When the Lord waxes poetic

Having just returned from a doterra event in the Dominican republic, my eyes have been opened just a bit more. While here in Utah I am surrounded by great people who are LDS, I found there great people as well - most of whom are not LDS. What they know about the church is very limited, and simply knowing Julie and me probably doubles what they believe they know about the church.

These are beautiful, amazing, powerful people to be certain. Some of their leaders would have them believe that Joseph Smith, our first prophet in modern days, was nothing more than a huckster. A fraud.

But what I see in Joseph's writings leaves me floored. What a powerful writer! A man who, if he wrote these things himself, did so with 3rd grade education. I compare this to myself. I have a master's degree, and have written almost daily for 25 years. At first it was home inspection reports, then a number of articles for KSL.com. I've written five books, and now, this blog. I have also further polished my language skills with hundreds of podcasts and more hundreds of videos. Yet for all the skills I've developed, I couldn't come close to writing with the power that I read today. Either this huckster was super insanely good, or he was writing under the direction of the greatest author. I think it's the latter. I testify that it is.

Whether the government is that of the United States, China, or others, there are those who are good men who wish only to serve and lift the people they govern. But the question is always: how far does the government go to do this? Can you mandate success or happiness? While I was in China, I quickly came to understand that they were doing the best they could - I just believe they started with some false assumptions about what governing means.

While reading the Lord's take on the subject, the first verse that struck me was D&C 134:4. First off, the Lord is treading an extremely fine line in defining what is the role of government vs the rights of the individual. To misuse any word on such a subject could cause extreme harm, resulting in either oppression and lives lost, or anarchy, and lives lost. To say that this subject is a mine field is an understatement of global proportion. I'll leave most of that reading to whoever wants to look it up for themselves.

But the end of the verse I found to be powerful and poetic - and precise. All those things, done in the same sentences. "...that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the freedom of the soul".

How the clarity and vision of such a statement lifts my soul! Here is the Lord poetically delineating a subject that has been argued in every country, every year, in every college. Here he uses concise words that could not be found so clearly in any of the greatest of schools of learning.

The chapter goes on to explain clearly some other things, like what an organization can do when one of its members errs. Again, the concise clarity, and the correctness of thought, jumps out of the page at me. I hear the Lord's voice speaking directly to me as I read these verses. Men may argue and debate, they may opine and exercise their grey matter. They may illustrate their ability to speak, to think, and to outwit, but in the end, the most gifted of these men cannot hold a candle to the Lord's voice.

And in the end, hopefully we choose to follow the Lord's voice - even when it may differ with the final thoughts of those who claim to be the smartest, most intelligent, or most wise. May we choose the Lord - even when it's unpopular.