Christmas Gifts: Knowledge

I thought I would do one post on how grateful I am for the Spirit. That is a big one, not only for the things I know through the Spirit, but also for the comfort.

I could probably spend a whole post on that, but then I started thinking about other things that I do know or feel because of the Spirit. I might sense some of them without having been raised in the church, but others I would not.

So I am grateful to have a Father in Heaven and a Heavenly Mother as well. I know sometimes having difficult parents on Earth makes it hard for people to build relationships with their parents in Heaven.

I can't say there are no issues there, yet I do have that sense of parental love and being watched over. I can see many times when that love has been communicated; communicated often enough to compensate for my difficulty in accepting it. For that I am very grateful.

I am also grateful for the Atonement and the brother who not only loved us enough to do it, but was also able to do it. I don't know that I am am always weighed down with a sense of sin or death, but when those are felt, they can hit hard; I know that those burdens can be lifted.

Believing in the importance of ordinances would be awful without knowing about temples, but we do.

I am also very grateful for being raised believing the Word of Wisdom. 

It is too easy to look around at some of my own issues (and some of the issues with family members) and be very pessimistic that if I had started drinking or using drugs that I could ever stop. Truthfully, other people do amazing jobs of not making those things look tempting, but if you start young enough you may not notice that.

I am better off this way.

No matter how much frustration I have with the way we view chastity through a patriarchal lens, I nonetheless can see that with my sensual nature and my difficulty in feeling loved by people or feeling at all attractive, it would have been easy to make a lot of choices that would be regretted (and would not have fixed the deficit in feeling loved or attractive).

I am grateful for being raised with that belief.

I am grateful for prayer and scriptures. 

I am grateful for the growth I have experienced through church callings.

Finally, I have known many wonderful people through church and had good experiences. 

If that part is a little shaky now, it is only that too many of us have allowed divisiveness and judgment to dull our sense of love, despite multiple scriptures telling us that is the most important thing.

I know it is not too late.

Merry Christmas.

Christmas Gifts: The Temple

I remember once saying that I did not so much like going to the temple as having gone to the temple. 

It is a significant time investment. When you don't have enough time, you feel that. I don't dislike being there, but at least for me it is more about what is accomplished there than the experience of accomplishing it.

I still believe in the importance of that work with my whole heart.

All four of my grandparents were dead before I was born, but I have felt that pull to them and the generations beyond them.

I submitted my first names to the temple when I was in junior high, and I think another two batches before I was out of college. 

When I say I felt a "pull"... it was not just that I could feel caring about them, but I have felt them reaching out to me, asking for their work done. When I would remember things, or I would suddenly get more names from a relative outside of the church -- sometimes ones I had never even known existed -- then I knew that they wanted their work done, and they were providing a way.

I could never not believe that those ordinances are true and important.

In the temple, I have felt that whatever my life was lacking, what I did there had value, and that it was enough.

In the temple, I have felt a happiness that was not my own, but it made me happy to feel their happiness.

I have felt reassurances there, and seen that I was remembered. 

When I was younger, it seemed like I could never go to the temple without finding someone I knew there. That doesn't happen so much now, but it is still a place of connection. 

This is a short one, so I will add one other thought. 

I have said that currently I am reading old conference talks. I just finished April 1990.

I never watched conference then, though I read the church magazines somewhat reliably. That changed shortly after I graduated from high school in June of 1990. Going to a singles ward and going off to college got me more diligent, apparently. I remember loving all of the leaders and knowing the names and faces of the First Presidency and the apostles by the time I was on my mission.

Approaching the October 1990 conference (and seeing some things that aren't so great along the way), I have been wondering how these talks that I know I watched and felt good about will feel. There has been some trepidation.

Then I remembered that I grew to appreciate Brigham Young more after coming to terms with him being racist. 

We have to let people have their imperfections.

It will be okay.

Christmas Gifts: My mission

For these posts, the "gifts" sounds like they are focused on gratitude, but they are also a way of affirming my testimony. Maybe that is my gift to readers, or just that I am grateful for my testimony.

I am grateful for my mission, and know that it was the right thing to do. for which I am also grateful.

That is impressive if we remember this post:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2016/12/sharing-that-i-cant-share.html 

That post is a week shy of being six years old. A lot has happened, but it is still an accurate summary of my feelings. I cannot do missionary work the way things currently are; but at one time it was absolutely what I needed and wanted to do.

Of course I learned and grew a lot on it. Some of that was very painful, and I understand much of it better now. 

Speaking of the passage of time, I am coming up on the 30th anniversary of my departure. That is a lot of water under the bridge, yet some things still feel so close. There are some expressions that are still more natural to me in Lao than in English. 

For gratitude, obviously I am grateful for what I learned. 

I am grateful for the people. I was not really able to maintain the majority of those relationships, but the love was real and I still feel that warmth.

(Not knowing how many of them voted for Trump helps.)

