Please don’t run away screaming.  Or worse, please don’t roll your eyes and move on to something else… But yes, I am about to quote extensively once again from one of the leaders of the LDS Church.  This is worth your time,  (promise!), and it’s not just here to be a great quote.  It’s not just something that I dug up to plaster here for “scripture Sunday.” It’s not even just something I read, loved, and wanted to share.

Nope.

It’s not just that.

This is here because it is going to change my life.

I’m not even sure exactly how yet, but I feel like…

like…

Oooh!  I know! I know!

I feel very like an ostrich!  Yes!  (No, you goose, it’s not because we both have long twiggy legs.  Sheesh.)

I am an ostrich who had her head unceremoniously jerked out of a nice, cosy hole in the ground.

The sunlight is bright.

I’m a bit disoriented and a bit tipsy.

The world sure is different up here.

And I’m not sure *what* exactly I’m going to do, but life is sure going to be different now that my head isn’t hiding in a hole.

And that is why I must share with you this long excerpt from a much longer speech.  It almost feels… feels…

I’m coming up blank this time for something original so I’ll just use the common old term -

sacrilegious

to chop Elder Bednar’s speech into a few little paragraphs.  Seriously.  (Elder Bednar, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) It’s a great speech.   It’ll take 15 minutes to read it, which in the world of sentence-long status updates and hieroglyphic-like text messages, might as well be an hour.

Except that it’s not.  It’s fifteen minutes and it’s amazing.

So if  you haven’t read his article in this month’s Ensign yet, go on over here and get your head jerked out of its hole.

Or if you’d rather just read the parts that stuck out for me, and a little bit of my commentary, here you go:

Our physical bodies make possible a breadth, a depth, and an intensity of experience that simply could not be obtained in our premortal estate.

[One of my favorite Gospel truths is the knowledge that we all lived as spirits with God before we were born into mortality.  Priceless, and so true!]

President Boyd K. Packer, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, has taught, “Our spirit and our body are combined in such a way that our body becomes an instrument of our mind and the foundation of our character.”³ Thus, our relationships with other people, our capacity to recognize and act in accordance with truth, and our ability to obey the principles and ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ are amplified through our physical bodies. In the classroom of mortality, we experience tenderness, love, kindness, happiness, sorrow, disappointment, pain, and even the challenges of physical limitations in ways that prepare us for eternity. Simply stated, there are lessons we must learn and experiences we must have, as the scriptures describe, “according to the flesh” (1 Nephi 19:6; Alma 7:12–13).

Satan does not have a body, and his eternal progress has been halted. Just as water flowing in a riverbed is stopped by a dam, so the adversary’s eternal progress is thwarted because he does not have a physical body…

Because a physical body is so central to the Father’s plan of happiness and our spiritual development, we should not be surprised that Lucifer seeks to frustrate our progression by tempting us to use our bodies improperly… The very tool he does not have and cannot use is thus the primary target of his attempts to lure us to physical and spiritual destruction…

I raise an apostolic voice of warning about the potentially stifling, suffocating, suppressing, and constraining impact of some kinds of cyberspace interactions and experiences upon our souls. The concerns I raise are not new; they apply equally to other types of media, such as television, movies, and music. But in a cyber world, these challenges are more pervasive and intense. I plead with you to beware of the sense-dulling and spiritually destructive influence of cyberspace technologies that are used to produce high fidelity and that promote degrading and evil purposes.

[he's talking about fidelity as "the similarity between reality and a representation of reality," not faithfulness or other such uses of that word.]

If the adversary cannot entice us to misuse our physical bodies, then one of his most potent tactics is to beguile you and me as embodied spirits to disconnect gradually and physically from things as they really are.

In essence, he encourages us to think and act as if we were in our premortal, unembodied state.

[Whoah!  That's so true!  Being on the internet can be like looking through a window into the world.  We can learn, we can connect, we can share... And it's easy to imagine that the spirit-world is quite a lot like this.  In fact, I have often reflected on this very thing.

[I believe -and this is just MY thinking, not anything doctrinal-  that in heaven we are connected with the people around us in a very real way.  The reason so many of us love social-networking (Facebook, cough cough) here in cyberworld is because it echoes this connection.  Something in our soul longs for it and loves it.  I don't think Elder Bednar is suggesting it's evil. In fact, he explains this clearly several times in his speech.  He's warning us of very real spiritual dangers here.  Man, I love this talk...]

And, if we let him, he can cunningly employ some aspects of modern technology to accomplish his purposes. Please be careful of becoming so immersed and engrossed in pixels, texting, earbuds, twittering, online social networking, and potentially addictive uses of media and the Internet that you fail to recognize the importance of your physical body and miss the richness of person-to-person communication. Beware of digital displays and data in many forms of computer-mediated interaction that can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience.

[close quote]

As Doodle would say,

Wowzers-kah-dowzers!

I really don’t have much to add to this.  Once again, go read it for yourself so you won’t miss all the explaining and expounding he does on this topic.  It’s awesome.

And, once again, I’m not sure exactly how this will play out in the coming days and weeks.  I’m just certain that something will change in a big way.

OH.

And.

I should mention my gratitude to my best friend for mentioning this article when we talked last Friday.  Sad to say, I otherwise may not have taken the time to read a ten-page article.  (That’s how badly I needed to be jerked up into the nice, open air.  When 10-pages is a turnoff… head-to-desk…) Okay, I like to think I would have come around to it eventually.  It just wouldn’t have been soon with everything else going on.

So yes.  Thanks for the heads up.  I needed that.