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Wait a minute…wasn’t this the whole premise of Smokey and the Bandit?
I was surprised that this was never brought up but when they made the temple go 24/7, what spots were immediately opened up? The 10 PM to 8 AM slots?
I am thinking of the call going out.
Hey, Bob, the temple is going to be shut down for a long time because the government is shutting us down because of the virus. What do you have going on at 2AM next Thursday?
Amazingly, Bob didn’t have a good excuse and was available. What a miracle!
Great work! My only problem was in order to hear your spot-on commentary I had to listen to the voices of Bednar, Wendy and Rusty, three of the cringiest people out there.
Did I misunderstand that the temple workers rescheduled the endowments scheduled after November 13th and booked *new* endowment appointments during the countless 24 hours? Or were those booked appointments rescheduled and called new appointments because of the new hours? I don’t quite understand.
Or that the temple workers had booked *most* of the appointments within 1.5 days (out of 3?) Huh? At my office, that’s not something I’d call a miracle, it would be disappointing.
Lastly, how is God’s hand in any of it? The Mormons I know talk about free-agency but God does miracles, too? If God acts on someone, isn’t God interfering? If God interferes, doesn’t that take away free-agency? Wouldn’t God cease to be God then?
Great analysis of Wendy Nelson’s confabulation. Surprisingly you two missed the Freudian slip when she was asked by Sherry Dew “what it was she had learned in the three years since Nelson has been president”. She said that “prayer works”. Surprisingly we are left to conclude that she did not know this prior to Monson passing away, and only made this discovery since Nelson became president. If she did not know that “prayer works” and that fasting works, and the other things she said in response to the question, it may not be a stretch to conclude that she had not figured out that Prayer Works during her youth and through the time she worked at BYU, and the entire time she has been married to R.M. Nelson prior to his presidency. It is not hard to conclude that if she had not figured prayer works in all her years of marriage, that maybe Pres. Nelson did not know it either, after all as you said , they do live together. It was an interesting way to answer the question, even though these two women had obviously rehearsed the interview before recording the finished product.
My favorite miracle is that slots were open for the ONLY time when a patron could make it. So I get a phone call from the temple, letting me know my endowment now has to be rescheduled and they are only allowed to be open the next few days. My response is, well looking at my schedule the only time I have open in the next three days is 2:30am tomorrow – What??? That is the ONLY open time slot? That is a miracle.
RFM…..This was pure hilarity. Your dry wit suited the topic perfectly. It reminded me of your episode on “faith NOT to be healed.”
This one could have been titled ” Let’s pretend a temple scheduling miracle equates with the raising of Lazurus from the dead” Ah, come on everyone, you know it’s so!
How does Bednar try to pass this dismal list off with a straight face??? Oh right, they don’t come any straighter.
Isn’t Bednar actually an apostle???? Why would he need to milk some uber boring bunch of hapless temple workers for some miracle fodder????
Wouldn’t he have a wealth of his own examples? His rewriting each story in his own conference dialect was so obvious. These people were like cut out paper people. I doubt that any of the stories were even real.
Of course if it was just fabricated for his talk, couldn’t he have put a little zest or thrill in at least one???? He should take a page out of J Holland’s playbook of fabricated stories. At least some of those were interesting , if not true. Or even better, didn’t he pick up any tips from the great Paul Dunn??? That whole thing must have been brutal to sit through…no speed up button for his audience.
I’ll give you a real modern miracle…I can’t believe I survived nearly 60 years of this pablum without losing my mind…I guess I nearly did . LOL
Here’s what I don’t understand about the whole scenario of temple shutdowns from COVID.
Why did the Church make the decision to keep them open 24/7 in light of the fact that the shutdown was motivated by a global pandemic? Why didn’t it shut temples immediately to minimize transmission risk in a vulnerable population?
The local governments had chosen to implement shutdowns based on the best available science at the time. To keep temples open, prior to the governmental-mandated shutdown, seems to be 1) contrary to best medical practices 2) in conformity with the letter of the law but contrary to the spirit of the law.
The best Mormon analogy that I can compare this situation to is for a high schooler to get his/her “sinning” in a year prior to their mission. That way, they can confess, receive repentance, and be in the mission field on schedule, thereby fully complying with the letter of the law.
Through the Church’s behavior, I think it’s really making the statement that its perception of health and transmission risk is superior to that of government experts. Trust Big Brother and everything will work out fine.
I kept waiting for one of you to point out the truly miraculous thing about Bednar’s “miricles”. I can understand why Bednar doesn’t want to mention it but I’m a bit surprised both of you overlooked it. The truly miraculous thing about it is that everyone who pitched in for all those 24 “countless hours” not only worked for free but they paid 10% of their income over the course of many years for the privilege of doing all that wheel spinning and “smiled” all the way through on top of it. Otherwise it was a great podcast!
Bernard example of “miracles” demonstrated the insularity and stupidity of Mormonism.
The point of the lockdowns is to stop virus spread. People were brought together from diverse locations to do something that is hardly urgent
Great presentation by the way! I was highly entertained!
Here’s a temple miracle – as COVID started to shutdown the world 3 months before our wedding day, our sealing on the west coast was cancelled promptly. My husband and I ended up driving 6 hours to another state in March in a rush to get a marriage license so we could be sealed in the closest temple ASAP. After the long drive home (and $300 in travel/license/lodging expenses that crushed our bank account) the church announced all temples would close. I cried endlessly. I thought maybe we were being punished because we slept in a hotel room together the night before, so we could keep from driving 12 hours in one day. We ended up getting married before the temples opened.
Meanwhile, many friends of ours (and aquaintances) continued to be sealed and throw receptions in Utah while we prayed and patiently waited to have our dream wedding day and sealing. It would be 7 months later until we had the opportunity to be sealed. Clearly, miracles are only given to those worthy of them?
Now, many months later, we are beginning our step away from the church. Maybe the miracle was that I did not feel much, if any, of the spirit at the temple sealing that I was anticipating, and seeds of doubt continued to grow? My husband is my soul mate, has been from the beginning – the miracle is that we survived the pain and grief that came from feeling like God was working against us on purpose and preventing us from being sealed – the narrative the church helped write.
Wendy insisting that January was “pre-Covid” is sort of an embarrassing admission of how American-centric this church is.
Lady who prayed for the temple worker to be there….. Um, why would she have uttered such a prayer? Because she knew that lady (probably from her ward) was a temple worker and that it’d be nice if she happened to be working a shift during HER endowment…
People who could only come to the temple at the precise moment that there were openings… Um, why might they have been available during those specific times? Probably because the open shift were between midnight and 4am… and all they had on their schedule was sleeping hahaha
Sorry I’m late to this comment. I just listened to the part recounting the “miracles”. And my first thought was: how many people starved to death in poverty in that same time period while the church sits on $100+billion and the church touts temple workers making calls as a miracle?