Just thought I'd mention

I just wanted to say:

I believe in prophets.

I don't believe that our prophets are infallible. But I also don't believe that they are all-fallible. (Else what is the point of having a prophet?)

I believe that the prophet who leads our church talks to God. And that God talks back.

I believe that following the advice of the prophet will make me happy.

I believe that God knows more than Men, and that if we don't understand something we can ask Him to teach us and we'll get better results than if we use men's reasoning to try to understand.

I believe that the best path to understanding is obeying. And revelation. In that order.

I believe that God can change the way He does things, but until He does, I will be happiest if I follow the things He's said already, not the things I think He should or will say in the future.

Because I believe that this truly is God's church, not man's, I believe that petitioning for change is best done through prayer and private communication rather than publicity.

I believe that God is not trying to confuse us or make things complicated, and therefore we ought to consider taking His servants' words at face value instead of splicing and dicing them to fit....whatever it is we want them to fit.

I have found that the more I learn, the more the gospel makes sense--as it's written, not as I think it should be written.

I believe there is a difference between the revealed words of God and cultural practice and assumption, even within the Church. God's way is smart to follow, cultural practices and assumptions are smart to question. We find God's way in the words of the prophets.

I believe that God's way is infused with love and truth, and that people sacrifice each in the name of upholding the other, and that's both unnecessary and wrong.

I believe in revelation, but I also believe it is a mistake to make assumptions about what will or ought to happen based on a revelation. We tend to want to infer endpoints from the instructions, but it's not a good idea. We also tend to infer the endpoints and then force those inferred endpoints to happen, and that's doubly a bad idea.

I believe that the messiness of history and the human experience compounded by the messiness of recording and interpreting historical records does not make the church untrue or the words of the prophets wrong.

I do not believe that God holds multiple truths and gives them to different people at the same time.

I have personally found it more useful to ask, "What if God's right?" than "What if God's wrong?"

And I've found it important to remember that the Spirit of God is not an emotion, and all thoughts that pop into my mind, all desires I find in my heart, and all dreams that come to me when I sleep or when I'm awake are not necessarily placed there by God.

I believe the point of our existence on earth is for God to help us be remade more completely in His image, not for us to remake Him in ours.

I believe we can no more understand God and His ways than a 10-month-old baby can understand adulthood and the ways of his parents. But we can know He knows more than we do, and that He loves us. So we can trust Him.

It seems to me that it would be important to be so sure in our recognition of God's voice that we can be like Abraham or Nephi, confident to obey when things seem strange because we know the source of the instruction. Barring that kind of familiarity with God's voice (which I suspect few people have), we ought to cling to the voices and words of His prophets.