Area Seventy Richard N. Holzapfel: comments on recognizing the spirit, shame & pornography and body shaming and modesty

Area Seventy: comments on recognizing the spirit, shame & pornography and body shaming and modesty – powered by Happy Scribe

From that. And something I think that could be done better is teaching us how to recognize the spirit, because that’s so important in our life. And especially going into my future these next ten years. Lehi make so many big decisions. I need to know how to recognize the spirit and how it speaks to me. And it took me a while to learn that. So I think if I could have learned it earlier or even now, I’m still not that good at it. But I think that’s definitely something really important that’s so good.

So we do surveys all the time with missionaries, and the number one request of new missionaries is they wish they had learned how to recognize spirits and show up in the mission field. And all of a sudden, they supposed to be directed and why. They know that their leaders have a testimony. They know their leaders are led by the spirit. They haven’t taught them how to do it. Okay, so that’s a really good insight. Pornography really important. But let’s just be careful here. I want to make sure that we’re careful here.

We don’t want to shame anyone. Okay. Religious communities, particularly conservative religious communities, have a harder time of overcoming pornography addiction than others because of the shame, the things we say. Oh, that’s disgusting. Oh, that’s terrible. And so somebody struggle with it. It just goes deeper and deeper inside. So we got to talk about these without shaming and also body shaming. Okay. We have not done a good job in talking about about issues of modesty. We’ve made women feel like they’re responsible for men’s evil thoughts. And, you know, the Taliban cover women completely and still rape.

Okay, so let’s be careful how we talk to our young men. Young women, particularly young women, stop body shame, and they’re not responsible for other people’s thoughts. So we’ve got to do this in a new way.