Light and good stuff

Navigating the scriptures can be hard. I remember reading the scriptures for the first time as an 8th grader. I started my first seminary class and we were all challenged to read the book of Mormon all the way though. Three pages a day. "Shouldn't be hard" the teacher said. Yeah, right! I think by the time we were supposed to be done, I was somewhere in Alma - about 40% finished. Reading scriptures is boring if you're an uninspired teen. It's not like reading Harry Potter.  How could others find it so much easier to read than I found it to be?

Navigating the scriptures can be a task for many. If you don't know what you're looking for and just trying to read the scriptures like a novel, it can be labor. But lately (and this is why I started this blog), I read it looking for easter eggs. Gems. Little shining truths that expand my understanding and allow me to feel like I can see one more star in the sky. One way to look for those is to look for markers. For me, no word makes a better easter egg marker than the word "and". 

It's such an unassuming word - and that's why it's awesome in its use as a marker.

I was in priesthood meeting yesterday, and the lesson was on the general conference talk by Taniela Wakolo. Our teacher was my former home teaching partner, when it was really home teaching. A stellar man. The dude has a few years on him, and every one of those years must have been spent well. He serves when nobody is looking, and his soul runs deep. I admire him much.

So he was teaching, and had a question that seemed to drop off a cliff. He was asking about light and knowledge. He was referencing this talk, and quoted one of our church leaders about light and knowledge. "Why light and knowledge" he asked. Nobody had an answer. I asked a question back to him - what is light and knowledge? He didn't know. Nobody else in the room did either apparently. The conversation went elsewhere then, but I was stuck. He had wanted to consider knowledge and light to be interchangeable, but I knew the Lord doesn't do that. The Lord's language is extremely precise, and if he used both words, then both words were different and important. I knew that here lies an easter egg, and it was up to me to find it. 

What's the difference between light and knowledge? Light and truth? The title of this conference references light and protection. I suspect that a discussion on light and truth goes infinitely deep. I can venture down that hole, but I could never go too far. That one is so deep, it's a personal thing. That's one egg we all have to find ourselves, nobody can or should hand it to you - including and especially me.

But I feel like Light and Knowledge are something I can explore. For me, using your brain to learn spiritual truth is like trying to use your eyes to hear a song. Not the right tool. Like trying to hear someone touching you. 

So light and knowledge? What if knowledge is what we know - it's truths we already have. It's super data. It's some combination of experience, study, and what we've already received from above. It might even be described as the sum total of what we have achieved thus far in life. No matter where that is, it is probably not enough to move forward in life without further guidance from on high.

So that's what light might be. Light is our ability to be guided into tomorrow. Not our present skill set. We might have a huge tool box, but be completely unaware that there is such a thing as a drill, a table saw, or an allen wrench. We might not know because, to date, we've never needed them or been able to use them. 

This is where light comes in. The Lord sees that I really need an allen wrench. Nothing else in my tool box works. He tries to give it to me as I need it, and if I'm open to receiving it, I've got the allen wrench I need. 

Light is like access to the library, or to google. It's access to knowledge much more infinite than I can ever use. It's my Heavenly Father being there, lighting my way, and placing the allen wrench in my pathway, moments before I need it. I still need to be open to seeing it, bend down, pick it up, carry it and use it. Most importantly, I must not reject it.

There is much more to this subject, but as always, this is about as far as I can go. It's a subject that certainly goes a mile deep. I can get to the first two millimeters.

Light and knowledge? Very different. Huge.  

May we read the scriptures looking for gems, may we find our own sign posts indicating where the gems are for us. May we use all the tools that the Lord provided for us as we search for truth. And may we seek earnestly for them.

Lesson 33: Sharing the Gospel

I don't remember when or where it was, but I heard a church leader say something like "The church must be true - if it wasn't, the missionaries would have killed it long ago".

I get that. As a missionary nearly 40 years ago, I saw that some of the missionaries there considered themselves to be on a two year vacation away from mom and dad. The damage they did was regrettable. Even a well meaning missionary, and I'm speaking of myself here, can cause damage. The language in Guatemala is Spanish. I walked past an outdoor preacher once and said in English "Is that so?" Now that alone was definitely not Christ like, but how it got interpreted was worse. He didn't speak english. He spoke spanish and thought I said "Sonso", which means he thought I was calling him an idiot. There was no recovering - I kept moving on. Damage - done.

So there is a little bit of understanding for Jonah. He was definitely a man, and like all of us, was much less of a tool for the Lord than the Lord would have him be. First, he tries to avoid a mission call by leaving the city. Apparently he didn't understand that the Lord was the Lord of more than just that city. The bigger picture was lost on this man - at least in that category.

Next, I find the story interesting. It looks like there is a chiasm in this story, but that's a subject for a different blog. All my life I had heard that a whale swallowed him up and blew him out right next to Ninevah. Not so. The old testament says it was a fish, and it vomited him, 3 days away.  It may have been a whale, but the bible just says it was a fish. The whale thing is "common knowledge", but it's also inaccurate.

So like so many of us, when we get a title, we think we're awesome. We're powerful. We are to be obeyed and feared. And whatever we say goes, because why? We have a title. In his case, he was a messenger of the Lord. To him, that meant that whatever came to his head, and whatever he said, must be backed up by the Lord. It wasn't about relaying the Lord's word to the people, it was about him being powerful. In a way, he misunderstood his role - he considered himself to be the Lord, and figured that if he said it (he had a title, right?) then the Lord had an obligation to make it so.

Credit: Garth Knox - Longroom.com

Now, the purpose of this discussion is not to just beat up on Jonah. It's to get all of us to look at ourselves, and decide how much we fail to understand our roles. Do we expect the Lord to back us when we don't listen to his guidance? Do we let a title of the Lord's trust make us proud? When we get a title, do we then humbly work to enlarge our pipeline with the Lord? Or do we consider it no longer necessary because now we have the title?

This passage is in the scriptures not because Jonah was a problem, but because we all are.

We all have leadership positions. Husband, wife, father, quorum presidency, manager, executive, bishop, nursery leader. It doesn't matter what the position of trust is. What matters is that we must rely on the Lord to guide us. What can't we rely on? We can't rely on ourselves, our intellect, our social circles, philosophical books, social trends, or "common knowledge". And we can't rely on our titles. We must develop that pipeline with the Lord, and do what He commands. And when we really wanted those tens of thousands of people to die so that we could be "right"? When it ruins our day that the Lord doesn't do what we command him to do? That's when we need to check our own souls.

It's not about the title - it never was. The prophets have long said that judgment day won't be about what title we had, it will be about how we lived. For me, that means it's about how well I've developed that pipeline to the Lord. May we seek that relationship. From what little I know about it, it's absolutely worth developing.