Many of us go to the temple today the way Adam and Eve first offered sacrifices—simply because we are commanded, without knowing why. Simple obedience is certainly better than not performing the ordinances at all. But the Lord who sent that angel must have wanted Adam and Eve to know why they performed the ordinances—and I believe He wants us to know why we do.

Alma 8-12

The Lord spoke powerfully about the idea of honor. He said:

President Nelson recently announced a second edition of Preach My Gospel, saying, “It contains some of the best instruction I have ever seen to help people accept the Lord’s invitation to come unto Him.”

This conference has been inspiring and uplifting in so many ways. From the announcement about the new home-study programto the announcement of 12 new temples, this weekend has been incredibly spiritual.

What a sweet testimony from this father: “As the father of Jared, I can identify with some of the fathers we read about in the scriptures,” Dan Tucker wrote in an email to the Church News. “Adam, Noah, Isaac, Lehi, among others, had a lot of heartache to deal with. But the father I can most identify with is Joseph the carpenter. Even though he wasn’t the real father of Jesus, he provided for Him all his life. . . . I can only begin to identify with the heartache that Joseph and Mary must have felt during the last few days of their son’s life.”

If you were driving along in the dark and could see only the turnings into cross streets and the forks in the road, you would be subject to all kinds of directional mistakes. But if you had your GPS and could see it all from above, adjusting your perspective to a mile, to five miles, to 50 miles, to the whole distance from where you are to where you want to go, you could then make all the right turns along the way. The plan of salvation is the big picture, the big map that shows the destination, and the restored gospel is the clearly marked path. And the gospel GPS is so advanced that it allows for U-turns and course corrections so long as we don’t turn it off or tune it out. And like a buddy-tracking application, it also allows us to locate the position of our children and to coordinate the journeys so that we all end up at the same place.

The BYU Ballroom Dance Team have dominated the British Open Ballroom Dance Championships in Blackpool, England for years now. And recently, they just won the Ballroom category of the competition for the 24th time.

“The story began in 1820,” the voice in the headphones exclaimed. A handful of people taking an audio tour of the Church History Museum here over the weekend followed exhibits, from a stained-glass window depicting the first revelation of “14-year-old farm boy” Joseph Smith, to the printing press that produced the first edition of the Book of Mormon in 1830, to the chair that carpenter Brigham Young built before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1832. A few steps forward, the awed museumgoers listened to the words of Parley Pratt, a pioneer ancestor of Mitt Romney, as he imagined the establishment of Zion in Ohio, only to walk a few more feet to inspect the weapons used to chase Mormons from state to state and the death mask of the religion’s murdered founder.

After the death of Lehi, Nephi is warned that Laman and Lemuel will try to take away his life and is told by the Lord to flee with his family.