“Gee, but it’s great to be back home”

Gee, but it’s great to be back home:
Home is where I want to be.
I’ve been on the road so long, my friend,
And if you came along
I know you couldn’t disagree.

Of course, while I’ve been out and about since the last of April, others have been busy as well.  Including the good folks on what I call the Peterson Obsession Board.  And it doesn’t matter in the slightest degree where I am:

It’s the same old story, yeah.
Everywhere I go,
I get slandered, libeled,
I hear words I never heard in the Bible.

Oh well.

We’ve just returned from our ward’s Sunday services.  It’s good to be in our own congregation again after an absence of eight or nine weeks.

The sacrament meeting was a huge one, since it was simultaneously a missionary homecoming (for a sister who served in Alberta, Canada) and a missionary farewell (for an elder who will be serving in the Philippines).  I believe that we have eight missionaries currently serving from our ward.

It being the fifth Sunday of the month, we had a joint meeting of the elders quorum and the Relief Society in the second hour.  Significantly, the lesson (taught very effectively and interestingly by our neighbor across the street, a CPA and an MBA with a very great deal of experience as a corporate financial officer, overwhelmingly most of it outside of Utah) was about financial prudence, and particularly about avoiding unwise and even fraudulent investments.  The lesson was based on official Church materials, the production of which I can only assume was provoked by the deplorably high incidence of Ponzi schemes and affinity frauds and other such phenomena in Utah.  The frequency of such things seems, in my judgment at least, to represent a vulnerability of Latter-day Saint culture:  We trust each other, which is a good thing.  But our trust offers too-easy and too-tempting targets for bad people, or even, as our teacher stressed, for good but flawed people who have unrealistic dreams and who then become desperate when they find themselves in over their heads.

I suppose that I would rather live in a community with too much trust than in one in which nobody trusts anybody else, but surely there ought to be some middle ground between the two extremes.

***

Not, perhaps, entirely unrelated, here is an interesting perspective from Dr. Jeff Lindsay, a prolific and valued contributor to the Interpreter Foundation who has been living in Shanghai for the past eight years.  He’s seeing Utah with rather fresh eyes, and liking what he sees:

“BYU: A Beautiful Solution for the Needs of Many Families and Students in China”