Card of the week: My Holy Day

Verse:  DC, D&C 59:9

Text: “Thou shalt go to the house of prayer and offer up thy sacraments upon my holy day;”

Verse Rule: none
Sacrifice Cost: 1
Markers: Strength
Icons: S

There have been times in my life when I just didn’t want to go to church. I think everyone goes through that a time or two. At those times, I often would try to talk myself into staying home by telling myself that I didn’t have to actually GO to church, I could just stay at home and study on my own, and that would be just as good.  Maybe even better, on a day when the High Councilman was speaking.

Even at the time, I knew that was wrong. I knew I was rationalizing. I knew that I would go back to sleep or get distracted or something and not end up studying.

I also knew that I would miss out on the connectivity, the camaraderie of church. I know that church should be a personal spiritual experience, and we don’t go to just to socialize, but interacting with each other and strengthening each other is a very important thing, too.

I think that’s why we’re commanded, in this verse, to go to church.

Now, this particular verse, in game, isn’t particularly powerful. It only has one icon, Strength, and it has no verse rules. I think it’s very important to include a lot of these kinds of verses in a constructed deck. It’s nice to have cheap verses to fill in a chapter and allow you to close up a book. It’s also good to have sacrificial fodder. If you want to play something really big and cool, it’s good to have small, weak verses to sacrifice to play it. If your hand is filled with power verses, you’ll be less eager to sacrifice any of them.

Seeker’s Quest! It’s the most fun you can have with your scriptures! To get the game, and get in on the fun, go to https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/seeker-s-quest-scripture-mastery-set

Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.

Card of the week: The Sealing Power

Verse:  NT: Matthew 16:19

Text: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven”

Verse Rule: None
Sacrifice Cost: 2
Markers: Wisdom, Priesthood
Icons: W, W, F

This one is interesting to me. I pull these out of my deck box at random, and then start writing. But just this last week, I’ve been musing a lot on how blessed I am to have a wonderful wife to whom I am sealed for time and all eternity.

We were married in 1987 in August (so our anniversary is coming up). We’ve had a wonderfully rocky marriage, especially the first three to five years. There were many times when we were working things out that we were each very upset at each other. And yet, at no time did I ever consider divorce as an option. As we’ve talked, she’s expressed this as well. We were committed to the idea of being committed to each other. We had promised ourselves to each other for eternity, so that meant we had to work out the problems we were facing.

Well, as we did that, it kept getting better and better. Now, we’re looking at our 28th coming up next month! 28 years together! I can’t imagine life without her.

This verse card has a very stunning graphic, I think. I tried to capture the thought of something being both earthly and heavenly at the same time. This arc shot of earth from space fit the bill very nicely, I thought!

Thanks so much, Jodi, for all these terrific years!


Seeker’s Quest! It’s the most fun you can have with your scriptures! To get the game, and get in on the fun, go to https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/seeker-s-quest-scripture-mastery-set

Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.

General Authority Trading Cards

http://www.thebunyion.com/2013/07/17/general-authority-trading-cards-unveiled

I had to chuckle a little when I saw this article. Obviously, from the name of the site, I can tell this is a parody, but it sure is a sweetly done one. A while ago, someone had made some other GA trading cards that looked a lot more like sports cards, and they were pretty cool, too. http://www.nine-moons.com/?p=594

I kind of liked that these new ones were based on Pokemon, both in design, and in the way the rules text was laid out and written. Pokemon is kind of a fun game, and how my kids got introduced to the whole concept of collectible card games. Later came Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic.

What's kind of funny about this is that I had imagined something kinda similar early on in the life of Chapter and Verse. I had thought about a sort of promotional mini-set of, maybe a dozen or so cards that could come out after each conference, based on quotes from the talks. I think it would be cool to be able to intermingle the words of the current prophets with those of the ancient and even the historical Latterday ones.

I think it's really cool to see how fast the stand-out quotes from each conference show up as meme pictures on facebook, as fast as that afternoon.

I thought that there might be copyright and trademark issues involved. Those might get sorted out under either "Fair Use" laws or through negotiation with the church's intellectual reserve. In any case, I thought it was a kind of fun idea!

Check out Mark's other blogs, like Mark's Black Pot - Dutch Oven Cookbooks, and Mo'Boy