So I'm a bit stuck. I feel like I have failed at being consistent in doing this blog. I know that nobody really reads it, and that's OK - I'm choosing to understand that someday, some one person will take value from whatever. Yet I feel like I've been lazy. I took time off - years - then come back to it, then get distracted again and take a month off. Good habits are hard to start and easy to stop.
Now I review this upcoming week's Come Follow Me lesson and what stops me is the story of Thomas. He was a disciple of Christ, presumably now an apostle. Yet he wouldn't believe that Christ had been resurrected until he saw it himself. This is one of the 12.
How painful must it be for God to rely on us unreliable humans to get the work done? This is the 12 that will carry the work forward, but the leader just denied Christ (whether he was commanded to is a subject for another day), and another sold Him for the equivalent of a few bucks, and now we have another that only thinks he can get confirmation with his senses?
That's right, the five senses. And some of us might add the brain and its brainpower to that list. If these physical things can convince us, then we're convinced. At least until some other thing happens, and then we're not convinced.
How much easier would it be for everyone involved if we just recognized that the five senses and the brain were good at what they do, but if you want spiritual stuff then you go to the sense for that? That sense would be the spirit we all have and its connection with the Holy Ghost. If we haven't slammed the door, locked it and then deadbolted it 6 times, that door is open for us. That door is how we learn about Christ and what he has planned for us.
I'm no biblical scholar, but I expect that this Thomas story might be the last place he was mentioned in the bible. He likely took the physical miracle that he witnessed and did nothing with it. There were crucified hands, but there was probably no inner change. He testified of Christ - but only perhaps that once. Physical miracles, proofs, and mental arguments won will last - for maybe a day.
The chapter reads about how Jesus blew on the apostles. In their defense, they had just received the Gift of the Holy Ghost, or maybe the blowing was that gift being bestowed. If they had never received that gift before, then it would be unfair to disparage them for not having and using it. Still, the Gift of the Holy Ghost is now given to all men so we can use it. Guidance we gain from God is likely a bit more reliable than what we can deduce, feel, or see. Deductions can be reduced, and physical manifestations are great show and tells, but do little to change us, motivate us, or direct us toward being who we need to be.
It's easy to see how I'm as guilty as anyone. My motivation was to write this so that some person who I presumably will never know or meet may be benefitted. I got a good start, but I let the smallest of physical blocks get in my way. If nobody is cheering me on, it's hard to keep going. The moral of the story for me? To do this because of what it does for one "reader" - me.
