D&C 4

(1) It’s coming. It’s almost here! The final days are upon us, and God will again pour out revelations, will bestow the priesthood upon us, one last time (2) Come and be part of it! Throw all of yourself in it, so that when you die and go before our makers, you can tell them that you did everything you could.

(3) If you want to be chosen, then you are. If you want to be a part of this work, then you are called to it. (4) The time has come to work miracles, to preach the Lord’s word, to bind up the broken hearted and heal the suffering, to build temples and make covenants.

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D&C 3:1-10

You and I must translate these books again. Word by word, line by line, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, God wants the whole thing translated once more, and this time he wants it translated into your native tongue, inflected by your native concerns, and written in your native flesh.

—Adam Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon

It’s a different thing to translate the Doctrine and Covenants. The other books of scripture were written in languages I don’t speak or read (Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, some pidgin developed in the Americas) and they were written thousands of years ago by people who have long since met their maker.

The D&C was written in English. The words I read on a page didn’t cross through hundreds of years of abridgers and translators. They didn’t have men of God, scholars, generals, and kings making decisions about which meaning of each word to prioritize; I read them as they were scrawled by a prophet of God not quite two hundred years ago in my own language.

What, then, is the purpose of Miller-ish translating when the scriptures are already in my “native tongue"? Honestly, it’s much more for me than for you. When I translate the scriptures, I have to think more deeply about what they mean. I chase down rabbit holes after the etymology of “grace,” the evolution of roads as a scriptural metaphor. I comb through wikipedia pages, old dictionaries, theological articles to trying to figure out what these words could mean to me, today, one hundred and ninety years after they were first written.

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3 Nephi 12

(21) It used to be said, “Don’t kill people—people who kill people will be judged by God.” (22) But I’m here to say, you’re all going to be judged by God. That’s inescapable. Because all of you will be angry, all of you will say things that you shouldn’t. All of you will need me.

(23) So remember when you’re coming to me, in prayer, in the temple, in spirit, in death, that you have hurt people too. (24) Before you come, go to them and make things as right as you can, and then come to me, and I will take you in and make right all the things you could not.

(25) When you disagree with someone and you know you’re right, listen to them anyway. Hear the ways that they’re right. Don’t let your conflict spiral, but find ways to the other’s humanity….

(27) People used to say, “Don’t sleep with people you’re not married to.” (28) But I’m here to say that all of you will mess up here too. All of you will feel the hunger of your bodies and will not know what to do with it. You will have to learn how to live in hunger, how to practice intimacy.

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Hosea 6

Hosea 1:1-6

Let's go talk to God. He let us hurt, but He will heal us too. Where we bleed, He will bind. Like Christ, we will wait two days in death, but on the third day He will restore us and raise us to His presence. Let us know the Lord, that we may have knowledge. Like sunrise, His coming is certain. Like rain, He is always on His way. How can God help us when our trust evaporates like dew? God wants us to trust Him more than He wants us to sacrifice, He wants us to know Him more than He wants the worship that comes easy. 

Genesis 1: The First Creation Story

Before the first beginning, God created everything. The world was shapeless, then, dust and water and swirling gravity, a sea of darkness and chaos. The Spirit of God hovered over it all, caressing it.

And God said, "Let there be light," and at Their word light flooded into existence. And God loved the light, and moved it to one side, so that there would still be a place for darkness too. They named the light day and the darkness night.

And it was evening and morning, first day.

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Mosiah 18

If you'll remember, there was a young priest among the priests of King Noah who believed Abinidi and started writing down what he was saying. Which didn't go over super well with the priests of the king, so Alma had to go into hiding and started teaching the people the things that Abinadi said, about getting to live after we die, and redemption and the Atonement. His faith was so strong, he talked about these things like they had already happened; time was collapsed for him.

He taught everyone who would listen to him, but secretly, because this is the kind of thing that would really make the king mad. He taught with power, and lots of people believed him, and they all went down to a place called Mormon, where Alma had been hiding from Noah.

After a few days, there were a lot of people hiding in this thicket listening to Alma talk. And he said, "Look, there's some water right there—if you are ready to carry your brothers and sisters who can't carry themselves and to be carried in your turn, to feel with each other, to laugh and to cry and suffer and rejoice with each other, to testify of God and stand as his witness, even when that's terribly uncomfortable and inconvenient, even when that means that they'll burn you like they burned Abinidai, if you want to do these things so that you can be God's people and children, so that you can be part of his work and become like him--if this is what you want, then in the name of God let's go be baptized. Let's witness to him that we're willing to make him promises and try really hard to keep them, even when we know and he knows that we can't really do that well right now, so that he can send his spirit to us to make us better than we are."

