Revelation is available to everyone, but God guides His Church through His prophet. The Lord wants me to follow His prophet.

“Moses was very meek.”

I struggle with meekness. Not just the acquisition and practice of it, but the idea of aspiring to and emulating it. I feel a tension between wanting to follow Jesus’s examples and how I’ve come to define and experience meekness. And I think what I wrestle with is not the doctrine itself but the way we have shaped this word.

…

Meekness is not fear. It is not shame. It is not silence or self-erasure. Those are the conditions Adam and Eve felt when they hid from God in the garden, afraid to be seen. Christlike meekness is not a diminished self. It is a self in a state of readiness. We become ready to act, ready to repent, ready to speak up, ready to grow. It is the courage to be seen, the humility to be taught, and the faith to move forward

—Greg Christensen, “Vulnerability, Our Modern Day-Meekness”

Many believers and critics alike have misunderstood Christ’s call to meekness as a call to weakness, to indifference or acquiescence to injustice or to pain. This is a profound distortion of the truth. Christ does not right wrongs like a mighty knight errant, but when we turn to Him in our brokenness, He rewrites the meaning of our story. The facts of our lives do not change, but His power seems to rearrange the furniture of our minds where facts have settled, freeing them from the appearance of inevitability and of fixed meaning.

—George Handley, “Falling into Paradise”

With faith in the Lord, I can have hope for the future.

Jesus brought unfaltering hope into the world quietly. Only those who were already oriented toward Him could see it at first: the magi watching the skies; the shepherds who followed the angelic summons to witness Him in the manger; the imperfect but willing mother who risked her social standing, her marriage, and even her life to bring the Savior into the world. Hope might have felt far away to the families whose babies were killed in Herod’s decree or the followers gathered at the foot of the cross in Golgotha. It might feel far to you as you navigate the bruises and pains of mortality, tangled in situations that feel like they have no solution. But Jesus Christ keeps His promises. We can’t see the way it will all work out quite yet, but we can hope with surety and without shame. The Light has come into the world. Every one of us will fly again.

—Lorren Lemmons, “A Thrill of Hope”

As modeled by Joseph, we Latter-day Saints are called upon to be active participants in shaping the outcome of prophecies. Where prophecy speaks of disasters, we are not, like Jonah, to hope for its fulfillment; we are, rather, called to help avert those disasters, as Jonah did inadvertently. Where prophecy speaks of hopes ahead, we are called to be coworkers with God in actualizing them. Scripture is a script. Reading it actively opens us to performing its best lines and avoiding its worst.

—Don Bradley, “Hope, Fear, & Creation”

If I look to Jesus Christ in faith, He can heal me spiritually. I can look to Jesus Christ.

I feel so at home in Jesus Christ’s gospel, not because he’s wiped my slate clean and made me this perfect, pristine daisy. No, I feel at home because he invites me to use my wounds to aid him in what he does best: heal others. When Jesus appeared to the Nephites in America it was his wounds that made the people shout “Hosanna!” Jesus Christ heals just as much through his wounds as he does through his perfection. He asks each of us to do the same. The vulnerability of others, when they bear their wounds to me, has made me feel welcome and whole. I know that the commission within my patriarchal blessing, the one that urged me to go out and heal, is because I have wounds of my own. This does not make our wounds desirable and we all rightly avoid fresh pain whenever we can. But it does mean that through the pain we inherit, we can better bear the wounds of others, that Christ can heal and that we can help. Connecting with Jesus through our wounds has turned a solitary bitterness to a shared joy as I’ve realized that wounds are what connect us through Christ.

—Louisa Packham, “To Hurt, Heal, and Celebrate It All”

When sin is woundedness, Atonement is radical healing, and the “radical” is very important.

Healing is an everyday, mundane part of our lives—think scraped knees, sunburns, and white blood cells fighting off the latest mutation of the latest virus. But radical healing is a grand, supernatural miracle—think Christ healing the blind man (John 9), the woman with an issue of blood (Luke 8:43–48), or the ten lepers (Luke 17:11–19).

If we used the metaphor of everyday healing to explain the Atonement, it would be very similar to the metaphor of restoration. After all, when an injury or sickness is healed, the injured party has been restored to health. But “radical healing” is about more than mere restoration in the same way that Christ healing the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5) is a greater miracle than the recovery I made after the cold I had last fall.

—Chanel Earl, “Atonement as Radical Healing”

I can follow God’s will, even if others try to persuade me not to.

I believe there is an innate and even sacred desire within each of us to discover our own deep wells of passion, creativity, and self-determination. When we see obedience as the path toward conformity, it remains a perpetual struggle for self-mastery. If we see it instead as the freedom to truly love him as we are loved, it becomes the path toward fuller self-realization. Obedience does not gain us more love from God, but rather more power from his love to free us to do the good in the world we were born to do.

—George B. Handley, “Obedience as Gratitude”

Sometimes in the Church we like to think of ourselves as special or different. I remember learning very early that we are a peculiar people. We are blessed with knowledge, while “the World” sits in darkness. They need us to bring them the truth, to help them change their ways. We are the ones who have something to offer Them. But when I read Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan, I see something different. I see the importance of an outsider perspective. I see an other who has something to give. Maybe we aren’t the only peculiar people. Maybe heaven and earth are both populated by scores of peculiar peoples, each treasured by God, each with special callings that have been informed by their talents, skills, and cultures.

Tribalism is important because it creates Us. It gives us places to feel that irreplaceable sense of belonging. But another paradox of tribalism is that it is just as important because it creates Them. The true lesson of the Good Samaritan story is that They exist not to just be tolerated until They change into Us. They exist separate from Us, and we need them, just as they are.

—Jeanine Bee, “Peculiar Peoples”

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The Lord wants me to become holy. I can feel the Lord’s presence in holy places.

The definition of “holy” as offered by Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom is beautiful in its piercing simplicity: Holiness means imitating God. It’s almost too simple, isn’t it? Holiness means imitating God. But as I contemplate God’s command to dress this garden, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, and the Ecclesiastes charge to do with might, I am struck with clarity of purpose: be a creator.

Milgrom says holiness is “that which humanity is commanded to emulate and approximate.” Revealing the hand of the Creator through our own acts of creation seems like a good step toward approximating this holiness. When I am making, I feel the spark of the divine in me. I feel the memory of learning to mimic my Father as I approximate His ways and seek to be like Him. I relate closely to what famed author Madeleine L’Engle says about her feelings when she listens to music by Johann Sebastian Bach: “Bach’s music points me to wholeness, a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, which we seldom glimpse, but which we are intended to know. It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy, is hale (as in hale and hearty.) If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy.”

Creative work is holy work. It is repairing-to-make-whole work. It is sometimes the only work my hands know to do when all around me feels in chaos and despair.

—Paige Crosland Anderson, “A Careful Mending of the World”

Finding expression in creative forms becomes one of the most direct ways to connect to the divine, including to our Mother. Creative acts are pure manifestations of faith. They are the heartbeat of harmony, pleas for holiness to flow in the land, in our bodies, and through our transformation paths. We weave ideas into new patterns, breathe life into the seemingly lifeless, and live into being stronger and more tender threads of connection. Creative expressions open the mind and spirit to the possibility of transcendent (revelatory) experiences. … In very real ways, we participate in the re-creation of the universe through our individual transformations of intelligence, faith, and presence in the world. Our personal transformations lead ultimately to a shift in collective consciousness, bringing us all closer to wholeness and holiness.

—Kathryn Knight Sonntag, The Mother Tree

The words “heal” and “whole” come from the same ancient root, heilig. That same root gives us our word “holy.” That which is healed and made whole is also made holy. To make something holy is to set it in its proper order, devoted to its highest purpose, to make it most enduringly and intensely real and alive. … So when we read the scriptures and learn about holiness and unholiness, about being poor in spirit, about hungering and thirsting after righteousness, about making peace and giving others grace, about eternal life, about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these phrases aren’t just meaningless religious jargon. These are deeply practical and very real things that lead to life or death. To say that Christ’s spirit is holy, and that you can receive that spirit, is to say that you can learn the sacred art of binding up all broken things, to set things within you and around you on the path toward their highest and most beautiful purpose. This is real.

—Bob Sonntag, “The Sacrifice of All Things”

The Restoration, with its sacralization of the joy of embodied sociality, should give us a feel for the holiness of this humor and the way it promotes faith in a new age of joyous, healing atonement. It should help us see how the Jesus of the Gospels looks forward to a new age of celebration—a miraculous, but also somehow mundane, feast with friends.