I am also grateful for how clearly I knew that I needed to go.

I had a testimony before, and felt the Spirit in various ways, but I'd never had that "burning in my bosom". 

The process of me being called to go -- when I had never wanted to -- included strong circumstantial hints that I tried to ignore, actually heard words, and then feeling like my whole being was full of fire and light. 

Given my initial attitude, that clarity was probably necessary, but it was also amazing to experience and know. Then, in the process of serving there was so much guidance, and inspiration. A mission is not the only experience where you can have that kind of link, but given the focus, serving as a missionary may invite the Spirit more than most other things you can do.

I remember navigating once when we did not have the full address or the map, but it felt important to go and it actually did end up mattering that we made it. 

I remember translating for Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin in a stake conference, and the words literally flowed through me without any thought. 

I remember knowing the right things to say sometimes that were beyond my own knowledge and language ability.

Of course I have a hard time with the way things are now, but it doesn't change the reality of what was.

Not too long ago I was reading my patriarchal blessing, and it mentioned bringing people into the Kingdom; it said "Kingdom" and not "Church". If I help people with other parts of their journey, maybe that is okay.

Otherwise, I feel like a lot of my path now is calling members to repentance (perfecting the Saints). Am I doing enough with this blog? With my callings and ministering? Well, I try; but I may not have that same clarity all the time now.

I do know that people matter, and I hope that my life reflects that.

Christmas Gifts: Examples of indeterminate quality

I worry sometimes that I sound more negative than I am.

Well, I am pretty negative, but that doesn't change my faith. I understand that it is possible to start losing sight of the good and feel like you are drowning in bad. 

I don't want to lose faith myself, but I also don't think that is likely. I know what my feelings are and what I do to maintain them and my reasons for staying.

I also don't want to be a harmful influence on anyone else, and I have a lot less knowledge about the possibilities there.

Based on my experience, people who stop going to church generally have many reasons; it isn't necessarily likely that I would tip the balance. It is also very important to me that what I do is good, and that it helps instead of hurts.

This is my long way of saying that I want to spend a few posts on things that I am grateful for and things that I know are true.

I will start with the one that might sound the most negative, and yet it isn't.

We have covered before that I both believe Brigham Young was a prophet and that he was racist. 

Also already covered: that God accepts the work and service and attempts of imperfect people, for which we should all be grateful. 

At some point after my talk -- where I had brought up a Brigham Young quote, but also where I have been seeing other things he said -- my testimony of him as a prophet grew stronger. It actually required making peace with him being racist, rather than trying to gloss it over or ignore it.

And you know, I am sure he is not racist now, that he has learned. That doesn't take away from real harm being done because of it, but deeply imperfect people can continue to grow, and sometimes that growth might be easier after the perspective that comes with death and getting away from all the things that society does. It's better to get over those things here, but the odds of perfection being achieved during mortality are low, based on everything we know.

With this also being the Old Testament study year, I have been able to think of some other examples of prophets who were imperfect, and yet they were still prophets.

(Let me just add from the New Testament that I believe Paul was a strong and inspired man who was also a chauvinist and a crank.)

So let us remember that Jonah was disobedient, not just refusing to serve as directed but actually trying to run away from it. Then he was irritated and petty that his work was accepted and Nineveh repented, and that his gourd died. He must have preached powerfully given his impact on the Ninevites, but he clearly had some issues. He was clearly still a prophet.

(Obviously all of these examples are going to take the scriptures at face value.)

Balaam was a prophet, yet he still wanted those riches and tried to ignore not only his inner voice but his donkey's actions.Nonetheless, he was still a prophet, and at least at that point he only blessed Israel. Then greed won and he gave Balak a loophole, which caused much damage and makes Balaam our worst example. However, the person who did all that was still capable of receiving revelation.

Often, people in the Old Testament are pretty horrible, which made it easier to think of this, but my thoughts really started with Noah and the story of him getting drunk after the flood. 

Now, the footnotes say he was not drunk but overcome by the Spirit. That could be true, but getting drunk would be a very human.

We mainly associate Noah with the ark and the lives saved that way, but he was trying to save more lives with his preaching. He faced rejection for years. Having been a missionary, you can still really care about people who don't accept your message. 

They all died.

It is easy to imagine horrible trauma, and wine was not forbidden them. It would be easy to just keep drinking, and that would not make him not a prophet.

I think a mistake we often make is to consider some kinds of sins (especially the sex and drugs ones) as somehow much worse than others, where only really bad people will do them. Lots of very kind people with great integrity will do very human things that they do not happen to believe are sin, or at least very bad sins.

Ultimately, we should all be loving and helping each other. 

That does not mean being silent in the face of bad doctrine or accepting bigotry, but it doesn't have to mean that we hate them, either, or don't consider them capable of any other good.

It's a difficult balance, and I am not sure I always handle it right myself, but I will continue to try, in my own manner of imperfect but willing.