#jesus christ of latter day saints

[hoyas-big-head]

jacobscipio

[msclaritea]

Church and NAACP praised for reducing Black infant mortality – Church News

Church of Jesus Christ and NAACP praised for reducing infant mortality in Black communities

HHS recognizes MyBaby4Me initiative as key to improving Black maternal health outcomes

By Cynthia Clark, for the Church News28 April 2024, 1:59 PM MDT

Members on a panel discuss the faith-based initiative called MyBaby4Me in Washington D.C.

Vickie Terry, executive director of the Memphis Branch of the NAACP, stands at the podium with and Dr. Michael V. Beheshti of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' MyBaby4Me initiative, with others seated on a panel during an event in Washington D.C. on April 12, 2024. Cynthia Clark

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recognized the role of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for implementing a program that has reduced infant mortality rates in Black communities.

The director of the department’s program designed to integrate faith-based organizations in health care recognized and praised the Church at a Washington D.C. event on April 12.

As part of the Church’s partnership with the NAACP, Church leaders met with Vickie Terry, executive director of the Memphis Branch of the NAACP, to brainstorm in 2022.

What the Church and NAACP are doing to help new and expectant mothers in Memphis

She responded that “it disturbs me that [we] are sitting in a zip-code that has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country.” Dr. Michael V. Beheshti, then serving as an Area Seventy in the Church’s North America Southeast Area at the meeting and a practicing physician, determined to learn what he could and see how the Church could help.

The Reverend Dr. Que English leads the HHS’s center for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. At the April 12 event English organized, she highlighted this NAACP-Church partnership emphasizing the role of faith-based organizations..."

REVEREND is a Masonic term.

[lizardho]

I came out to my dad as bisexual at 14 and I was PANICKED because I had a crush on a guy in my Boy Scout troop and thought I was Going To Hell Forever and he was so kind and understanding of my distress, but he had NO idea what bisexuality was. He just said “yeah but you like girls too? This is normal. Everyone is like this.” And I love my dad and trust him with my life to this day and the idea that the concept of bisexuality had not occurred to him had not occurred to me so I put it off.

By 16 though I had a crush on like THREE boys. Three entire boys in my Boy Scout troop. I felt like my sin was slowly advancing, until like an untreated cancer it had become metastatic. I remember bawling my L’il limp-wristed sissy eyes out in his big rumbly truck on the way home from a scout meeting and him telling me that it was OK, that he still loved me if I was gay, but that he knew I wasn’t gay because I still had crushes on women and that meant I was straight. I didn’t quite know how to explain that those felt *~*different*~* and that I felt like I was losing a fight to evil inside me but I again felt comforted by his reassurances and his genuine fatherly love.

At 18 I was like “hey I’m realizing all my friends are going on missions. I don’t wanna do that. Idk how to say that and I don’t have a ‘good enough’ reason to not wanna go.” So I just put it off. Again, my parents were extremely supportive of the information I gave them (I blamed it on perpetually forgetting to start the paperwork.) and one day my mom texted me that she had done the paperwork for me! And that all I needed was to get a physical! So I did that (it was awkward af tbh, my hernia check was done by a trainee doctor and she spent like 3 minutes fishing around my inguinal canals before her attending rescued me) and was sent to Mexico City where I learned that in addition to dipshit himbos with strong hands and scruffy guys with artistic hearts I was REALLY into chubby Latin men with strong personalities who bullied me a little when I lived in Mexico.

I remember my first companion got annoyed with me during an argument and said we were just gonna wrestle and whoever won the wrestling match won the argument (I stg I am dead serious this happened.) I was like…SWEATING when he tore off his tie and threw his white button-down shirt onto the ground (I won btw, don’t ask me how).

I remember one of my companions with this really intense, almost manic energy telling me that he was gonna make sure I was safe in a new area I didn’t know very well. He cooked breakfast for me and we’d go shopping together on P-Days and in the mornings before breakfast he’d jog around and do pull-ups with his shirt off and I’d do anything but look at him because my face would break out in a sweat so intense he’d think I was crying and come over to see if I was OK and somehow make it worse. He let me play D&D with myself in the evenings even though it was against mission rules because he knew how lonely and stressed I was.