—James Egan, “Laughing with Jesus”

If I were to boil down the meaning of Joseph Smith’s restoration to a single aphorism, This is where everything happens might be my best try. This idea was the engine of the early church’s first migrations. As revelation began to flow, the earth under Joseph’s feet became holy ground in widening circles of sacred geography. The remnant of the house of Israel? They’re here, just down the river. New Jerusalem, site of the second coming? Watch this space, coming soon. The garden of Eden, primordial belly button of the world? It’s here too, in Missouri. Eve ate the apple on the same Ozark highland where my robin ate the inchworm.

If you find a touch of the absurd in this, I agree. We’re accustomed to thinking of the sacred as something apart, exalted. And we have good reason: the roots of the word sacred contain the idea of something protected and removed from ordinary settings, everyday experience. Sacred space is an ancient land, a walled garden, or the top of a mountain, the higher the better. But the restoration introduced a low-elevation version of sacred geography. Right here, at ground level, among normal places and events, sacred things happened.

I hear a twinkle in the divine voice as it relocates the high-and-holy to its new rough-and-tumble neighborhood:

A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book! The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county, on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fulness of times! (D&C 128:20-21)

Broome County, a holy land? Is Saul too among the prophets?

As the Restoration unfolded, these geographic circles extended outward with no apparent limit. A general principle came into view, a kind of axiom of the Restoration: the whole world is holy, because it is where we encounter God. In time, Joseph understood that these sacred circles, always widening underfoot, were both geographic and metaphysical. The spirit world? Look around, it’s here. Heaven? Also here, wherever you are. Eternal life? The people and relationships closest to you. For better or for worse, our relational heaven is here and it looks a lot like now, but with the added burden of glory.

—Rosalynde Welch, “Airborne at Low Elevation”

By each expression of faith, by each act of love, by each quest for holiness, by each act of self-healing, we give hope to our creators: hope that we will use the light they have placed within us to dispel the darkness in our lives, that we will use the love they have placed in our hearts to create peace, and to give hope to others by lifting their burdens, by healing their wounds, and by working for justice. Each step we take toward the light, each act of love gives hope to our Heavenly Parents that they can trust us with more light, more love, and more holiness. As Rabbi David Wolpe states, “By each act of love, by each expression of holiness, we give hope to God.”

—Robert A. Rees, “A Perfect Brightness of Hope”

The Lord asks me to make my offerings with a willing heart.

When people’s wealth took the form of crops and livestock, offering an animal to God required one to part with a significant economic asset. To place a bull or flawless lamb on the altar of God, one had to make a difficult choice about a scarce resource. One had to choose God over something else in a meaningful way. In a culture whose most valuable resource is attention, concentrating wholly on God requires precisely the same kind of sacrifice. Where your attention is, there will your heart be also.

—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”

My chronic grief about not being a great musician makes me wonder earnestly about the disconnect between what I think God would like and what I can actually give. It occurs to me sometimes that most of what we bring to the altar is not nearly as valuable as we suppose. The difficulty of figuring out what the Lord wants from us is illustrated in Genesis by Cain’s rejected sacrifice, articulated again in Samuel’s insistence that “to obey is better than sacrifice,” and the psalmist’s recognition that “thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” The Nephites are instructed that their “burnt offerings shall be done away, for I will accept none of your sacrifices and your burnt offerings.” And just before the Saints at Kirtland are asked to give a tithe of money to build the temple, a new kind of sacrifice, they’re reminded that “all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice—yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command—they are accepted of me.”

Perhaps we need to be told exactly what to sacrifice because we aren’t very good at recognizing what is valuable. Maybe Paul’s description of gifts within the body of Christ isn’t just about other people’s gifts that we wrongly think are less worthy than our own, but about our estimation of what it is we ourselves have to offer.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.

Maybe artistic gifts, like all the others, are useful for bringing us to the place where we can offer all that we really have to give—our brokenness, our need, our yearning to know and be known.

—Kristine Haglund, “The Beauty of Holiness”

The word “sacrifice” means literally to make something sacred, to take something mundane and ordinary and to put it to the service of a transcendent and sacred purpose. To give it up, or upward. Those moments when life feels meaningless, purposeless, or arbitrary, or when we feel at war with ourselves, those are moments when the pieces of life are not gathered properly in our own judgment in service of what we believe to be most high.

You have to sacrifice everything you have and everything you are. You have to sacrifice yourself. …

I can imagine each of us in a quiet moment kneeling and offering ourselves to God. And I can imagine God’s response: “Good. I can work with that.” But I can also hear him say “That’s only the beginning. You don’t even know all the parts of yourself, let alone how to sacrifice them.” I’m sorry to say that you will discover these pieces of yourself as they break down, and fail, and when you confront problems you don’t know how to solve. When that happens you have to let things die which have grown old and insufficient; ideas, desires, ways of thinking and understanding, habits, and paradigms, and more.

But the miracle of the cross of Christ is that those things that are given willingly to death upon it will be resurrected. When you choose to give your life as a body for Christ’s spirit, you will find that pieces of yourself will die along the way. But you will also see those pieces resurrected, now filled with God’s spirit and put to their proper use. The perfection that God has in mind for you isn’t a neutered, amputated, lobotomized sterility, where pieces of your spirit and body have been turned off. Christ wants all of you. This will not be a movement toward a uniform cookie-cutter image of pious, bland, sameness. Instead it makes each of us more fully and uniquely and eternally ourselves.

—Bob Sonntag, “The Sacrifice of All Things”

Discipleship happens at the intersection of the requirement that we sacrifice all things and the inevitability of losing all things. As a result, to imagine a life of Christian discipleship you need only imagine a religion that requires you to sacrifice everything in a world that will, regardless, exact the loss of everything.

Imagine, then, treading the path of discipleship and preemptively willing—as an act of love and sacrifice—your own already inevitable loss of all things. Imagine the practice of your religion as the business of willing the end of the world.

What would it look like to willingly give up your life and loved ones and world? What would it look like to give them up and then keep loving them and living with them and caring for them? What would it look like to sacrifice “all things” intentionally rather than just inevitably? How would it change your relationship to life? How would it change your relationship to property? How would it change your relationship to your parents, your spouse, your children? And how, in particular, would this sacrificial gesture utterly transform your relationship to time?

What would it look like to be a disciple of Christ as the world collapses around you?

What does discipleship look like at the end of the world?

—Adam Miller, “Discipleship at the End of the World”

In this conversation, Josh walks us through the pattern of the ancient tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, helping us begin to understand what temple worship and sacrifice looked like for the ancient Israelites. Gaining an understanding of what the temple experience was like anciently has really helped to enrich my relationship with our modern temple. I was struck by both the similarities and the differences in how we relate to the temple today. Josh breaks down the various types of sacrificial rites the Israelites performed and shows how they are more similar to our modern law of sacrifice than we might expect.

These were people who faced the same challenge we face today: how to move beyond outward performance and truly offer our whole heart and soul to the Lord. Josh teaches that, in the end, the only thing we can really offer God is our will. God invites us into the experience of sacrifice and repentance—a journey that both transforms and liberates, a journey back to Eden. And all that is needed to begin is our desire. —Larkin Swain

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

Insights from the Ancient Tabernacle: A conversation with Josh Matson

In this conversation, Josh walks us through the pattern of the ancient tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, helping us begin to understand what temple worship and sacrifice looked like for the ancient Israelites. Gaining an understanding of what the temple experience was like anciently has really helped to enrich my relationship with our modern temple. I wa…

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a month ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Cecelia Proffit

Temple ordinances were given anciently.

What are the differences and similarities between the ancient and modern temple experience? Learn from Matthew Grey in this episode of Sanctuary:

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

Learning the Language of the Ancient Temple: A conversation with Matthew Grey

Matt is a strong believer in developing an understanding of the biblical temple to increase our temple literacy, and he has dedicated most of his life’s work to studying this very thing. This episode felt like a continuation of my previous conversation with Josh Matson. Matt helps us explore more deeply the similarities and differences between the moder…

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14 days ago · Cecelia Proffit

As we leave the temple endowed, anointed just as [the ancient priests] were, with the garment of the holy priesthood, we have a mission to go out into the world just like the priests did, and bring people who are separated from God, who are alienated to God, and help them come back. … We have a role just like the temple priests had in ancient days of welcoming people and helping them be able to be restored themselves.

—Jennifer Lane, “An Embodied Discipleship”

 As people who wear the robes of the holy priesthood, we are playing a part in helping God’s people to be reconciled to our heavenly parents, to Christ. …  Precisely how the Lord is reaching out is through people who have taken the name of Christ upon themselves and who can then go out to the world bearing his name, bringing his love.

—Larkin Swain, “An Embodied Discipleship”

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

An Embodied Discipleship: A conversation with Jennifer C. Lane

This conversation with Jennifer was especially meaningful to me because it explores embodiment, a pillar of my personal spirituality. Jennifer beautifully explains how our ordinances teach us the necessity of embodiment in discipleship. We perform ordinances with our bodies to symbolize that the spiritual journey requires more than intellectual belief—i…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · Cecelia Proffit

 Now that we’ve been clothed and anointed just like the priests were, when we leave the temple, we have a mission, like the priests did, to be a part of helping God’s people be reconciled. And when you make these covenants with God, the purpose of your life transforms, and it becomes about this journey, this great project of reconciliation to God—and not just our reconciliation with God, but with each other, forming those bonds, drawing us closer to each other and building, nurturing, and cultivating this familial relationship with all of humanity.

—Larkin Swain, “A Walk Through the Temple Ordinances”

Hear Jasmin Rappleye explain some of the history and symbolism behind the modern temple initiatory in this episode of Sanctuary:

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

A Walk Through the Temple Ordinances: A conversation with Jasmin Rappleye

As we began preparing to create the Sanctuary podcast, one of our goals was to offer a resource for those preparing to attend the temple for the first time. We wanted to have a straightforward conversation about what you can expect in the endowment ceremony and provide some context to help you begin understanding the purpose behind these sacred rituals…

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a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Cecelia Proffit

Because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, I can be forgiven.

In Alma 34, Amulek teaches that “the Son of God” will offer himself as a “great and last sacrifice” and that “thus he shall bring salvation to all those who shall believe on his name” (Alma 34:14–15). How, though, does this “thus” work? How does Christ’s sacrifice bring salvation to those who believe? How am I saved?

Amulek develops a powerful theory of atonement in this chapter that is unique to the Book of Mormon. Rather than treating Christ’s sacrifice as a way of generating moral influence, ransoming us from the devil, or vicariously appeasing God’s wrath, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as a revelation that satisfies the demands of justice by showing how mercy was—all along, from the foundation of the world—“the whole meaning of the law” (Alma 34:13). Taking God’s law as a sign or type, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as an “epiphany” that redeems by fulfilling and displaying the true meaning of that divine sign.

… Amulek does not treat Christ’s sacrifice as an ad hoc workaround for sinners, a late arriving amendment that is foreign to God’s law or the demands of justice. Rather, Amulek treats Christ’s sacrifice as the “whole” meaning of the law, and Christ’s mercy as the fulfillment of the love that the law itself commands.

—Adam Miller, “The Word Is Mercy”

This is the power of justification. It may look like a simple mathematical equation or a righting of a wrong, but when Christ chose to atone for mankind, he did not atone mathematically; his sacrifice wasn’t about numbers, economics or arithmetic. He atoned infinitely, and his infinite sacrifice brings forth infinite and eternal joy and consolation.

—Chanel Earl, “Atonement as Justification”

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Meet the Early-day Saints Episode 9: Atonement and Grace, with Cecilia M. Peek

One of the most frequently discussed themes in Christian history concerns the relationship between grace, salvation, and human behavior. How does Jesus’s atonement work? How are we saved by grace? What role do human works play? Dr. Cecilia M. Peek takes us back to the early days of Christianity to take a look at these questions again. She also lays out …

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Blair Hodges and Cecilia Peek

God has given me gifts to help with His work.

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The Lord’s covenant people are a treasure to Him.

The greatest heresy in the history of monotheism is a misunderstanding of chosen-ness. It is the assumption that some are chosen for exclusive privilege, when in fact to be chosen by God is to be chosen for loving service. …

There’s this set of dynamic tensions that God says to Abraham. God says, I’ve chosen you to bless you and to be a blessing. I will make you a great nation, but through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed. …

The blessing is not exclusive. It’s instrumental. And that sense of being chosen, that chosen-ness, doesn’t mean that I’m better than anybody else. It means I’ve been chosen because God loves everybody. I have the privilege of trying to be a channel of of God’s love, not to people I’m superior to or separated from, but to people who God loves too.

—Brian McLaren, “Life After Doom”

Sometimes in the Church we like to think of ourselves as special or different. I remember learning very early that we are a peculiar people. We are blessed with knowledge, while “the World” sits in darkness. They need us to bring them the truth, to help them change their ways. We are the ones who have something to offer Them. But when I read Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan, I see something different. I see the importance of an outsider perspective. I see an other who has something to give. Maybe we aren’t the only peculiar people. Maybe heaven and earth are both populated by scores of peculiar peoples, each treasured by God, each with special callings that have been informed by their talents, skills, and cultures.

—Jeanine Bee, “Peculiar Peoples”

When we equate chosenness with deserved blessings, we create a dichotomy where those who aren’t chosen “don’t deserve” blessings. Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming, authors of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, reinforce this conclusion, arguing that chosenness can be “highly problematic in scripture and theology.” They add, “for if there is a chosen then there must be an unchosen. Any theology that would bifurcate and divide God’s children into the favored and unfavored can be a destructive and harmful mindset.” This way of thinking can breed dualistic, hierarchical relationships, leading to delineations of worthiness and unworthiness and potential discrimination in a divided society. Interpreting blessings or prosperity in terms of chosenness disrupts the chance for the beloved community that God is offering as the promise in the land.

…

Ultimately, Christ himself modeled the rejection of privileged prosperity in an act of self-emptying on the cross. As Latter-day Saints, we must courageously dismantle any false notions of deserved prosperity and power, for there is “no real imitation of Christ without humility, poverty of spirit, austerity of life, and genuine charity.”

—Jenny Richards, “The Promised Land”

…While this rabbi was only tangentially speaking about covenants, he reframed them for me. He said that he was sometimes asked by people who were not Jewish, “What makes you so special?” The implication was, “What gives you the arrogance to call yourselves a chosen people?” Latter-day Saints could ask themselves this same question: among the billions of people who have lived on earth, why would God give this unique piece of saving information to just a few favorites? Who made us the teacher’s pet?

The rabbi’s response to this question was simple: God chooses those who choose Him.

This felt like a mic drop moment. It was so basic. Could it be that this was the essence of covenant? Fundamentally, it’s not about reciprocal duties, but rather, reciprocal relationship?

And could it be that at the heart of every covenant we make is this one same truth? It’s not just separate and distinct agreements made at baptism, during the sacrament, and in the temple. It’s not a legal contract with pages of clauses. It’s one promise. It’s one choice. It’s saying yes to gracing. Fundamentally, it’s not making covenants (plural), it’s living in covenant (singular). It’s living in Christ.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

Sacred experiences require preparation.

If you—or someone you love—is preparing to receive their endowment for the first time, this episode of Sanctuary is for you:

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

A Walk Through the Temple Ordinances: A conversation with Jasmin Rappleye

As we began preparing to create the Sanctuary podcast, one of our goals was to offer a resource for those preparing to attend the temple for the first time. We wanted to have a straightforward conversation about what you can expect in the endowment ceremony and provide some context to help you begin understanding the purpose behind these sacred rituals…

Listen now

a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Cecelia Proffit

Obedience to God’s commandments brings blessings. God gives me commandments because He wants me to be happy.

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

The Extraordinary Gift of Life: An exploration of covenants with George Handley

Gosh, I really can’t express how much I loved this conversation with George. It felt like a celebration of life—and an invitation to live and love it more fully. This conversation explores the five covenants we make in the temple, with particular emphasis on the first and the last: obedience and consecration. George shares his personal journey of coming…

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3 months ago · 11 likes · Cecelia Proffit

The ego certainly prefers a spirituality focused on certitude and transactional agreements with God over a spirituality that asks us to love one another in our shared uncertainty and suffering. Why wouldn’t we want control in a fallen world? Obeying the rules in exchange for security is a desire that certainly makes sense. Our impulse to find order and predictability in the midst of disorder and pain is both understandable and deeply human.

But as we endure life’s inevitable losses, our spirituality tends to become one of recognition—a spirituality that perceives the beauty and wonder in life amid the necessary sorrows and hardships. And though our souls can feel a deep order within reality—divine truths we are all subject to—we understand that faith doesn’t grant us certainty or obviate suffering. Rather, it offers us solace, evidence of God’s love in sublime moments, and glimpses of the eternal that anchor us in a world full of loss.  

—Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, “Our Bodies Are Holy Things”

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

An Evolving Relationship with Obedience: A conversation with Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

I was so grateful to have the pleasure to speak with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife for this episode.. This conversation is another exploration of covenants, but from the framework of the stages of development. This episode begins with Jennifer introducing the three stages of development she describes in her work, and from there she helps us get a feel for…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Cecelia Proffit

Making covenants shows my willingness to obey God’s law.

The action of participating in ordinance becomes a way of saying to our Heavenly Father, to the Savior, I want this, I want to be like Christ. We are ritually enacting a willingness. … The Germanic root of the English word, Wille, means to want. So “I’m willing,” says, “I want this.”