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3 Nephi 17

When Jesus finished talking he looked around again, and saw that they were crying and they wanted him to stay. So he said, "I love you; your hurts are my hurts. Bring me the people who are sick, physically and spiritually and emotionally. Bring them to me, and I'll heal them, because I love you, and because you have the faith to be healed."

And as soon as he said this, the crowd went and found the people who were hurting and struggling, which had to be almost everyone, and brought them to him, and he healed every single one of them. Afterward, everyone who was healed and everyone who was whole bowed before him and worshiped him and gave him love in every way that they knew how.

And he commanded them to bring their kids, so they surrounded him with small children. Just a circle of all the kids, with Jesus in the middle. And when all the kids were there, Jesus asked the crowd to kneel down, so everyone was on the ground with the kids.

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Matthew 5:5-9

Blessed are the people who don't have anything, because I'll give them everything I have.

Blessed are the people who are hurting, because I will send them comfort.

Blessed are the ones who take me at my word, even when they don't know what it means, because they will receive every good thing.

Blessed are the people who hunger for beauty and goodness and love and peace, because they will be filled with those things.

Blessed are the ones who struggle to forgive over and over, and succeed over and over, if only temporarily, because they will be forgiven.

Blessed are the ones with deep kindness, because they will see God's face.

Blessed are the people who get what peace really is and work to have it in their lives and communities, because God will call them His kids.

Blessed are the ones who get called names and have much worse things happen to them because they took on God's name, because good things are coming, and you get to be part of them.

(Loosely) Isaiah 55

Hey, you, the one kind of struggling—come here. I know you don't have anything to give me back, that's OK. Rest here, draw strength, let me feed you and take care of you. Do you need a hug?

Dear one, why are you putting your resources into things that don't make you happy? Why are you spending your energy on things that don't fill you up?

Come here, listen to me, and you will remember what it's like to feel alive and joyful. I will make the same promises with you that I made with those that came before you, and you will be sure of my mercy and tenderness.

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Romans 8

So there are a couple of ways of going through the world: you can and follow after the things you can see and touch or you can try and pick your way after Jesus, even though you can't see or touch Him and the ways that you know Him will feel counterintuitive a lot of the time. Because when Jesus came He brought a new law, one that offered an escape from sin and death, and by this new law, you can feel your way after Him. But to make the law live—we are the life of the law—we have to follow it and fill it, we must walk by faith and hope, following after things we can't see or touch.

Because if you model your life after the things you can see and touch, then that's it, that's all you're becoming, physical and material and tangible. And those aren't bad, God is in those things too. But, like God, you're more than that. You are beyond the touchable, and you have to make place for those unseeable things in you, you have to follow after them to become them. As you fill the law with life, so it fills you with life and peace.

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Jeremiah 29

(These are my favorite scriptures about “living in the world but not of the world.”)

This is what God said to everyone that was forced out of Jerusalem into Babylon:

Build houses and live in them. Plant roots, grow gardens, dig up the vegetable and pick the fruit and eat it, year after year. Get married, and have kids and then marry your kids off and have grandkids and surround yourself with family. Don't stop living just because this is not what you expected, don't lean into the lessness, make it more.

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2 Nephi

Everthing must have an opposite, because all existence is dependent on opposition. In minds like ours that are shaped by language and draw lines between things in order to distinguish and understand them, we would never comprehend right without wrong, or good without bad—and we would never see that the opposite of misery is holiness. Without opposites, everything would be just one big ball of being, and our brains wouldn't be able to sort through it. There would be no real life in this reality, no real consciousness, and no real joy. Things would be created, but to no end. They would exist, but would not truly be. And we would never have access to God's power and justice and mercy, we could never see who He is and what we are, we could never become like Him.

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John 1

In the beginning (the very beginning, the Genesis) there was Christ, who was the organizing principle of the universe, reality itself. And He was with God, and was God, but also wasn't, in some confusing ways that people have been disagreeing about for a long time, because it's both somehow. Regardless, everything's being and beginning came through him; nothing was created without him (so every person you meet and particle you breathe is touched by divinity, is stamped with His mark). What He made was life, all life, life now and the possibility for eternal life, and light, all light, physical light and metaphorical light. There was darkness too, but the darkness could not overcome the light. This is a dark story sometimes, so we're going to tell you that upfront. The light wins.

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