Preach My Gospel: Introduction

I guess this is the easy week. The other thirteen chapters will be longer, and I may do one chapter a week, or break them down into smaller segments. I will see how it goes.

When I have tried reading Preach My Gospel before, I got bogged down. So much is familiar, but this still feels like what I need to do.

As I said, much of it is familiar. The missionary schedule is still pretty much the same as it was back then (1993-1994 for me), and you still have zone meetings and district meetings. Studying is mainly the same, but there are a few differences that I notice.

One is that the other allowed books for reading are different. If I recall correctly, back then it was Jesus The Christ, A Marvelous Work And A Wonder, Articles of Faith, and I think there was one more. It might have been True To The Faith but was definitely not The Miracle Of Forgiveness.

Now it is Jesus The Christ, True To The Faith, Our Heritage, and Our Search For Happiness. Our Heritage is new since then, but I am pretty sure I have read it. I have not read the other two. I may try and do that at some point, and compare.

I suspect the reason for those changes is due to the other change, which is an overall simplification. The direction they always try and send us is to listen more to the Spirit. This makes people nervous, and they look for scriptures, like memorizing things and adding visual aids.

I get that. I have also always been a bit more comfortable going by the Spirit for teaching and speaking, so that helps, but also, it's just so important to be able to do it in your life. You can't prepare for everything and figure out everything on your own, but being able to receive guidance and inspiration makes up for that. It is vital to sometimes know that you need to leave, or make a phone call, or say something, or even study something.

I remember once on my mission during my scripture study, I stopped on the part in the history where Martin Harris takes the characters and translation to Professor Anthon. The professor said the characters were Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldaic, and Arabic, and I realized he was wrong. From The Book of Mormon, we know they were writing in the Hebrew language using Egyptian characters.

And, that does not reflect horribly on Anthon - not like the rest of the story does. Champollion was working on the Rosetta Stone just a few years previously, so this field was really quite new at the time, and that he would not know is understandable.

The point is, shortly after that, someone asked me about it, and I was able to answer. I didn't know why it came to my mind when it did, but I was going to need it. That isn't even flying blind, because I was studying in advance, but it was a general study for general preparedness for teaching, and it worked.