April 5, 2023: Life in Utah, Impact of Mission Presidents and their wives, General Conference,

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1. Shawn helps us understand the challenges of Utah culture.
2. Our first mission president's wife recently passed away at 91 years old. We don't spend a lot of time talking about this calling in the church, and for her this represented three years of about a 70 year life dedicated to the Lord. Obviously the majority of her impact in her life is on her family and those she served in these other callings for 70 years, But she had a profound impact on me at an important time in my life. What kind of an impact did she have on you in your life as a missionary and your life since a mission?
3. What will you remember most from this general conference? What was your favorite talk? Is there any interesting news?
4. I want to dig in a little deeper on a specific message that I heard in the Sunday morning session. From my perspective, Elder D. Todd Christofferson, Elder Soares, and President Nelson all spoke about contention in political discourse. Were there any tidbits of information that you think are specifically relevant to what we're trying to accomplish here on the latter day lens?

Big Question:

Let’s talk about what it means to listen to the Prophet. Elder Haynie's talk was pretty clear that we should not spend a lot of time nitpicking about whether the Prophet says thus sayeth the Lord when he is giving us counsel. It sounds to me like Elder Haney is teaching us that we should focus on obeying the Prophet and not worrying so much about the context in which the Prophet is speaking. Shawn, I'm going to give you the first word on this because I know that you distinguish between the venue in which a prophet is speaking and whether or not their message gets canonized in terms of doctrine. So I kind of want to hear what you have to say about this. How do you deal with these questions about when the Prophet is teaching doctrine versus when the Prophet is just giving us counsel and how do you use that in your life to guide you into making decisions about what to do and what not to do?