—Jennifer Lane in “An Embodied Discipleship,” an episode of Sanctuary

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

An Embodied Discipleship: A conversation with Jennifer C. Lane

This conversation with Jennifer was especially meaningful to me because it explores embodiment, a pillar of my personal spirituality. Jennifer beautifully explains how our ordinances teach us the necessity of embodiment in discipleship. We perform ordinances with our bodies to symbolize that the spiritual journey requires more than intellectual belief—i…

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3 months ago · 10 likes · Cecelia Proffit

This is what I have learned about covenants: You can try for thirty years to keep the promises you made as a child, and have never kept a single one, not perfectly, not even close. You can sink deeper and deeper into an ocean of indebtedness. And yet that same sin and brokenness can save you. If you let it, your failure will force you straight back into the arms of Jesus. He stands above the water, reaching down to pull you up.

And hear this, my boy: You are not drowning. You are being baptized.

And when you stop trying to kick and thrash your way into heaven, you will realize that every bit of you from the tips of your toes to the hairs of your head are awash in the grace of Jesus Christ.

And so young as you are, flawed and proud and hungry and ambitious and imperfect as I have made you, be baptized. Fall backwards into promises so much deeper than your comprehension or abilities. Commit yourself again and again and again to the life of a disciple, the life of a friend and follower of Jesus. Plumb the depths of a relationship that has no bottom. Immerse yourself in covenants. And leave no piece of your soul above the surface.

—Sarah Perkins, “Covenants by Immersion”

Sin is turning away from God; repentance is turning toward Him and away from evil. I will not “turn aside” from God’s ways.

Repentance is the journey of turning to God again and again. We forget to join with God, and then we remember. We think we are right, and then we realize we are wrong. We stop living a lie. We stop telling ourselves stories that keep us stuck. We live with ego-driven, narrow vision, and then, as with a camera lens, we zoom out and see that God was present all along. Our experience and story changes. God offers alternate views, relationships, healings, and ways of being and seeing—over and over.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

The word repent in Hebrew is shuv and it simply means “to turn back.” And what am I turning back to? I’m turning back to Eden. We’re coming back to God’s presence. … Preach nothing but repentance. Preach nothing but turning back to God.

—Josh Matson, in “Insights from the Ancient Tabernacle,” an episode of Sanctuary

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

Insights from the Ancient Tabernacle: A conversation with Josh Matson

In this conversation, Josh walks us through the pattern of the ancient tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, helping us begin to understand what temple worship and sacrifice looked like for the ancient Israelites. Gaining an understanding of what the temple experience was like anciently has really helped to enrich my relationship with our modern temple. I wa…

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a month ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Cecelia Proffit

The Sabbath is a sign. Honoring the Sabbath is a sign of my love for the Lord.

I no longer used the Sabbath merely "to recharge my batteries” for the work week ahead, although recharging was a natural by-product. Instead, I began to use the other days of the week to live towards the Sabbath, where consciousness, gladness, and life had grown more keen. In my stricter rules for the day, I found not confinement but freedom. More precisely: By my chosen confinement (my letting go and fencing off of the mundane), I found myself unshackled from mundane preoccupations and their attendant anxieties.

—Philip Barlow, “Sacred Time”

Theologian Walter Brueggemann called the practice of sabbath an act of resistance. The word conjures French fighters, stylishly sabotaging Nazi infrastructure while smoking Gauloises. Imagining myself in a beret with red lipstick really helps when I attempt to turn off my phone for a day. It’s certainly a more attractive image than the grey, dull associations most of us carry. Sabbath sounds to us like the shop closing early just when we’ve run out of milk. It sounds like restriction. Which it is. But it is also through restriction, liberation.

For most of the week, my value is in what I produce and what I consume. If I’m not careful my main goal in a day becomes being impressive and competent, subtly signaling my status with the things I buy, say and post.

Sabbath is the opposite. It is a line in the sand. Today I am just a person, and a person is beyond price. Sabbath is about valuing, fighting for and fiercely guarding rest.

… For Jews and Christians, the sabbath is not designed to serve work, because love, not work, is our ultimate end. It always moves me that the sabbath command was given directly after the Exodus, to a nation that had until recently been enslaved for generations. There is a tenderness in mandating rest and play for traumatized people who had only ever known enforced labor.

Mandated time to rest seems a foreign notion now. It’s become one of the few clear political intuitions I have: that it shouldn’t be. Breaking time, and people, into ever flexible units of production is one of the strongest drivers of disconnection that we experience. I have come to see sabbath as central for my personal project of connection, with myself, with my family and community and with [God]. It’s a relational reset every week, a bulwark against the instrumentalization of relationships and the commodification of time.

—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Attending to Life”

What was the difference between the two sets of stone tables Moses made?

God's intention in revealing the law was to build a relationship with us, because God wants us close. God wants intimacy with us. So on the second trip up the mountain, God gave Moses a set of things to do that would build a sacred transactional relationship…

—Steve Young, “Two Trips up the Mountain”

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The Lord can do a “great work” in my life.

On the other hand in the Bible and Book of Mormon human beings are presented in the ways that most of us feel, day to day: struggling, frustrated, well-intentioned but flawed, determined but acutely aware of our own frailties. Moses protests that he cannot possibly do what God asks of him. Nephi obsesses about his failures. Mary confesses she cannot possibly imagine how God’s promise to save humanity is possible.

But in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon what we might call “religion” is something that God instigates. In scripture, religion is something that God does rather than something human beings do. Instead, God reaches out. God seeks humanity. The main character of the Bible is not Adam or Moses or Paul; the main character is God. The main character of the Book of Mormon is not Nephi or Alma or Mormon; it is God. The main character in Christianity is not us; it is God. And the point for human beings is not that we need to work harder on personal self-improvement; it is that we need to understand the world of justice and mercy that God is creating around us.

—Matthew Bowman, “Fruit on a Barren Tree”

The Lord can make bitter things sweet.

To be clear, my most foundational theological belief is this: God will never cause or condone suffering. Yet, since we exist as eternal beings in an oppositional universe, this is my secondary and nearly as resolute conviction: Our Heavenly Parents can consecrate suffering they do not cause or condone. Thus, while we are never meant needlessly to remain party to suffering, yet we can always trust that God will raise a phoenix, even from our darkest ashes. That light will make its way into and finally illuminate even what may initially seem to be the loneliest, scariest, and seemingly most impenetrable darkness.

God is light; and light finds a way.

—Tyler Johnson, “This is Grace”

He atoned for the world and yet, when I willingly enter that space I find it’s always one-on-one. The bitter cup he chose not to shrink away from is the totality of all the suffering experienced by humankind. I have found meaning and connection with Christ by visualizing how my current individual experience fits within that eternal totality. He is beside me to experience my moment of suffering with me. There, Jesus shows me how to pass through my mortal experience with dignity and grace, and not shrink from it. I imagine He and I softly clanking our bitter cups together before we take the first sorrowful sip.

—Chey Rasmussen, “Gethsemane in the Temple”

Fortunately, while disobedience temporarily compromises our access to experiences of God’s love or his inspiration, we can never put ourselves entirely beyond their reach. I know in my disobedience I still felt God’s love. Maybe I didn’t call it that, but it was still there in the joy of laughter with friends, in the sounds of seagulls and the smell and sights of a low tide on the Long Island Sound where I lived, the pleasure of music, or in the warmth of a family dinner or a wrestle with my dad. My personal experience with life’s goodness drew me back to God. After all, our very existence here is the fruit of this love. His love is not carefully budgeted; God is a spendthrift of lovingkindness. It falls outside of anything we devise to contain it. It is so abundantly available to us, it takes no more than a glance to find it in the most ordinary experiences or the most ordinary objects.

—George B. Handley, “Obedience as Gratitude”

The Lord offers me daily spiritual nourishment.

Heaven is like manna—it can only be savored on its chosen day because this portion of manna will never exist again. My youngest son will never be eight years, three months, and twenty-one days old again. Soon, he will pass through that imperceptible portal where it is no longer a thing to hold dad’s hand while he drifts to sleep, and, once that has happened, this tableau will be lost for all eternity—to be replaced, forever in an ongoing evolution, with whatever tomorrow’s manna will be, by whatever new tableau I will then need to learn to slow down to savor.

—Tyler Johnson, “This is Grace”

When hope in outcomes begins to feel dangerous—when it has the potential to become a downward spiral of worry and despair—looking for evidence of the Gardener has become a lifeline. As the Savior prayed, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I ask for sustenance and strength for today. Then, like the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings, I look for manna—or green peppers—for the echo of God’s presence. As I find the echo, the ashes of my bold hopes scatter with the wind where they nourish a garden sanctified in suffering and a new, gentle hope.

