Kirk Rollins
@nicoraytruth • 4,417 subscribers
father, husband, pragmatist, christian thinker
Shorts
Videos
For LDS considering voting for Democrats this cycle. Friendly reminder.
Kirk Rollins32,592 просмотров • 3 дней назад
I have spent years walking into LDS chapels as an outsider, and I will say something that shocks most non Mormons when they hear it. The focus on Jesus Christ in those buildings is stronger than in most churches I have been to. I know the reaction. You only say that because you like them. No. I say it because I have sat in the pews and listened. From the pulpit, from the bishop, from the teenager gripping her talk with shaking hands, from the old man bearing his testimony, from the Primary kids singing that they are trying to be like Jesus, the subject is Jesus. Overwhelmingly. Week after week. And before a single talk is given, the whole congregation takes the sacrament and covenants again to always remember him. When I say the focus is on Jesus, I do not mean his name tacked onto the end of a prayer. I mean his words quoted, his example held up, his life set out as the pattern for how a husband treats his wife, how you treat the neighbor who wronged you, how you carry your cross everyday. I cannot speak to the 60s, 70s, or 80s. I was not in those chapels. But from the 90s to today, in my experience, it is the truth And this is the part every evangelical, Calvinist, and Catholic should sit with. Argue the creeds/metaphysics all you want. Those fights are real. But on how to live like Jesus, there is no dispute. Love God. Love your neighbor. Forgive seventy times seven. Bless those who curse you. Give in secret. Feed the hungry and visit the prisoner. Every Christian tradition reads those words the same way, and the Mormons are preaching them every Sunday.
Kirk Rollins13,510 просмотров • 4 дней назад
Mormons are Christians: the evidence In April 1985, Bruce R. McConkie, an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, stood at the pulpit while cancer was killing him. He used what strength he had left to testify of Christ. Thirteen days later he was dead. He did not spend his last public words on a creed or a program. He spent them on Gethsemane, on the cross, and on the empty tomb. He spoke as a man who knew he would soon stand before the Savior he was describing. “I am one of his witnesses.” Please just watch the video. Then look at how Mormons live, how they serve, and how they worship. Then tell me they are not Christians. They take communion every Sunday and promise to always remember Him. They are baptized in His name, they pray in His name, and His name is on the sign of every chapel they build. Their book was written to convince the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, and its prophets talk of Christ, rejoice in Christ, and preach of Christ to the last page. They send their sons and daughters to the ends of the earth at their own expense to tell strangers about Him. They go hungry once a month so the poor can eat, and when disaster hits, the yellow shirts show up before the cameras do. You can argue with their theology all day, but you cannot argue with a people who have built their entire lives around a Man they have never seen. If that is not Christian, nobody is. -- reality
Kirk Rollins13,866 просмотров • 8 дней назад
Why Mormonism may be true.. a take from a pragmatist
Kirk Rollins202,160 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
The Cosmological Engineer: Mormonism and Simulation Theory
Kirk Rollins159,042 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
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 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
Gordon Hinckley says it best. Please just listen to his prophetic voice.
Kirk Rollins116,063 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
This is real. Just got posted on the official LDS Church Instagram account.
Kirk Rollins77,646 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Why be LDS unless you can pass a temple recommend, partake in the ordinances, and obtain a celestial marriage? If you disagree, please explain to me why. Because this may be the end of the road for me. Life circumstances dictate the final chapter in this journey. Stake President didn't give me a good answer.
Kirk Rollins33,195 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
1. Luke Nichols can lead the young men 2. Maybe my kids should goto BYU-Hawaiii
Kirk Rollins20,098 просмотров • 27 дней назад
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 Rollins78,143 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
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 Rollins53,533 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Of all the Christian denominations, the Catholic Church holds the most logically coherent position on abortion. It rests on a single premise, that the unborn child is a human being with the same claim to life as anyone else, and it follows that premise through every hard case, since nothing about how a child was conceived changes what the child is. The LDS position does not hold together the same way. The LDS Church condemns abortion as a grave sin, yet it allows an exception when the pregnancy results from r*pe, and that exception gives the argument away. A child conceived in r*pe is no less a child, and the father's crime takes nothing from that child's innocence or worth, so either the unborn life is sacred and the exception cannot be justified, or it is not sacred and the general prohibition has lost its stated foundation.
Kirk Rollins14,633 просмотров • 21 дней назад
There is a moment in The Passion of the Christ where I always weep. The film cuts from the road to Golgotha to Mary as a younger woman, watching her boy stumble and go down hard in a courtyard, and she does what every mother who has ever lived does without deciding to. She runs. She is across the ground before the thought has finished forming. Then we are back on the road, and the child she gathered up is falling again, only now he is grown and beaten past recognition and dragging the instrument of his own execution, and she breaks through the crowd and runs to him the same way, the same reflex, thirty years apart and not one degree cooler. The first fall she could catch. The second she cannot. She reaches him and finds that all she can do is be present to a suffering she cannot lift, and that is the deepest and most terrible thing maternal love ever comes to know, the day the running is not enough. And into that exact helplessness he lifts his ruined face and says, See, Mother, I make all things new. He takes the blood and the failure and the thing she cannot stop and tells her it is the raw material of a remaking. The wound is not waste. Her standing there, unable to fix it and refusing to leave, is not the failure of her motherhood but its consummation. Hear the order of the words, because the gospel lives in it: Jesus does not say I make all new things, he says I make all things new, and he will not concede a single thing to the trash. He does not throw this world away and start over on cleaner ground; he takes this one, the ruined bleeding clay still turning on the wheel, and works it into another vessel, because you cannot transfigure what you have discarded, only what you are still holding. Which is why he keeps the blood in his hands, and why, three days later, he keeps the holes in them, passing through a locked door still scarred and making Thomas put his fingers down into the wounds, the proof carried into glory rather than erased from it. So the blood Mary is watching soak into the dirt is not lost there; it soaks into matter itself, into the actual ground of a real hill, and the dirt is included in the promise, because he did not say he makes all people new but all things, and Paul says the whole creation has been groaning like a woman in labor, and the cross is the contraction that finally breaks the water.
Kirk Rollins72,442 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
"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 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
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 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад