Welcome to the creative side of week 23, you guys.

Time for the good stuff.

Okay, I've got three good options for you.

There are so many that you could choose from this week, but I'm hoping these

will at least just get you started, help you realize that there are creative

ways to teach everything you find here.

In fact, you could even use the steadfast and immovable one with the rice this week.

There's a whole bunch that are already at your fingertips that

you could use to teach this study.

But I've got three that I think Really fit the bill.

So let me walk you through those.

I'm going to take you through the supplies and a quick introduction of

each one first, and then we'll spend a few minutes in each next so that you

can understand how you might adapt these to whatever your circumstances are.

I'm hoping that these object lessons are usable to families, to grandparents, to

teenagers teaching their own classes, or to kids teaching their older siblings.

I'm trying to keep things simple and easy and really memorable.

Okay, here's your supplies list.

The first one this week, you're going to learn a lot about the pride cycle.

And I, one of the things I don't love about the pride cycle is we tend to teach

it almost like this circular loop that you can't escape from, you know, I just think

there are exit ramps on the pride cycle.

So I like to teach it as a figure eight.

And this is what we're creating in order to teach that this is

a storytelling object lesson.

So you can actually use this as you go through the stories of this week's study,

or you could just use it as a storytelling tool to teach the pride cycle.

I've made it.

basically like a gnome village and then you have all these adorable little

gnomes that will travel through the pride cycle and you'll be able to talk

to your kids about how to exit off the pride cycle because you see it this

week you'll see both you'll see some nephites who loop around the pride cycle

just like we would expect and some who exit and we're going to talk about both

so for that one supplies wise you just need the printable printed on cardstock

ideally and then a piece of cardboard you just don't want like a thick amazon

box cardboard you want something like a cereal box Thickness of cardboard

and then a couple of neodymium magnets.

Those are those small little silver magnets that you can

get at any office supply store.

They're stronger than the black craft ones and they'll work much better.

Okay.

Second one, we're going to talk about Nehor.

Ideally we're talking about priest craft and how our kids can watch for it.

Cause I think it's rampant in our day.

And so we want to be aware of it and then also know how to get away from it.

I think a big part of Understanding how to defeat priestcraft is

learning to look away and we're going to talk all through that.

I don't have anything to hold up for this one because this is a video clip I'm

going to have you watch that will teach you how priestcraft distorts your vision

and how to get back to what is true.

And I'll walk you through that in a second.

Okay, third one.

This one refers back to that episode with the Amlicites where

they choose to mark themselves.

We talked about this a little bit in the questions.

This is when they don't want to be Nephites anymore.

They don't want to be associated with the righteous Nephites.

They want to mark themselves like the Lamanites do, but they don't

want to go all the way over to what the Lamanites do, and they choose to

just put a mark on their foreheads.

And I think it's really interesting to see how that causes separation.

It's they choose to separate from their own people.

They choose to separate from the covenant.

They choose to separate from God.

And that Choice is delightful to Satan.

I think that's his whole goal, is to find ways to get us to separate

from our divine identity, from the love of God, from our fellow men.

He wants separation.

So I thought it would be a good time to bring back the wedge.

I redesigned it this time so that it's applicable for this week's study.

But this object lesson of the wedge, you could teach with the

printable wedge that I give you.

You could fill this with candy and I'm sure it would be awesome.

A huge favorite for your class, but you also, if you're especially in a family

setting, you could go out with your kids and split wood and teach the very

same concept or just hold up a split log and talk about what had to happen

in order for it to be in that state.

So for this one supplies wise, you either just want cardstock and some

treats for the printable, or you could or you want to grab some wood splitting

supplies yourself and take your kids out and show them what it's like.

Either one of those will work.

Grab those supplies and then come on back and I'll show

you how to pull each one off.

Everybody knows that throughout the Book of Mormon you're

going to see the pride cycle.

It loops over and over and over again and I think it's really good to take a week to

talk to your kids about what that means.

Why it happens, how we have that tendency to like flow in

that circle and how we can exit.

Because what I love this week, like I mentioned, is that you can

see two groups of Nephites who choose different paths, right?

One group of Nephite follows that pride cycle.

They get blessings, they get prideful, they start to be disobedient

and that causes pain and loss.

And then they loop into the other side where because of their pain

and loss, they humble themselves.

And then they come closer to God and you just see this cycle.

But you also see some Nephites who Are blessed and have an abundance of

things and choose to give it freely.

It's such a beautiful batch of scriptures.

I laid out for you in the notes, but it talks about how they even, despite the

fact that they have all this abundance, they don't hoard it to themselves.

They don't seem to have this feeling of scarcity that the others do,

and they just give what they can.

They take care of the poor.

They make sure no one is hungry, that everyone has clothes, like

they they care for their brethren.

And I love that piece of the pride cycle.

I think it shows that there's an exit, which is why I love seeing

the pride cycle in the Bible.

an infinity loop.

If you look at the printable, I've designed this so that there are two sides.

There's this good side over here.

That's all the, or over here, sorry.

All the little greenhouses are kind of the positive parts of the pride cycle.

This is when you come to yourself and you choose to be humble.

And then you're, you choose to enjoy the blessings of God.

Like that's on this side.

So where I begin, if you see under the printable, there's some numbers.

And number one is humility.

When you get to humility, you.

are choosing to submit yourself to God and do what he needs you to do,

which is quickly followed by obedience.

And then as you go a little bit further, you gain charity, you take care of your

fellow men, and then you're blessed.

And it's this beautiful cycle, right?

What's hard is the natural tendency in this path is to head over

into this side, into the darker, more reddish little gnome houses.

And that's where you see pride creep in.

You see this in the story several times this week, where

people who are blessed by God.

Because of righteous choices and making covenants with him, start to

take advantage of those blessings and start to separate themselves from

others and see themselves as better than others and they grow in pride.

And when you grow in pride, you start on this other track.

This is when you head towards disobedience.

Selfishness, and then it ends up with pain and loss.

And then because of that pain and loss, you turn back to God, you humble

yourself and you start that cycle again.

What I love helping my kids understand is first I would use this printable

to walk them through all those different steps of the pride cycle

and show them how, yep, this is this natural loop that often happens.

But then I would show them that they don't have to take that course.

And the way you'll do this is with a game.

So you're going to take this printable.

If you want, you could make one for each of the kids in your class or

in your family, and then you play a version of red light, green light,

the same way you would play it in elementary school, but your people

are going to be moving their little.

So in the printable, you're going to find these tiny little gnomes that are

going to travel through the pride cycle.

We picked gnomes because I feel like gnomes are one of those creatures that

can either be like good and nice, or they can be like selfish and greedy.

So that's why I chose gnomes.

But the idea here is that they will practice that pride cycle.

And as they play red light green light, one person stands in front of

the room, they turn their back and say green light, and then you try

to travel through the pride cycle.

And I would tell your kids that every time they pass through that humility.

Little house, that's one point and they're trying to get up to seven points to win.

And so as a person has turned around they're gonna try and move

their person through the pride cycle as quickly as they can.

And then of course when the person turns around and sends red light if they can

see their gnomes moving or can see them on that darker side of the pride cycle, then

they have to go back to the beginning.

They lose their points and they start over.

You can go through the notes and see all the rules to the game.

But the idea is really simple.

If you're caught on the red side of the pride cycle, that

negative side, then you lose.

You lose in that moment and you switch places with the person who's the caller.

What I'm hoping is after a couple rounds of this, you could talk to

your kids about their other option.

If they play that exact same game, and instead of following through the

entire pride cycle, instead of winding their way through, the green and the

red, they could choose to just loop.

You know, if they get through humility and then obedience and

then charity and then blessings, they don't have to head into pride.

What we see in the Nephites this week is they don't go into pride.

A lot of them choose to stay humble and they choose to give of what they can.

They choose to use the charity that they feel and take care

of the people around them.

Essentially what they do is they stay looping over here on the green

and so they're never on the red.

And if your kids play that same game of red light, green light,

and never are on the red, they win.

Right?

That's, that's the promise of the Lord is that if you keep yourself humble, and

even as he blesses you, if you abundantly give to others, you stay on that green

side and you receive an abundance, an abundance of love from your father in

heaven, an abundance of the spirit and the fellowship that you feel with your

fellow men, as you care for each other.

I think that helps us.

And hopefully this silly little gnome object lesson will help your kids get it.

I think this is one of those object lessons that you'll probably

pull out a few times this year.

It's one that you could use over and over again as you study.

As you see people enter the pride cycle, you could say, all right, you guys,

which house are they in right now?

Where are they on the path?

What's going to come next?

And then if you can try to highlight those times when people depart the

normal path and choose to stay righteous.

I think, conversely, you can teach the other.

And there are people who choose to stay in this red zone the whole time, who

never humble themselves before God, and then they just kind of spiral down.

And I think you can teach both throughout the Book of Mormon,

not just with this week's study.

This week we get a little more understanding of priestcraft.

Why it's so risky and so magnetic at times and how we can pull ourselves

away from it and see things clearly.

This is all about Nihor.

You're going to see Nihor in this week's study.

He's the one that teaches that everybody's going to be saved.

Everyone's going to have eternal life and be exalted.

You don't need to worry about being obedient.

You don't need to worry about learning the doctrine of Christ or anything else.

You don't need to worry about covenants or ordinances.

You just need to rest easy knowing God will take care of all of us.

That's his teaching.

And it draws people in.

They are pulled in by his words because it sounds comfortable and easy and safe.

And it's got a lot of allusions back to Satan's strategies in the pre mortal life.

That's a little bit of Nehor.

You can hear Satan's words trickling in to Nehor's ideas.

And it's interesting how it's phrased in this week's study.

You learn a little bit more about what priestcraft is and how it's identified.

It means you're setting yourself up for a light.

To me, what I think is so sinister about priestcraft is that they

almost block the light of the Savior.

They create confusion and darkness by teaching these false doctrines.

And then in that confusion state, they present themselves as a light so that

people are drawn to them rather than drawn to the Savior as they should be.

They put themselves in between.

The people and the Savior.

They also do it for the wrong motives, right?

They don't try to intercede on behalf of the Savior to do God's will.

They do it so that they can get popular, they can get praise, they can get wealth.

All of that is tied up in priestcraft and those should be red flags

for us as we're moving forward.

out and about in this crazy world that we're living in.

So I think you want to teach your kids about that confusion state,

what priestcraft does to our vision.

And this is where the spiral activity comes in.

So I'm going to show you a video.

It'll last maybe 15, 20 seconds or so.

And while it's spinning, you want to look right at the center.

There's a little dot in the middle.

I want you to stare right at that dot.

Try really hard not to look at anything.

anything else in the room.

You just want to focus in on that dot.

After 20 seconds, then I want you to take your eyes and look at an object in

the room, a water bottle that's on the coffee table, a book, even the hand in

front of your face and see what happens.

You will see really quickly that your perspective changes.

You, the water bottle will look warped.

Your hand will look distorted.

Things change.

change in your vision because you've been fixated on this one spinning dot.

The reason I like that for teaching priestcraft is, I feel like that's

what happens when we stop looking at a true light source and instead

look at this one spinning dot.

Twisted one.

Our vision changes.

I think that's what happens with these Nephites.

They weren't bad people.

The ones that will eventually, you know, pull away from their

own families and neighborhoods.

They're not bad people.

They just have a distorted vision.

They've been looking at a false light source and it's distorted their vision.

And so when they look at the world around them, it looks warped.

I'm sure you have people like this around you that, that see the same

beautiful doctrines of the gospel that you see, and they see them differently.

And so I think it's our job to continually look away.

What's powerful about this trick is if you teach your kids to look away.

So if I show you that same 20 second clip and tell you that I want you to look at

that dot here and but then look away.

Like look for two seconds at the spiral and then look away at that water bottle

on the table or watch the spiral for a second and then look away in the

distance at a picture on the wall.

If you look away as often as you can, that spiral doesn't do anything to your vision.

You have normal vision and you can tell that nothing is distorted.

And I think that's what daily discipleship is all about.

I think that's what Amel will teach his people.

He wants them to remember their connections to God.

And I think it's why he asks us to pray always, why we're asked to read our

scriptures daily, to attend the temple regularly, to go to church every Sunday.

It's your chance to look away from those spinning spirals that you see in

the world and get your bearings again.

I don't think we can ever live in a world where we won't see those spirals, and

they won't catch our eye now and then.

But every time we choose to be a disciple of Christ and do what he asks

us to do, we center ourselves again and see what is true and what is real.

And so we don't need to be afraid of all the spirals that are around us.

They're going to be there, but we don't have to be warped by them.

And hopefully this object lesson helps you teach that.

Sometimes when I go to teach youth or adults, I will bring a physical wedge,

like a big, heavy, metal wedge to teach this object lesson because I found no

matter who I'm teaching, the visual clicks, it really helped me the first

time I came to understand it, and I've taught it many times, so I'm hoping

it helps you as well, but I really think sometimes we get so focused

on sin that we forget Satan's goal.

That Satan's goal is not just to get you to sin, but to get you to separate.

He wants you to separate from your connection to God.

He wants you to separate from your divine identity.

He wants you to mark yourselves in some way that separates you

from the people around you.

And I think we can do this in lots of different ways.

Like we talked about in the insights and in the questions, I think this idea of

marking ourselves to show the world that We're not quite as righteous as others.

We, we really do fit in here.

I think we have a tendency to do that just like these Amlicites

did, and it causes separation.

And anytime we separate from God, especially from our understanding

of God, we lose spiritual power.

There's this beautiful talk from Elder Kleben Gant.

This is how he phrased it.

Whenever the adversary cannot persuade, cannot persuade imperfect yet striving

saints such as you to abandon your belief in a personal and loving God, he

employs a vicious campaign to put as much distance as possible between you and God.

The adversary knows that faith in Christ, the kind of faith that produces

a steady stream of tender mercies and even mighty miracles, goes hand in

hand with personal confidence that you are striving to choose the right.

For that reason, He will seek to access your heart, to tell you lies, lies

the Heavenly Father is disappointed in you, that the Atonement is beyond your

reach, there's no point in even trying, that everyone else is better than you,

that you are unworthy, and a thousand variations of that same evil theme.

As long as you allow these voices to chisel away at your soul,

you can't approach the throne of God with real confidence.

Whatever you do, whatever you pray for, whatever hopes for a miracle you

have, there will always be just enough self doubt chipping away at your faith.

Not only your faith in God, but your confidence in God.

in yourself.

Living the gospel in this manner is no fun, nor is it very healthy.

Above all, it is completely unnecessary.

The decision to change is yours, and yours alone.

Elder Klugman Gatt, I think, teaches the risks of becoming separated.

And then he says, if you want to close that gap, the tools are in your hands.

This is where the wedge comes in.

So, what I would do, if you don't have a physical wedge in your house that

you could use to take your kids out.

log splitting.

I mean, for me, that would be so much more memorable than a printable.

So I vote for that option.

If you can, if you can't then use the printable option, but you

want to show what a wedge does.

Just troubleshoot with your kids, talk to them about the purpose of a wedge.

Basically, if I was going to like set this wedge somewhere, I would have

to find a crack in the log, right?

I can't just put it on a perfectly round log.

I have to find one that has a crack in it somewhere.

And I start with this skinny end, because if I can get that skinny end in and

tap it a couple of times, then that.

Separation becomes bigger and bigger.

If I tap it a few more times, it expands.

And then, with one whack, oftentimes I can split the whole log.

And I think this is what Satan does with us as well.

Sin is a wedge.

It is, no matter what our sin is, whether it's pornography, or lying,

or gossiping, or whatever sin it is, he uses that as a wedge to take any

crack in your testimony and Split it.

Break it wide open and make you doubt your connection to God.

Make you doubt in the power of the atonement of Christ.

And the more separated you are The more you feel like you can't get back.

I think that's what Elder Kleppingat was warning about.

So if you look on the wedge, I give you the story of the Amlicites, where

they began by just having different opinions than their neighbors.

And because they couldn't resolve those opinions about whether or

not they should have a King, they turned against their neighbors.

They.

Marked themselves.

They choose to eventually to join forces with the Lamanites and then

they completely Attack their neighbors.

They become this warring Faction that attacks the people that

they used to be close to.

I think you see the wedge throughout this story That's why on the verses this week.

I kind of walk you through the Amlicites splitting that it

starts with this small gap.

And then over the course of those verses, it widens and widens until they crack.

And they just don't, they don't return back.

But my hope is the QR code that's on the other side of the wedge will

help you show your kids how that doesn't have to happen to them, even

if they have divided themselves.

Even if they feel separate from God somehow, there is a beautiful way back.

And I think you see it with this video.

If you follow the QR code, this is a video about a girl who

struggled with pornography.

It tells a little bit about her backstory of how she got into it in the first

place, about her serving a mission and then falling back into those habits of

pornography and coming to an understanding that the atonement of Jesus Christ

infinite and it can reach her and there is no limit to the number of times she can

turn back to God for help and for healing.

And I think that's the story of the Wedge.

No matter how separate you are, no matter how many times you've let the

adversary knock you apart from what you know to be true, you can come back.

The promise of the Wedge.

the power of the atonement of jesus christ is it's like this infinite wood

filler that fills all gaps and closes all wounds and breaks you know closes

every every crack on the surface so that not only do we become whole again but

there are no places for the adversary to get a new wedge in that's what the

atonement of jesus christ offers and i'm hoping having a candy filled printable

wedge to take home with them will help your kids remember that always.

And hopefully if they know that this QR code can link them to a video

that will send some healing to their soul, they'll choose to push back

against this tendency to separate from God and do something better.

See, I told you it was going to be a good week.

All right, you got lots of things at your fingertips.

I hope you get into your scriptures.

If you need extra help, remember there's two big tools available to you.

If you need more detailed notes, you can find those on the website.

If you go to gather.

macmom.

com, subscribers have access not just to the printables, but also to the notes.

And there are lots of notes.

to not just help you understand the scriptures but to tie

them to conference messages.

You probably notice that I really love to pull in quotes from our

leaders into my Come, Follow Me study because I feel like it helps me

understand it and connect it to my day.

So the notes are full of those, you guys.

There's insights notes and creative notes, both of which feature different

quotes from different prophets, apostles, and women leaders of the church

that can guide you in your efforts.

You also can come find me on the live.

So, Monday morning, 10 a.

m.

Mountain Time.

That's when I do the live on the site.

So go to gather.

macmom.

com.

Just go to the events tab and click RSVP for the upcoming live

and you'll be able to join us and be part of the conversation.

And then the last thing I would tell you is if subscriptions aren't your

thing, and I totally get it if they're not, then you can find all these

printables and the instructions for how to pull them off over on my Etsy shop.

So not just this week's printables, but all the ones we've done for the

Book of Mormon so far, and many of them could be used for this week's study.

So head over to the Etsy shop.

You can find the links down below this video, but otherwise I hope you

have everything you need and that you really enjoy this week of study.

It's a big turning point in the history of the Nephites.

They're going to change how they mark time based on what happens this week.

So enjoy it and then come back next week for even more.