QUOTE - WHEN A MAN REFUSES - By: Dr. Ronald E. Cottle

When A Man Refuses
===================
When a man refuses to obey God,
he inevitably obeys the devil.
~Dr. Ronald E. Cottle~

ARTICLE - LEHI SUSHI CHEF JOANS OTSUJI A CONTESTANT ON NEWEST "SURVIVOR"

Lehi sushi chef Jonas Otsuji a contestant on newest 'Survivor'

 

By Rachel Brutsch, Deseret News

Published: Tuesday, Feb. 14 2012

Looking out the window this time of year at Utah's brown-gray landscape could inspire feelings of gloom, particularly for someone who's recently been in, say, Samoa.
It did for Jonas Otsuji, who recently finished participating as a contestant on CBS's "Survivor: One World," and said returning home was "a little depressing" at first.
"It was honestly great to see my family, but I went to the Lehi library like a couple days after and I was sitting in there and I was just like… 'What am I doing? I'm sitting in the Lehi library. What's the purpose of my life?'" he said with a laugh.
It's not that Otsuji has never made the tropical-island-to-Utah leap before. The 37 year old was born and raised in Hawaii and came to Utah for the first time to study photography at Brigham Young University.
Today he lives in Lehi with his wife and three kids and works as a sushi chef, catering and teaching cooking classes at area universities and kitchen stores.
Otsuji has been a "Survivor" fan from the very beginning. "Since Season 1, I've watched every single episode, some of them twice," he said.
"Every season when we'd watch it, my wife would always say 'Man, you'd be so good on that show,' and I was always like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.'"
Otsuji decided to apply to be on "Survivor" when two contestants, Purple Kelly and NaOnka, quit during "Survivor: Nicaragua" during Season 21.
"I was just so worked up. I thought, 'Man, it is just so disrespectful that they would quit,'" Otsuji explained. "(Then) I thought, 'I really have no place to judge these people because I haven't applied, so they're one ahead of me.' That motivated me to make my tape and the rest is history."
His acceptance to be on the show, he said, was surprising in some ways but not in others.
"They've never had a sushi chef on the show before, and you know, I just thought, from a producer's perspective, you know, it'd be interesting. Everybody's interested in sushi chefs for some reason; they're sort of mysterious. … People would be like, 'What? A sushi chef?'"
From his years of watching the show, Otsuji strategized his physical preparation: a lot of running and no weight training.
"I purposely didn't want to bulk up or get too muscular or ripped. I wanted to be in shape, but I didn't want to look in shape," he said. "I ate more food than I normally would so I'd have a little bit of a belly, so they'd be like, 'Oh, just a fat sushi chef, no big deal.'"


He also had his mental strategy figured out, and shares it in his introduction video, "Meet Jonas", on CBS.com:
"As far as lying and manipulating and backstabbing, I have no problem doing that. I feel like if you're playing the game, you've had, what, 23 seasons to figure out what people do. If you're not aware that people backstab and lie and all that, then that's your problem."
Otsuji said it's confusing to him when people ask him how he, as a Mormon, is willing to lie and manipulate on the show.
"Yeah, that's part of the game," he said. "It doesn't mean it's how I am on a day-to-day basis. BYU players don't tackle people on the street; they only do it when they're in the game."
He is one of several members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to have competed on "Survivor." Past LDS players have been Ashlee Ashby, Tyson Apostal, Neleh Dennis and last season's Dawn Meehan and Rick Nelson.
Otsuji served a mission for the LDS Church in the Japan Tokyo North Mission, which he said gave him, a fourth-generation Japanese American, the opportunity to get in touch with his roots and to learn to speak Japanese.
"It was really cool to learn my history, you know, the culture. Because you know I grew up American, so I always wondered what it would have been like to grow up Japanese," he said. "So yeah, it was a little weird, because I felt kind of Japanese, but at the same time I realized I totally wasn't Japanese when I got there."
After returning from filming "Survivor: One World," Otsuji worked on his latest project, Chef War, a cooking competition between two local professional chefs. "It's basically like a live Iron Chef competition, but the audience eats the food and the audience votes for who they think should win," he said.
So far, Otsuji hasn't been recognized in public yet, but that is likely to change when the show begins airing on Wednesday.
This season begins with 18 castaways divided into two tribes of nine: the male Manono Tribe and the female Salani Tribe. They were named after islands in Samoa, where this season was filmed.
The participants on "Survivor: One World," hosted by Jeff Probst, will try their best to "outwit, outplay and outlast" one another through a series of challenges and voting rounds, all while living on the same beach, to be crowned "sole survivor" and win $1 million.
How well Otsuji fared will eventually be revealed after the 24th season of the Emmy-Award winning series kicks off Wednesday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. on CBS Television Network.
For more information about "Survivor: One World," visit www.cbs.com/shows/survivor.

