant people grown too comfortable to bear the weight of their own future. A people who will not have numerous children have, at the deepest level, stopped believing the future is worth filling with their faith, and a people who no longer believe in their own future are already in the early stages of not having one. This is the warning the scriptures have been shouting across the centuries, and we have been too soothed to hear it. And yet the warning has always carried its mercy folded inside it. Every cycle in the Book of Mormon that ended in destruction could have ended in repentance instead, and some did, and the difference was never circumstance. It was never the size of the threat or the strength of the enemy or the hardness of the times. The difference was always one thing only: whether a people, warned, would humble themselves before the comfort finished its work. We have been warned. Your prophets at general conference warned you time and time again. Do not forget their words. The cradle is the warning made visible. The only question left is the one the scriptures have put to every people who ever stood where we now stand. Will we turn, and take up the weight again, and build a future worth being born into. Or will we stay comfortable, and go the way of every comfortable people the record has ever buried. That is my last word.
Kirk Rollins21,096 views • 3 months ago
"Every Saint should know the names of their dead. Not just the famous ones. The unfamous ones. The great-grandmother whose maiden name has been forgotten. The uncle who died of pneumonia in a country no one in your family has visited in three generations. The cousin whose temple work was done by a distant relative who never knew them. These are your people. They are watching. They are interested. They are praying that someone will remember. FamilySearch is not a hobby. It is a sacrament. Every name you find is a person delivered from the obscurity of forgetting. Every ordinance performed is a door opened between worlds. We have made it convenient. Perhaps too convenient, so that we underestimate what we are doing in the temple but the doctrine is unchanged. Elijah came. The hearts of the children must turn to the fathers, or the whole earth will be smitten with a curse. That curse is, among other things, the curse of being unmoored, of belonging to no one, of having no idea who you are because you have no idea who you came from. Reverse it. Sit down with a name. Find them. Take them to the temple. You will not understand until you do it what is actually happening in those rooms."
Kirk Rollins18,229 views • 2 months ago
