thank god for the atomic bomb

Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII that atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War.

Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands--a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese--and you thank god for the atomic bomb."

Winston Churchill told Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to dropping the atomic bomb seemed to have "no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.

James Bradley

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Little, Brown. 2003. 

We hear in the gospel, 'No room in the inn,' and we think Motel 6 and "No Vacancies." But actually Joseph went home. These were his people. So, everyone who said no were probably blood relatives. They were cousins and uncles and there was no room for the shame and disgrace of Joseph's 'fiancée,' big as a house and ready to burst. Tenderness finds room. Church at it's best.

Father Greg Boyle

The Whole Language, The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. Simon & Schuster. 2021. As quoted in Living on the Inside of the Edge by Christian Kimball. Common Consent Press. 2023. p. 291

God loves you

Your growth in Christ will go no further than you settledness, way down deep in your heart, that God loves you. That he has pulled you in to his own deepest heart. His affection for his own never wanes, never sours, never cools. Half-hearted is not who he is. That thing about you that makes you wince most only strengthens his delight in embracing you. At your point of deepest shame and regret, that's where Christ loves you the most. The old Puritan Thomas Goodwin wrote that "Christ is love covered over with flesh." It's who he is. 

Divine love is not calculating and cautious, like ours. The God of the Bible is unrestrained. If we are united to Jesus Christ, our sins do not cause his love to take a hit. Through our sins will make us more miserable, they cause his love to surge forward all the more.  

Dane C. Ortlund

Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners by Dane C. Ortlund. Crossway. 2021. p.75

occasional calls home

Deep need or personal crises motivate some of the most earnest prayers we will ever offer. Sin, fear, anxiety, an unsupportable burden – these drive us, rather than beckon us, to prayer. When we are pressed by great affliction or threatened in our personal life, when tribulation is upon us, we turn to God. All who are acquainted with prayer and who have lived long enough to experience life’s complexities and vicissitudes understand this kind of reaching for the Lord. We know what it is to cry out to God in sorrowing penitence or deep necessity, or perhaps in great gratitude. The spontaneity of these outcryings – these “groaning” of the soul – is normal and natural and issues from a relationship with our Heavenly Father that is intuitively felt, whether or not nurtured or ever acknowledged to self in comfortable seasons. Such occasions are usually not premeditated or prethought or prepared; they issue from our depths, from anguish or despair or shame or of that which in every human is more than human, something that identifies us with a power and spirit far loftier and lovelier than our own, with a caring Father with whom we have part as his beloved children.

But such special times of anxiety or fear or exultation of spirit, sincere and important as they are, are like occasional calls home when our more thoughtful and regular attendance would be welcome, and is expected.



Marion D. Hanks, “Preparation for Prayer,” Prayer. Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, UT. 1978. P.22

anything but godly

Why is lust such a deadly sin? Well, in addition to the completely Spirit-destroying impact it has upon our souls, I think it is a sin because it defiles the highest and holiest relationship God gives us in mortality—the love that a man and a woman have for each other and the desire that couple has to bring children into a family intended to be forever. Someone said once that true love must include the idea of permanence. True love endures. But lust changes as quickly as it can turn a pornographic page or glance at yet another potential object for gratification walking by, male or female. True love we are absolutely giddy about—as I am about Sister Holland; we shout it from the housetops. But lust is characterized by shame and stealth and is almost pathologically clandestine—the later and darker the hour the better, with a double-bolted door just in case. Love makes us instinctively reach out to God and other people. Lust, on the other hand, is anything but godly and celebrates self-indulgence. Love comes with open hands and open heart; lust comes with only an open appetite.


Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "Place No More for the Enemy of My Soul." General Conference, April 2010

A man loses a lot of things
and sometimes finds them again,
but it’s my duty to inform you,
and you’ll do well to remember it,
if once your sense of shame gets lost
it will never again be found.


José Hernández,(La Vuelta de Martín Fierro, part 2 of Martín Fierro [1879], canto 32; bilingual ed., trans. C. E. Ward [1967], 493) as found in Claudio D. Zivic, “After All We Can Do,” Ensign, Nov 2007, 98–99