—LeAnne Bingham Hansen, “The Night Is Coming On”

I’ve stopped focusing on the Jesus who will come into my future and have started focusing on His coming into my present. The lines between a religious life and an everyday one blur. My search for a life in Christ requires a new kind of seeking and an entirely different orientation to my works. Works stop being a way to carry me into future grace and start being a way to orient me to present grace.

…I’m inspired by those who have shown me how this is possible. The Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren describes something similar in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary. Liturgy is not a word Latter-day Saints use frequently, but it refers to religious rituals and habits such as the sacrament or daily prayers. Warren explores the idea that the common daily liturgies of making our bed, brushing our teeth, or checking our email can be opportunities for practicing holiness. They can be practiced as liturgies to experience God in even the most mundane tasks.

In addition to the many chore-like daily routines, a more intentional motherhood has often involved reaching for what lights my children up. With my Minecraft-loving son, that might mean some stumbling around in the game. With my math-loving son, that could mean learning about the Fibonacci sequence and how its mathematical patterns show up in nautilus shells and galaxies. Too often I’m cluelessly going through motherhood, not paying attention. But my experience changes when I reach for connection with my children through the things they love. I bring God into the dance.

…Embracing these moments leads me to God in the here and now. In all the works I do, from math, to raising children, to taking the sacrament, to belting Queen, I can live more fully in relationship with Christ. I can stop living a severed life. I can learn that life in Christ has been the natural state of affairs all along.

We have a divine and willing partner.

And an invitation to join the dance.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing

The prayerful one promised bread like seeds
feathering on dusts of wild Sin, where wisps
of lowly morning water held God’s glory
in their mist. Here, child, mother said, go find pearls
of honey before they melt beneath the candle sun
—bright till late when even comes, hot while whirls
of coveys run. Have you forgotten? God can grow
flocks of quail from stone in single turns of earth,
will try our optimism with daily acts of sacred birth.
We tasted meat with manna, bit feathered flesh while
grinding colors from the seeds, baking cakes to turn
sweetness into fresh oil without a single olive tree.
Have you forgotten? Who God creates, God sustains
and we must keep for generations the seeds we have
been rained. I prayed to know my own mete hunger,
testing fullness as I ate. Here, child, I told my daughter,
plan what to ask from Heaven’s plate. Know you the needs
you call your own? Trust you the seeds you pleaded sown?
The prayerful one promised God our eyes, gazing up
into the clouds, and I promised God my words until
the heavens all fall down. Then song, then dance, then surer
faith until the mountains all but drown, and up on ridges
kin will gather to watch the dew again disperse. I’ll pray
for you to see your manna, child, flooding this universe.

—Manna’s Child, by Fleur Van Woerkom

Jesus Christ is my spiritual rock and living water.

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The River from the Temple

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2 years ago · 8 likes · Kelsi Folsom

Disciples help each other “bear the burden” of doing the Lord’s work.

But there are not two Churches and I am not divided. There is one Church, and I claim it as my own, ashamed of what is shameful and proud of what is praiseworthy. My loyalty does not arise out of a calculation that the pros outweigh the cons, but out of reciprocity. In addition to the gift of Christ’s atonement, which he gives freely to all, I owe a debt to my sisters and brothers. Fellow Latter-day Saints have taught me to want to be good, protected me from danger, and helped make real the things I wanted to be true but could not see.

—Melissa Inouye, “A Church That Is Real”

While it is not our place to determine the revelatory direction the Church will take, it is our place to hope, and it is our place to make those hopes known—especially to our priesthood leaders. We can look forward to a day when women and men more completely and effectively partner in the work of salvation. Even without knowing precisely how we will arrive at this better place, I believe that longing, hoping, and praying for such a day—and being candid about those hopes, especially in consecrated conversations with our priesthood leaders—is a powerful way that those of us who serve “out in the periphery” of the body of Christ can hasten the day when women are more fully empowered to fully partner in bringing about the Lord’s vision of Zion.

—Tyler Johnson, “A Church for All of Us”

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I can choose to soften my heart.

I wondered about faithful believers, my kin in pain, for whom hope is treacherous—who suffer mistreatment at work, church, in families, or on missions—who boldly pray for deliverance, and then are left to “hope” God will soften the hearts of their persecutors. But what if the tormentors choose not to be changed by God? How can we pray when our peace is riven by the agency of some other person? Or by the circumstances of mortality? What about the prayers of those who are fighting cancer? Or infertility? Or loneliness? How do they pray when a remission doesn’t come, again? Or a pregnancy ends, or doesn’t even begin? When we are suffering, and hope is exhausting?

My wrestle with hope required a paradigm shift—a way to preserve faith in God’s goodness while I placed my hopes and desires on the altar and grieved. During this process, I read the third chapter of Mormon with new eyes. Here, Mormon seems to have experienced a shift as he loved and led his people, who were devolving individually and as a nation. He lamented, “My soul had been poured out in prayer unto my God all the day long for them; nevertheless, it was without faith, because of the hardness of their hearts” (Morm. 3:12). I had read this in the past and wondered at Mormon’s reaction. Didn’t he know that faith is to be centered in Jesus Christ? But with the lens of my own pain, I wondered if he, too, was experiencing a paradigm shift. What if he’d assumed that God would be able to change the people if Mormon believed hard enough? Perhaps he was wrestling with what faith is, and whether hope is always present in tandem. Roughly thirteen years passed as Mormon watched the Nephite and Lamanite armies retake and lose multiple times, in a bloody loop, the city Desolation (what tragic irony!). However, Mormon seemed to have laid his hopes for the repentance of his people upon the altar, where they were consumed. Later Mormon writes that he was “without hope” (Morm. 5:2). But I wondered if, in surrendering hope in a specific outcome, he found his faith.

—Leanne Bingham Hansen, “The Night is Coming On”

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The Sacrament of Attention

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” —Simone Weil, Letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942…

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3 years ago · 80 likes · 5 comments · Michael Austin

Jesus Christ can save me because of His Atonement.

How does Jesus’s atonement work? How are we saved by grace? What role do human works play? In this episode of Meet the Early-day Saints, Dr. Cecilia M. Peek takes us back to the early days of Christianity to take a look at these questions again. She also lays out different ways Christians understood Jesus’s saving work–from illuminator, to restorer, to victor, to victim and sacrifice:

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Meet the Early-day Saints Episode 9: Atonement and Grace, with Cecilia M. Peek

One of the most frequently discussed themes in Christian history concerns the relationship between grace, salvation, and human behavior. How does Jesus’s atonement work? How are we saved by grace? What role do human works play? Dr. Cecilia M. Peek takes us back to the early days of Christianity to take a look at these questions again. She also lays out …

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Blair Hodges and Cecilia Peek

At age four, I attended my first funeral. I was very confused about death and what it was, but my mother explained to me that everybody dies and gets buried in the ground, and we don’t see them anymore. Then she reassured me that it was all okay because Christ died for us a long time ago and then came back to life, and now we will all (even my great-uncle Leon, lying in front of me in a casket) come back to life.

This is the first Atonement lesson I can remember, and I spent the entire year after that asking my mom over and over again when my Uncle Leon would come back to life. I thought I understood what Christ had done for me, but my understanding was as if I had seen a single picture of an oak tree and then declared that I understood the forest.

The Atonement is difficult to comprehend. Since that first lesson, I have had many more lessons and conversations about the Atonement with family members, teachers, friends, missionary companions, and the Spirit itself. And sometimes I feel like I am still four years old, trying to wrap my head around a concept I don’t have the capacity to understand. It is difficult to comprehend something that is infinite and eternal while also being both intensely personal and full of enabling power, but I want to try. I want to do all I can to understand the Atonement so that I can fully appreciate my Savior and access the miracles he has made possible.

I believe Christ has performed the Atonement, but faith is not the same thing as understanding. My faith has grown through personal, powerful experiences of heavenly love. My understanding has only come through stories.

- Chanel Earl, “Atonement, Metaphor, and Fairy Stories”

Explore further through Chanel Earl’s Atonement and Fairy Story Series

The sacrament helps me remember my deliverance through Jesus Christ.

It’s a ritual I’ve been participating in for longer than I can remember. Sunday arrives. My wife and I arrive at the chapel. We shake hands. We tousle a few Sunbeams’ hair. We’re happy to be here. We sit. We sing. We pray. Then the main event:

Bread first: break, bless, pass, eat.

Water second: bless, pass, drink.

Repeat weekly. It’s a simple routine. It’s all over in a matter of minutes. I’m as guilty as the next person of sometimes just going through the motions. But though I’ve taken the sacrament more times than I can count during my lifetime, lately it’s taken on new meaning for me. It’s become anything but routine.

…

In truth, healing is exactly what Christ is offering to each of us every week as we receive the sacrament. But we have to want it. We have to yearn for it. We have to reach from deep down inside of us and bring forth our brokenness, believing that He will receive our broken selves and heal us. This requires faith. It requires focus, as much focus as was present in this suffering woman. Our brains get distracted and wander so easily. The cares of the world seep in so effortlessly. Our shame and guilt beg to stay hidden even from ourselves.

- Brent Croxton, “The Outstretched Hand”

Learning how big and beautiful and shared the world is, I try to share myself and my family more—to open myself to receive the grace God has to offer me. During sacrament meeting, I no longer try to contain my children to our pew (except during the sacrament itself). I let my baby wander the aisles. She shares her Cheerios and steals applesauce pouches and sits on the lap of a childless man in our ward. I tell my son, we are Heavenly Father’s and Heavenly Mother’s children, so we are all family. We can trust our family to help take care of our baby. We can trust our family to take care of us.

—Lindsey Meservey, “‘All Things Common’ Among the Courtyard”

James Goldberg’s Tales of the Chelm First Ward is a collection of fictional stories set in a Latter-day Saint ward in the imagined town of Chelm—a nod to Jewish folklore and the famous “village of fools.” The humor in the book is wonderfully absurd, but beneath the silliness is something powerful and profound. Enjoy this short story from the book about Passover:

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The Blind Beggar's Passover Feast

On the first night of Passover, all the families in the Chelm ward held seders in their homes, but on the last night, they gathered to the meetinghouse to enjoy the beggar’s largesse. Zusa Cohen came along with her grandparents to see what was happening. And oh, what a feast their new people prepared! With help from Heschel’s eager eyes, Lazar the blind…

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2 years ago · 6 likes · James Goldberg, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and Mattathias Singh (he/him)

The Lord has power over all things.

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Jesus Christ offers me peace and joy.

Before we can fully savor the victory of Easter, we must learn to let hard things have their own gravity, their own time and space. After all, before it was empty, the tomb was full.

The concrete reality of Jesus’s suffering matters because most of us will spend time—days, months, years, a lifetime—staring at our own unjust pain, our own unwarranted suffering, or our own empty and echoing moments of doubt. There will be periods where our best laid plans seem to come to naught or when our noblest efforts turn to ashes in our hands.

In those moments, we need to know that Jesus lived as a fully mortal man—subject to hunger, pain, longing, betrayal, and sadness. Then, we need to realize that the bleak sunset of Friday and the emptiness of Saturday were just as real as the victory of Easter Sunday. The reality of all that preceded the resurrection teaches us that when we feel abandoned, or betrayed, or alone, or forgotten, we are not the first to walk that road. By recognizing this reality, we can learn that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not an empty fairy tale filled with flimsy promises, but rather, the gospel is the guarantee from someone who also suffered terribly that light will vanquish darkness, that love will overcome enmity, and that hope will conquer despair.

—Tyler Johnson, “Dressing the Wounds of Jesus”

Because of His Atonement, Jesus Christ has the power to help me overcome sin, death, trials, and weaknesses.

Finally, as we celebrate Easter soon, I am brought to the scripture that stands for me as perhaps the most direct and beautiful argument for the centrality of empathy in both the character of divinity and in the pantheon of Christian virtues. I am deeply touched to know that when Jesus presents himself in his resurrected glory to the people gathered at the temple surrounded by physical devastation wrought in protracted and absolute darkness, he immediately focused their attention on the centrality and beauty of his vulnerability and his history of suffering. As a doctor who has examined hundreds or thousands of patients, I cannot easily move past the visceral impact and almost macabre specificity of Jesus’s invitation and the crowd’s response:

Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that we may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole Earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety.

What other course of action but this could have more indelibly impressed upon the hearts and minds of Jesus’s followers this message: God’s willing suffering is what makes Him God. He has come to a people whose world has just been riven by earthquakes and consumed by fire. They have endured impenetrable darkness so thick that it could be tasted, smelled, and rolled between their fingers. Thousands have died, and the cries of the wounded and dying lingered in that opacity while the living wondered if light would ever be restored. But then, the Being who finally returns light to the sky and who descends with healing in his wings does this one thing before the healing, before calling disciples, even before instituting the sacrament: he shows them that even in his resurrected glory, he has maintained the bodily reminders of the steep price of suffering he paid to gain his empathy—because that empathy is what makes him most fully God, and is the path he invites us to follow.

—Tyler Johnson, “Vulnerability, Finitude, and Community”

Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price for my salvation.

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God can work through me to fulfill His purposes.

Women are central to the whole story. In fact, women are the ones that allow the whole story to even happen, and in several places are talked about in ways that explicitly mirror God’s actions. The Exodus is not the story of the hero Moses; it’s the story of Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews who, yes, works through Moses, but also works through a whole bunch of overlooked and unexpected people.

The midwives Shiphrah and Puah are the first named characters in Exodus, and in Exodus 1 they respond to Pharaoh’s murderous command with creative resistance, lying to the evil king to preserve life. As Walter Brueggemann puts it “At great risk, they counter genocide; in so doing, they bear witness to the mothering power of God, whose will for life overrides the killing, and whose power for life is undeterred by the death dispensed by the powerful.”

Moses’ mother literally “saw that the baby was good” in 2:2, just as God saw that creation was good in the creation story. She then puts Moses in “an ark” in 2:3, the same word for what God put Noah in for the flood.

Pharaoh’s daughter “comes down” to the water, “sees” the baby, “has pity” on him, “draws him out” of the water, and adopts him as her son. These are the exact same things God is said to do for the Hebrews in the Exodus story. The author is intentionally using the same language for Yahweh and Pharaoh’s daughter (!!).

Miriam boldly approaches Pharaoh’s daughter with an ingenious (and daring) plan for restoring the baby to his family, at least for a while.

—Meredith Miller

God is our first and final liberator. The Savior whom Moses knew as “I Am,” Paul introduced to the world under the name of Jesus Christ. But, as revealed by a modern prophet who wielded a rod like Moses (2 Nephi 3:17), the saving work of God proceeds by means of small-s saviors, men and women who labor as fellows in the day and in the night: in the temple, in the fields, in the clinic and the classroom and the council room. Among the lives we save and serve may well be those who, when it is most needful, lead us out from bondage into freedom.

—Rosalynde Welch, “Saviors before Sinai”

Jesus Christ is my Deliverer.

I’ve never experienced anything that felt like pulling down divine power, suddenly being filled with strength, or having a burden evaporate. However, when I'm in step with the Savior, my burdens feel lighter. I have experienced peace that surpasses understanding (Philippians 4:7). I have experienced enough inspiration to take one more step. I have always had enough strength to get through all my days (Deuteronomy 33:25). I hope he is near me. And although the veil is thick, I do believe that Christ is on the other side of my covenants with him, walking me home.

—Brooklyn Miller, “Burdens and Yolks”

I can show reverence for holy things and places. I can treat holy places with reverence.

If God uses time and process to create life, can we imagine that destroying God’s creation can be excused just because God, with the snap of his fingers, can make it all right again? As acclaimed botanist Paul Cox puts it in one of the most important essays on stewardship written by a Latter-day Saint, a world of such staggering beauty and diversity as this Earth that takes billions of years to create is not something to trifle with or degrade with impunity. It is a masterpiece, and when we destroy it with indifference, it is like taking a knife and slashing the canvas of a painstakingly and carefully created work of art. Cox writes: “As we reverence the Savior, let us treat His masterpiece with reverence and humility.” Such reverence honors Christ the Creator.

—George Handley, “A New Story of Creation”

The Eden story is also a story of separation of humankind and the rest of creation. While the scriptures teach us that the Gods intended a binding relationship between humanity and the land—care for it and it will care for you¹—the fall from the Garden led to the natural world becoming victim to the idea that humankind owns knowledge. In this demarcation is the deeply harmful belief that nature is “other,” leading to its objectification, plunder, and commodification. Environmental degradation is directly connected to the devaluation of women—the creators, nurturers, and caretakers of life on earth—and patriarchy’s disabling narrative that men have limited responsibility and capacity to be equally nurturing. Deforestation is destroying sacred trees. Living by the rhythms of the seasons and the body has given way to mechanistic production, which does not honor our ecological heritage as humans embedded in creative cycles of growth, harvest, rest, and replenishment. We find ourselves looking back at two thousand years of human-centered Western philosophy that has taught us to retreat into our own heads for solutions to our problems and to prize the rational human mind above nature. …

Is it necessary for our very survival to believe in the sacredness of Mother Earth, that within her is the hidden world of God? How can we possibly know God if we destroy that hidden world? How can we ever know ourselves? For “we cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.” I believe the denial or acceptance of God begins with how we relate to the world They have created. They did not create it for our personal or collective gain but for our joy, so we may learn that joy is not found in storing up earthly treasures where moth and rust corrupt but in forging eternal bonds.

—Katherine Knight Sonntag, “Our Relationship to Mother Earth”

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Meet the Early-day Saints Episode 5: Sacred Spaces, with Matthew J. Grey

Early Christians didn’t have wonderful or ornate buildings to gather in during the first decades. They met in small homes and living spaces. Matthew J. Grey takes us back to these early house churches and tells us what worship was like there. As Christianity spread, new buildings replaced the old, which reflected development in belief and worship. In th…

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3 years ago · 3 likes · Blair Hodges and Matthew Grey

We are not only just minds in bodies, but souls: utterly inimitable, with strange depths and unknown potentialities, an alchemy of hopes and fears, sorrows and joys. To discover and nurture this is the joy and meaning of our lives.

What makes our lives worth living is the act of living. Life should be a dance with reality—nimble, graceful, fluid—in which both we and the world continually respond to each other and evolve. Participating in this unmappable dance—rather than outsourcing it to a machine simply because it can do it “better,” or following another’s choreography—allows us to become ourselves. That is the human use of human beings: giving every person the chance to dance, to unfold, to be constantly surprised and delighted by who we can become. And no machine, no matter how intelligent, can do that for us.

—Ashley Zhang, “Alchemy of a Soul”

God gives power to people He calls to do His work. When the Lord asks me to do something, He will help me do it.

The Lord’s purposes will be fulfilled in His own time.

Apparently, a God of instantaneous creation is easier for some people (and many Christians) to believe in than a God of infinite patience. The God I believe in is an artist. And Makoto Fujimura reminds us, “There is no art if we are unwilling to wait for paint to dry.” Whatever the mechanism or meaning of creation—it took a lot of time to get from hydrogen atoms to Michelangelo. Whatever the precise role of God in designing and guiding the growing beauty, complexity, and intelligence in the cosmos, something is going on that is garnering new attention and new explanations.

—Terryl Givens, “Waiting for the Paint to Dry”

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Time Is Out of Joint

“There is a season, and a time,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes, “to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to danc…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Zachary McLeod Hutchins

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“God sent me before you to preserve you.” Heavenly Father sent Jesus Christ to save me.

Like someone invited to the delivery suite, we are also called to stay awake and watch the suffering of the body of Christ. The suffering of His physical body is finished, but the suffering of His metaphorical body—the suffering of His children—continues today. Paul taught, "Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular" (1 Cor. 12:27). As members of the body of Christ, we will not sleep through our own deliverance this time. How do we learn to stay awake for the suffering of the body of Christ? We can start by acknowledging the pains that exist among members of our church community.

—Christopher John Bissett, “Awakening to the Suffering Body of Christ”

Forgiveness brings healing.

When the teacher known as Jesus of Nazereth was teaching at the temple in Jerusalem, Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.

“Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” They were trying to trap Jesus into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:4-11)

This is the pattern of forgiveness—when the demands for justice are answered with mercy. The same pattern applies to self-forgiveness. We have all three parts of the story within us: the woman (or self), the accusers (justice), and the Teacher (divine mercy). When we learn to quiet the accusers in our minds, we allow the inner Teacher to respond with love for the self. This is what it means to fulfill the law. The law asks what is right. The Teacher fulfills the law by responding with what is needed, and invites his followers to walk the same path. Until we’re ready for that path, may we take courage knowing that the Teacher is kneeling in the dirt next to us, waiting until we meet his divine gaze and through his love transform into new beings.

—Haymitch St. Stephen, “Something Sharp”

I can show love and forgiveness to my family.

In its simple form, the answer is the same for everyone, regardless of religious affiliation or disaffiliation: The answer is love. As the Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila wrote, the spiritual path consists of two parts: loving God and loving each other. And how do we know we are on this path? “The most reliable sign that we are following both of these teachings,” writes Teresa, “is that we are loving each other.” That’s the path. No one’s above it.

But the path is complicated because the outcome of our love cannot be predetermined. Sometimes we love and the other person never returns to the fold. Sometimes we love and we are changed. And sometimes we love and the person returns to religion, but not in the way we may have envisioned.

“[Love] does not insist on its own way,” writes the apostle Paul.

—Jon Ogden, “Love Does Not Insist On Its Own Way”

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Ghosts in the Church Parking Lot

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3 months ago · 30 likes · 3 comments · Diana Brown

The Lord helps me through priesthood blessings.

Members from the ward arrived, and the brothers gathered on either side of my father’s bed to anoint him with oil and give him a priesthood blessing. My brother, who had long since distanced himself from the Church, desperately wanted to join the circle even though he knew that he could not place his hands on my father’s head with them. Wordlessly, he took a place at the foot of the bed, knelt down on the hard floor, and gently laid the blankets aside. He placed his hands upon my father’s bare feet and bowed his head to join the mighty prayer of his heart with the elders’ blessing. After the blessing was affirmed with amens, my brother said, “I hope that God heard my prayer, too.”

—Lisa Murphy, “Angels Kept Their Watch”

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Washing the Clay from My Eyes

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2 years ago · 53 likes · 7 comments · W. Paul Reeve

God can help me find meaning in my trials.

Indeed, it is probable that my soul could only have opened to this insight in this way, at this moment, precisely because it has been cracked open by the very suffering that has broken me asunder. To be clear, my most foundational theological belief is this: God will never cause or condone suffering. Yet, since we exist as eternal beings in an oppositional universe, this is my secondary and nearly as resolute conviction: Our Heavenly Parents can consecrate suffering they do not cause or condone. Thus, while we are never meant needlessly to remain party to suffering, yet we can always trust that God will raise a phoenix, even from our darkest ashes. That light will make its way into and finally illuminate even what may initially seem to be the loneliest, scariest, and seemingly most impenetrable darkness.

God is light; and light finds a way.

In the meantime, we are not meant to construct a world where suffering ceases so much as we are meant to transform suffering forever into love.

—Tyler Johnson, “This is Grace”

In the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord shows Enoch a vision of “all the doings of the children of men” (Moses 7: 41). The vision is well known for its image of a God who weeps, the Restoration’s response to the question of divine passibility. There is something spiritually sobering about the fact that God’s divine nature does not spare him suffering, that part of what makes him divine is his capacity for suffering. And God’s emotional experience seems contagious to those who draw near him. In Enoch’s vision, there’s a lot of “sorrow, grief, [and] anguish” to go around.² Indeed, multiple Restoration scriptures depict the cosmos as necessarily suffused with suffering (for example, see 2 Nephi 2:11). Why is this?

One reason may be that suffering eschews the superficial. Consider that God’s weeping over his children’s (mis)use of their agency causes Enoch to weep and stretch forth his arms. We also witness that Enoch’s “heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7: 41). These are powerful, poetic metaphors for spiritual growing pains. Enoch learns in an embodied way that increased light and knowledge come at the cost of suffering (see Ecclesiastes 1:18).

Suffering in this sense has nothing to do with pain for pain’s sake. It is rather more akin to compassion (from the Latin compati, to bear or suffer with). Suffering as I mean it here would combine both (1) Lehi’s reaction to his vision—he “cast himself upon his bed” because he was so “overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen” (1 Nephi 1:7), and (2) the pillars of Alma’s covenant community, including a willingness to help others bear their burdens (see Mosiah 18). This is the kind of suffering the Savior referred to when he declared that “all these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good” (D&C 122:7), and when he gave the injunction to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees” (D&C 81:5).

—Ryan A Davis, “Hie to Kolob”

What can we do in light of this pain and powerlessness?

We can choose to stay soft, open, and humble to the possibility that we might have something to gain from people whose beliefs differ from our own. That’s love. It’s what Jesus pointed to in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, which he directed to those “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” In the parable, a Pharisee thanks God that he is “not like other people” while the tax collector bows his head to God and pleads for mercy. The Pharisee is closed off and full of contempt. The tax collector is open and, presumably, full of love.

Love shifts us away from an insistence that we alone are righteous (and therefore always deserve to get our way) toward a realization that there are new paths that can only be discovered through our encounters with each other. In this sense, love integrates each of our gifts into a new way of being together.

—Jon Ogden, “Love Does Not Insist On Its Own Way”

“A seer shall the Lord my God raise up.”

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The Lord will be with me in my adversity.

I believe discipleship requires that we look at suffering with enough focus and care that we are moved with compassion to respond. Perhaps like Joseph we need to contemplate evil and suffering of the kind that makes us wonder where God is—or even if God is—because this is also the kind of suffering that brings us so low that we can’t help but look upward to God and then outward to God’s children. We can’t take on all human suffering as Christ did, but we are called to emulate him in suffering toward godliness.

