Hi, I'm Grant

I'm a husband, father, grandfather, CEO and I'm a Mormon

About Me

My wife and I have been married since 1971. We have six children and 21 grandchildren living in 5 states coast to coast. We love family reunions at the beach, and try to find a house to rent big enough for all 35 of us to be under one roof for a week. It's a blast! I am a serial entrepreneur. I have founded or co-founded 4 successful businesses based on innovative technologies. The companies have been acquired by major corporations once we get them up and running. Innovation is my vocational passion. Perseverance is my forte. You can find out more about our family by clicking the link to our blog. Naturally it's all about our forever family!

Why I am a Mormon

I believe faith is non-denominational. People of all religious beliefs will receive the precise reward of their faith that they expect.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints challenges and tests a person's faith to the max. Therefore, the rewards of that faith are correspondingly great. I am a Mormon in a quest for the finest, sweetest, most wonderful state of being for eternity.

How I live my faith

My daily goal is the pursuit of godly virtues. The object of mortality is not to get an X in all the categories of good behavior. The goal is to become the kind of person God is.

Morphing to be like God is not an easy or rapid process. There are constant challenges and affronts to that effort. But I believe that over the years, step by step, lesson by lesson, goodness by goodness we can all become better people - each of us a little bit more like God every day.

He has given us a road map to return to His presence after we leave this life. It is clearly laid out in many examples of the lives of the prophets in the Old Testament and Christ's teaching and life in the New Testament. The pursuit of the quest to become like God is an individual decision. Our success in this regard is the measure of our character and moral fiber.

I love the Book of Mormon. I have read it cover to cover once each year since in finished my mission in Southern California in 1968. To me it is my spiritual IV. Like a medical IV, you never get stuffed or bloated with nourishment. Like saline solution just helps keep your body alive, the Book of Mormon maintains my spiritual life.

Another anchor in my life is the Holy Temple. My wife and I perform sacred ordinances in the temple weekly. In this supremely sacred place, we can worship more deeply on a daily or weekly basis. I cannot imagine living anyplace on the planet without a temple nearby - the void in my life would be unbearable.

We have had our share of trials and adversity. No amount of righteous living entitles someone to skip the chiseling and shaping trials that are the purpose of mortality. Fortunately, we have found that in our ever more difficult adversities of life, we grow closer and closer to knowing our loving Father in Heaven. Not that we would ever seek for trying experiences, but the growth and closeness to God make our challenges very worthwhile.

What do Mormons believe is the purpose of life?

Grant answered...

Our Father in Heaven is the father of our spirits. We lived with him in a place we call the pre-mortal world, or sometimes the pre-existence the former term being more descriptive.
In the pre-mortal world we lived in the presence of our Father in Heaven, and all His other spirit children designated for a mortal life on this earth. Our existence as spirits in the pre-mortal world may have been thousands or millions of years - we don't know - but as we grew and developed there, our loving Father knew us and interacted with us much as our mortal fathers do in the developmental years of children on earth. His knowledge of His pre-mortal children was not limited to just the prophets, such as Jeremiah see Jeremiah 15
Tutored by our Father in the pre-mortal world, our spirits made decisions, exercised faith in Father's teachings, encountered ideological differences with other spirits and had a chance to demonstrate our allegiance and adherence to the plan Father was laying out for us there. This gave him a substantial acquaintance with each of us personally. He knows our personality, our preferences, our strengths, our weaknesses and more than we have yet discovered about our own selves.
But in order for us to grow and progress further than we could as spirits, we needed to add another element to our existence. We needed to see what our spirit could do in a physical environment. We needed to have a physical body added to our spirits to see if our spirit being could handle the appetites, desires and passions that are inherent in a physical body. We yearned for the chance to prove how well we could do.
So our Father set out to create a world where we could dwell for a relatively brief moment compared to eternity and gain a body. Adam and Eve were the first spirits to come here, and began a multi-billion-person posterity in mortality. They were chosen for the pre-mortal valiance in serving God and their fellow spirits in the pre-mortal world. Their assignment here was significant, as recorded in the Old Testament.
And eventually, each of us have waited until it is now our turn in the events of this planet to make our try. This is our chance to see how we can manage the physical stresses, temptations, enticements, choices, decisions, value judgments, faith, repentance and all the other aspects of spiritual growth and development. Our bodies give us a new dimension. Our physical world is our proving ground where we all have a chance to measure our own stature as beings.
To my fellow sojourners on planet earth in the latter days of this mortal place I say congratulations! We have finally gotten our chance. This is our moment in eternity. May we learn to live it with great success in our eternal quests. May we help each other through the many trials and challenges that are inherent in the physical realm, and may our indomitable spirits conquer all that is thrown in our path.
Best wishes to everyone with spiritual testing on planet earth.
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Aileen. answered...

This question started my whole spiritual quest, so it is only most appropriate for me to now answer it.

Mormons believe that we were chosen by the Heavenly Father in the spirit world pre-existence to receive a physical body and to come to Earth to our specific mother and father. We agreed, and we essentially are fighting on Heavenly Father's "side" in the war with Lucifer. It is our spiritual "job" in this world to live a certain way, to use our agency to choose between good and evil, in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ, Heavenly Father's only son, whom He sacrificed to allow for our atonement to allow for our spiritual progression.

Mormons believe that while here on Earth, we should learn and live more like our Heavenly Father. This is our spiritual quest which is accomplished through our choices. We marry and build our own family, and by following the Scriptures and living accordingly, we receive access to the Temples where eternal ordinances are performed individually and together as a family.

We can be with our family forever, after death, joined together in Heaven, with Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father. We have greater peace in this life and eternal joy in the life to come. This is the purpose of our life here.

Before I understood this and became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my life was reasonably happy but devoid of purpose. Something was missing. I felt incomplete.

Now, I have peace. My soul is soothed.

Why do you have 12 Apostles? They were just meant to be around for the time of Jesus Christ, not to be replaced with new apostles.

Garet Mang answered...

Well if Jesus Christ decided to have twelve apostles to minister to the people once he was gone, then why would he change his mind and decide not to have them ever again?
The twelve Apostles are like a pedestal, a foundation, where the church which is a beautiful vase is built upon. (Ephesians 2:19-20) When there was twelve and Juda fell away, it was important to replace that lost leg of the pedestal, so they chose Matthias, to replace Juda so the foundation would continue to be strong.
But when all the apostles where killed off, and rejected. It was like pulling a leg off of the pedestal, leg by leg. once you start taking off almost all of them, it becomes very unstable. because all the legs were torn off, the vase fell. And everyone knows when a vase falls, it shatters. There were still bishops around though, and they tried to piece the vase back together, and made it look very similar to what it once was. but there were still cracks in it and it wasn't perfect. And if you place water in that vase, it's going to leak out of the small cracks. Those cracks are small and simple truths, and authority that was lost. Because even the Bishops had to report to the Apostles before they were killed
But because God loves us and is perfect, he had Jesus Christ work through Joseph Smith (A prophet) and created a new Vase exactly like the one he made before (The Church), and a new pedestal (The Twelve Apostles). Because Jesus Christ church was the way he wanted it, and so it is again.

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Joseph Smith

As is the case throughout history God has communicated to His children through prophets. God used a humble man as a prophet to restore His Church on earth who ultimately died defending His faith.

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