Amanda Betts > Recent Status Updates

There are situations when it is a waste of time to defend yourself before men. The best defense is to appeal to God and keep on working. If people have sincere and significant questions about a project, then by all means answer them honestly and courteously, but if they are only out to slander and obstruct, don't let them slow you down. Don't be distracted. Keep your eyes on the Lord and your hands busy in His work.

"Martin Luther, who was often criticized on every side, said letting God be God is more than half if all true religion!"
William Blaikie said, "It was better to bear the wrong, and leave the rectifying of it in God's hands; for God detests unfair dealing, and when His servants receive it He will look to it and redress it in His own time and way ."

"...hidden beneath the surface of destructive criticism are sinful motivations. Such hateful speech may be fueled by an envious hunger for promotion and prestige (Korah) or an attempt to appease one's conscience by shifting the blame of one's sins to another (Dathan and Abiram)."

The right-to-die movement presents euthanasia as compassionate. But disparaging human life as expendable is not compassionate. The term compassion literally means to "suffer with" True compassion means being willing to suffer on behalf of others, loving them enough to bear the burden of caring for them.

"if we latter-day believers are not able and willing to be faithful in the relatively small trials we face now, there is no reason to think we will have what it takes to endure serious persecution in the future."

"...we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period."

what Russia's young...intellectuals and cultural elite hoped for and expected was the end of autocracy, class division, and religion, and the advent of liberalism, equality, and secularism. What they got instead was dictatorship, gulags and the extermination of free speech and expression. Communists had sold their ideology to gullible optimists as the fullest version of the thing every modern person wanted: progress.