I remember one of my companions was a big chubby man with a loud voice and a great sense of humor. He was kind and direct when addressing conflicts with me, and always bragged about how he knew the secrets of women’s minds and it felt like he really did since it almost always boiled down to “Treat Them Like People and Love Them a Lot. Don’t Stop Being A Person For Them. Also Eat Them Out Sloppy Style.” Our P-Day activities sometimes felt like dates, and it seemed like he was more attentive to my emotional state than I was since he was always the first to suggest we slow down our Divinely Mandated, God-Ordained, Super Sacred Work and Wonder to get a snack or check out a Pawn Shop (I love Pawn Shops).

I remember another companion who asked me to bully him every time he did something against his goal of losing weight. It was like he gave me Carte Blanche to take out my crush on him by being a nuisance and I LOVED that. I remember having a breakdown one day after we’d spent the afternoon frantically cleaning our disgusting-barely-habitable mission house to make it look less vile that it was (not our fault imo?) and I started bawling and he pulled me into a hug and he smelled good and he told me he knew it wasn’t just the house and that I was mad at him for being a Huge Dickhead for about a week (true) and that he would work on it. (He’s also a huge chaser but that’s a separate thing.)

I remember one of my companions waking up early (and our schedule is already built for sleep deprivation) to make me a “birthday cake” from knock-off Nutella and bread. He used matches for candles and woke me up, lit the ‘candles,’ pulled them out, then smashed it in my face and took a bunch of pictures while I was still madrugada and disoriented as fuck. He had the same sense of humor as one of my HS crushes and I could push his buttons pretty easily which was so fun.

I came home from my mission and started back at BYU where I became actively and aggressively suicidal. I had a stalker the year I moved up there and my dad’s solution to that was to get me a gun. I know he wouldn’t have bought me a gun if he could have read my mind, but I had a loaded pistol under my bed during a trifecta faith/sexuality/gender crisis and that was not helpful. I remember that the day I decided to kill myself I figured I’d call the BYU CAPS and see if I could get into therapy because it felt like what I was “supposed to do” so I could check my suicide boxes. My therapist was the guy who’d helped me pick a major the year before and was this drop-dead gorgeous Hawaiian man who cried when I told him how I’d been feeling.

A few weeks into therapy I met another stunning man with soft eyes and a scruffy illegal-at-BYU beard he kept pushing his luck with. He was funny, kind, patient, married, and wouldn’t give me the time of day if he knew I was crushing on him. We were in my history of psych class, which was inarguably the worst psych class I have ever had, and we studied together for every assignment and test and I realized that my feelings for him and for all the men I’d already mentioned were in direct conflict with my faith and relationship with God. My already agonizing spiritual conflict became even more wretched and as a result of this plus some other tightly-packed experiences with Mormonisms bullshit, I left the church.

After leaving the church I decided to move back to AZ and transfer to ASU. My mom helped me get a dog since I think it had started to dawn on my family that my mental health was barely getting me through the day, and she knew that we both loved dogs. Madi made my last year at BYU livable while I got my shit together and transferred. In that last year, I went on a date with quite possibly the only semi-openly-out trans person on BYU campus. It was not a great date imo, I was not doing well, but the person I spoke with was fun and fascinating and talked to me about Gender Dysphoria and it really cemented my need to go. To leave and never come back to that fucking school.

I started at ASU a month after my last semester at BYU and within a very short time frame it felt like I was coming back together, like a puzzle magically putting itself together in an environment that wasn’t slowly draining that puzzle’s will to live.

On the 4th of July, the year I started at ASU, I saw a transition timeline photo of a gorgeous happy beautiful happy radiant happy woman and her former Mormon missionary self and I realized the light that was on in her eyes was the light that was off in mine. I looked into transitioning for 3 days, sleeping about 10 hours total during that time. I started talking to other trans people on Reddit (one of whom is now my beautiful fiancée @cintailed) and after about a month of making preparations to be disowned and kicked out, something I was not sure would happen but was ready to go through to Turn On The Lights, I came out to my family and it was amazing. I started HRT a month after that. I secretly dated some dorky guys for about a year while I applied to grad schools. I got into a great grad school for me and my needs. I got FFS. I did my trainings and classes. Me and my fiancée moved in together after some LDR shenanigans. We’ve lived together now for 4 years of basically marital bliss. We have a cat named Grandmother Esmeralda Weatherwax who bites the hell out of my feet about three times a day. My bi-cycle continues to be part of my life but now it’s not as scary. Baby gays in my life have started to look to me for advice. Idk how this all happened so fast. When the years, months, weeks, days, and hours seems to crawl by so slowly now they are rushing past me so fast it’s almost bewildering. Whereas before I felt like I was living on borrowed time, past my ‘expiration date,’ now it feels like I can Fucking Breathe. I’m training myself to slow down now and it feels worth it to Live In The Moment.