Helping marriages progress is the greatest Valentine's Day gift

By Linda & Richard Eyre, For the Deseret News

• 
  
  Happy Valentine's Day! We think it is one of the great holidays of the year — especially for couples — a chance to express love in a special way to the most important person in our lives.
  It's also a great holiday for jewelers, perfume-makers, chocolatiers and flower shops. We are afraid this column will be of little help to any of these retailers, however, because we are going to suggest a different kind of gift for Feb. 14.
  How about giving the one you love the most a gift that will actually make your love grow even stronger — a gift that will keep on giving to both of you and to your relationship?
  We think that marriage can exist on at least five levels, and that it can progress from one level to the next and to the next. Let us try to name these levels and describe them briefly and then suggest a Valentine's gift that can actually help couples progress from one to the other, climbing the ladder of love.
  Level one is a marriage of convenience. Two people think they are in love so they decide to live together, with or without an actual ceremony.
  Level two is a marriage of contract. Man and wife get married legally — and often religiously — and make at least a pledge of "in sickness and in health" and "till death do us part."
  Level three is a marriage of true commitment. Beyond the formality of a wedding, both parties exclusively and completely commit themselves to each other and give the security of knowing that there will never be any other.
  Level four is a marriage of synergy, where the man and the woman, the yin and the yang, learn to complement and complete each other so well that the total is greater than the sum of its parts.
  Level five is a marriage of oneness in which the commitment and the synergy continue to grow to the point where the couple share everything and where their oneness becomes an entity that supersedes their "individualness." Everything they seek, they seek together, and they are essentially fused into something that swallows up even as it preserves their separate gifts and natures.
  Whatever level you perceive yourself to be on this Valentine's Day, you can progress to the next one if you both want to. And while there are many ways to progress, here is a suggestion that we think works for all who really try it.
  Have a private, marital "Sunday session" for about an hour once a week where you do four things:
  
  
  1. Coordinate your schedules and priorities for the week ahead so that you are together when you need to be and know where each other is when you are not.
  2. Decide on one night during the coming week when you will go on a "date," which might be as complete as dinner and a movie or might be as simple as a little walk or drive together. Think of it as a continuation of your courtship and be willing to pay the price and make the sacrifice of a baby sitter.
  3. Have a private "testimony meeting" or "feelings session" where each of you takes a few minutes to tell the other your feelings about your goals, your relationship concerns, your faith and your love. Listen attentively to the other person when it is his or her turn, and express yourself honestly when it is yours.
  4. Finish with a prayer — in whatever way you are accustomed to praying — with each person being voice for a part of the prayer. Whether or not this is a regular or usual process in your marriage, do it to close this weekly Sunday session.
  Giving this gift to each other for Valentine's Day will take real commitment, and it will take an hour that you may not think you have. But there are 168 hours in a week, and using one of them this way will make the other 167 a lot better. Guaranteed!
  

  The Eyres' three latest books are "The Entitlement Trap," "5 Spiritual Solutions" and "The Three Deceivers." Richard and Linda are New York Times No. 1 best-selling authors who lecture throughout the world on family-related topics. Read Linda Eyre's blog at www.deseretnews.com/blog/81/A-World-of-Good.html and visit the Eyres anytime at www.TheEyres.com or www.valuesparenting.com. Listen to their weekly radio show on Mondays at 4:30 at www.byuradio.org

Book Review: The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks

 

Posted by Shelah | February 13, 2012

 Title: The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith

Author: Joanna Brooks
While Mitt Romney is undoubtedly the most high-profile Mormon in America right now, many might argue that Joanna Brooks is the most high-profile Mormon woman in America today. In addition to her job as chair of the English Department at San Diego State University, she writes for Religion Dispatches and Washington Post, hosts the Ask Mormon Girl website, and blogs at Feminist Mormon Housewives. Last week, the front page of CNN’s website included an in-depth story of Brooks and her family. So it’s really the perfect time for her memoir, The Book of Mormon Girl, to be released.
Brooks divides her life into three basic sections– growing up, early adulthood/disillusionment, and maturation/resolution. In the growing up years, which comprise the bulk of the memoir, she gives us detailed and delightful stories of her Young Women’s leaders and her grandmothers, interesting, devoted, hardworking women who taught her the gospel while hiking mountain passes and doing service. She writes about the cultural dissonance that comes from being “in the world but not of it.” She writes about her adoration for Marie Osmond. All of these chapters are rich with description and detail.
Joanna’s story is one that I’m familiar with because I’ve both heard her tell it and because I recognize parts of it in my friends and myself. Maybe not the growing up in the tract house on the edge of Southern California’s orange groves, but certainly the feeling of being the only LDS girl in my high school, of being a “root beer among cokes” as she puts it. Like Joanna, I was a girl who set my sights on attending BYU and only BYU, and when I arrived there and had to adjust when I realized that it wasn’t as perfect as I thought it would be. I see her story in the story of friends who have felt pain too acute to bear, pain they associate with the church, and have left as a result. And I see her story in friends who have come back from that pain, who want to find a way to live a life of integrity within the religion and culture in which they were raised.
Brooks’s adult chapters, as well as the way she has chosen to live her life publicly, do a lot to dispel the myth that Mormon women are all cut out of the same cloth, with the same thoughts and beliefs. She shows that it’s okay to grieve for the things we wish were different, that we can find our voice, even if we’re most comfortable speaking quietly and politely, and that we can love the church and want to be part of it without embracing every aspect of it. Furthermore, she shows that it’s possible, even fulfilling, to come back and to see raising children in a home where parents come from different faith traditions as a boon and a blessing.
Brooks chose to self-publish her memoir, and while I understand why she did it, and I really do think that she has both an important story to tell and the writing chops to carry it off with remarkable sensitivity and finesse, self-publishing is always a tricky business. The Book of Mormon Girl, is an engrossing and important memoir, but it’s not a perfect book. The child and teen chapters repeat many of the same details, and while the repetition seems to be intentional, the cumulative effect was to give sort of a storybook quality to the setting. Also, as a reader, I am interested in Brooks’s childhood, especially since her teen years seem to be such a reflection of mine, but I’m even more interested in how she went from belief to disillusionment and back again. She does give several chapters to the adult struggles in her life, but I want more. I think it’s a testament to the success of her writing both in The Book of Mormon Girl and in other venues, that we want more of Joanna’s wit and wisdom. And I’m confident that she’ll give it to us.