Idk why I wrote this. Idk why these thoughts only seem to come up on Sundays when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. Idk why I’m crying rn or why I feel so happy. I’m gonna post this shit then get on with my dissertation I guess. Read more Terry Pratchett and give yourselves the time you need. Get a pet. Talk to someone. Re-examine the events that brought you here. Be gayer. Love y’all 💕

[heathersdesk]

There are a lot of adults going to church today who are going to be Pikachu-face surprised when they get to judgment and are handed a millstone to place around their necks because of how unsafe they've made this world for children.

[eve-ate-the-right-fruit]

Things that did NOT make me consider leaving the church:

coming out as queer

every time I find out another cool thing about Quakerism

Things that did make me consider leaving the church:

seeing 2 (TWO!) cybertrucks in the temple parking lot

[slaying-one-day-at-a-time]

Any LDS people on the Aro-Ace spectrum willing to share experiences?

Hello!

I am trying to write a research paper on the intersection of Asexuality and Aromanticism when it comes to being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

As an aspec person myself, and an active member, I'd be more than happy to hear any experiences from active and former members alike! I'd like to get as many voices as I can on this project, so I would greatly appreciate anyone willing to share.

[roses-red-and-pink]

Lolol sometimes it’s so funny reading peoples posts about “Mormon” theology that is based on Exmo stories, tradition/culture but not doctrine, and like random statements by some church leader 200 years ago that was not put into doctrine/canonized, or that he was corrected/reprimanded on, and all of us look back on like “well that guy was racist/sexist. Anyways moving on…” like tbh it just makes me laugh. Like I know our theology is a bit different than mainstream Christianity but y’all don’t need to make it sound like we are out here truly believing half the stuff you say about us.

[churchblog]

Every time I feel petty about people talking about how gross and awful Mormons are I want to give them a list of stuff they can't engage with anymore. No more TV, no Mr. Brightside, no hearing aids or certain other medical procedures, no more Doom, no traffic lights, nothing Don Bluth touched, and I could go on. Below is an article with just a fraction of inventions by Mormons. Sorry to break it to you all, but this "regressive cult" has actively contributed to your life for the better, no matter how much you want to pretend it hasn't.

https://www.ldsliving.com/14-things-you-didnt-know-a-latter-day-saint-invented/s/74878

[christiansinternational]

[secret-sageent]

Just got my mission call today!!! I haven’t opened it yet but I can’t stop stimming I am so excited lol

Update!!! I am going to the Tahiti, Papeete mission!!!!!

[tiny-blue-beetles]

Jesus is literally my homie. He’s one of the girls. He’s my good time boy. Old sport. Sweet cheese. Rotten soldier. He’s my dude. He is just a friendly guy

[nottskyler]

According to my LDS Temple Calendar, today is the 128th anniversary of when fasting occurred regularly on the first Sunday of the month. So happy first Sunday fast Sunday day!

[demigodofhoolemere]

Let’s go!

[finn-ickymentalstability]

People who talk about how “how could you believe in the church ever, how did they talk you into getting baptized when you were 8? I NEVER would’ve fallen for that!” Did you believe in the Easter Bunny? The tooth fairy? Santa Clause? All things that are made up but you believed were true even though there were some weird and honestly creepy aspects of it if you look at it now, but you still believed in it and believed in the good parts of those things. Do not blame people for believing in something that they were fully taught was the truth because the people around them were taught it was the truth. Do not criticize a little kid for believing in Santa.

[heathersdesk]

"Do not let them make you feel small."

[bloglizziekamiya]

I’ll be honest guys I’m so tired. I’m so angry. I’m sick of putting everything I have into this country and getting literal poop back.

Right now I feel like Moroni and Mormon, totally betrayed by their society. But I’m trying to channel their spirit. If they could keep going, keep the faith, and not let the world change them when they were literally the last of their kind, then, I hope and pray we can do the same.

We have each other and that’s more than they had. I love all of you. Stay safe.