—Jordan Watkins, “Suffering Towards Godliness”

A few years ago, I was at a low point. Daily I felt drained from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. Even showering felt like a monumental task—so big. So heavy. One day I switched a load of laundry in the basement and then lay down on the floor because it was too much effort to walk the half flight of stairs to the family room. Sitting upright at the table for a meal was sometimes too much. There was no relief in sight, and I had no idea how I could be a mother and wife, let alone a fulfilled human being in this body that was absolutely void of vitality. I had nothing.

My sense of spiritual connection was also at an all-time low. The gospel message was “turn to Jesus. He will not forsake you.” But the invitation seemed suddenly inane, nonsensical. I felt forsaken. Utterly abandoned and forgotten by God. The chasm between what God offered and what I believed Him to be capable of offering was entirely too wide, and I found myself stranded in the gap. My arms stretched wide between two truths—the attentive God I trusted, and the absent God I experienced.

There in the dry, parched no-man’s-land was my wrestle. I was Jacob, wrestling with the messenger and crying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Gen. 32:26). I was Sarah, abandoned between promises of a numberless posterity and the reality of an empty womb (Gen. 17:16).

And time stretched on. So much time.

…

One day—I can point to the exact place I stood in my bedroom, next to my Great-Grandma Esther’s hand-me-down jewelry box—I was pondering some scriptural examples of unflinching faith, including the biblical Esther, who declared, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). There were also Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who knew that God had the ability to deliver them from the fiery furnace, but also knew that if He didn’t, they would remain faithful (Dan. 3:17–18); and Mary, who with absolute sub- mission said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).

And I asked myself, if I got to the point where I simply could not find the divine communion and spiritual healing I sought, what would I do? Would I give up on the Lord? Would I turn elsewhere?

Almost as I thought this, in a holy, perhaps mystical experience which I can only call gracing, I knew that I would never turn my back on the Lord. It was simultaneously a decision, a feeling, a direction, and a command. It was also a scripture and a hymn:

On the surface, these words barely touch the significance of the experience for me; I admit they seem wholly unextraordinary. But the experience itself was fire. It was unclear what part of this lightning bolt stemmed from me and what part from God. In some ways, its intensity convinced me that it could not have emerged from my weak self, which was entirely too fickle and frail for such bold declarations. But in another sense, this conviction seemed to stem from the most authentic part of myself— the spiritual core that knew God intimately, even through veiled vision.

But also, in a strange inexplicable way, the demarcation between me and God seemed irrelevant. In communion with God, we were one and the same—indistinguishable. It was a duet, a dance, a covenant: a gift given and a gift received, a promise made and a promise trusted. It wasn’t submission; it was collaboration and union.

After the long wrestle, like Jacob, I had prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Like Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I had been given power from God and all was new.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, “Gracing”

Our Heavenly Parents can consecrate suffering they do not cause or condone. Thus, while we are never meant needlessly to remain party to suffering, yet we can always trust that God will raise a phoenix, even from our darkest ashes. That light will make its way into and finally illuminate even what may initially seem to be the loneliest, scariest, and seemingly most impenetrable darkness.

God is light; and light finds a way.

In the meantime, we are not meant to construct a world where suffering ceases so much as we are meant to transform suffering forever into love.

—Tyler Johnson, “This Is Grace”

If I am faithful, the Lord will guide and inspire me.

How have faith and trust evolved overtime throughout Christianity? Yale professor Teresa Morgan and Zachary Davis explore this in a recent interview:

Wayfare

A History of Trust in God

Teresa Morgan is the McDonald Agape Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School. In this interview, Morgan and Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis discussed how ideas of faith and trust have evolved in Christianity…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Teresa Morgan

With the Lord’s help, I can flee temptation.

How might we think about sin and temptation? In this conversation, Elizabeth Oldfield explores the concept of sin through examining the seven deadly sins. She asks, What can envy teach us about having a stable sense of self, especially in this age of social media? Is acedia, or sloth, really about attention? How can we continually recall our attention to the things we hope will shape our souls? Elizabeth demonstrates that at the end of the day, the seven deadly sins aren’t a legalistic list of ways to be in debt to God, but a loving guide for how to be in right relationship with the people around us.

Wayfare

Four Readings from Genesis 37–41

I’m trying to think more carefully about how I encounter the Bible. I am by nature an intellectual magpie. I’m always on the lookout for some beautiful thing that I can pick up and take back to my nest of a brain. When it comes to the Bible, this eclectic approach is built into my biography. I was raised as a Latter-day Saint. I have an undergraduate de…

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2 months ago · Kristian Heal

The Lord will help me prepare for possible hardships.

I can be kind to my family.

Just like the lost sheep in a field and the son that finds himself in a muddy pigsty, the coin is lying somewhere on the woman’s dirt floor. Not because the coin is worthless, but because that’s where life sometimes drops precious things. But coins have intrinsic worth, and losing sight of them somewhere on the messy floors of life does not change their value. Parents, families, and even religious communities can all feel that they have lost someone who transitions to a different gender or identifies in a way that challenges their prior assumptions. Christlike love, for me, started to look a lot less like certainty and a lot more like getting on my knees in the dirt with my hands outstretched, feeling for what I could not yet see. This time and effort in search have a message underneath the actions: You are known, and you are worth this care.

—Candace Bithell, “Glowsticks and Parables”

My life is richer because of good friends. Friendship is a relationship that asks for renewal, but which also renews. And even if time, distance, and circumstances weaken bonds, I still believe there is something that lasts, something that leaves its residue on my soul, something pulling at a subatomic level to remind me of the times I have purely given and received love from members of God’s family whom I have, at various times of my life, called the blessed name of friend. And not only to remind me, but to find ways to bring heaven now, wanting all of us linked together.

—Megan Armknecht, “Heaven of Friends”

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Covenant marriage is essential to God’s eternal plan.

I can value eternal things over temporal things. Eternal things are more important than worldly things.

From a transformative perspective, worldliness is any attempt to find security through finite means—safety, pleasure, the esteem of others, and the insatiable need to control our circumstances. The gospel invites us to leave this worldliness behind and find security in the only Reality that is worthy of our hearts. We are not sanctified by perfecting the false self but by waking up to an entirely new dimension of self, whose center of gravity is Christ.

—Thomas McConkie, At-One-Ment (read an excerpt here)

The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, is within us. It’s not just in a far-away celestial land where God will make everything right that is currently wrong. As co-creators with God and co-builders of Zion, we can harness grace to intervene in the stickiness now—to merge the disparate visions of a glorious family-centered heaven with each heaven-centered human of earth’s family who wants to be there.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing

The challenge for the believer is that the prospect of eternity can detract from full attention to the moment. The prospect of life as something to get through, to endure, to devalue, has long been a pronounced strand in Christian history. It was not always that way. Before asceticism and other-worldliness took hold, Christians were alert to the “nowness” of heaven. “Let us love the present joy in the life that now is.”

—Terryl Givens, “Our Ongoing Resurrection”

“Our relationship to the physical world itself has been shaped in surprising ways by Greco-Roman culture and philosophy. For example, the early Christian movement incorporated the idea of Platonic forms, which says there is a perfect world “out there” in contrast to the deficient (and “fallen”) world we live in.

… Revealed scripture clearly states that the transformative process for Christ (and we can suppose it is the same for ourselves) isn’t just a movement of “up and out.” It’s not a matter of passing the test in a body then flitting off to the “real world” of spirit. Exactly as much as there is an “up and out,” a transcendence in the spiritual journey, there is a moving “down and through,” an immanence, into the heart of the earth and the very heart of matter.”

—Thomas McConkie, At-One-Ment

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

The Extraordinary Gift of Life: An exploration of covenants with George Handley

Gosh, I really can’t express how much I loved this conversation with George. It felt like a celebration of life—and an invitation to live and love it more fully. This conversation explores the five covenants we make in the temple, with particular emphasis on the first and the last: obedience and consecration. George shares his personal journey of coming…

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3 months ago · 9 likes · Cecelia Proffit

The covenants of the Lord’s house bring God’s power into my life. Covenants help me return to Heavenly Father.

More from Wayfare on Covenants

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

Embracing an Endowment of Love: A conversation with Melinda Wheelwright Brown

Melinda W. Brown is an author and educator with a master’s degree in Christian Practice from Duke Divinity School, where she focused on Christian Education. She is the author of Eve and Adam: Discovering the Beautiful Balance (Deseret Book, 2020) and…

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6 months ago · 5 likes · Cecelia Proffit

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

A God Who Cuts Through All: A Conversation with Jenet Erickson

I’m so excited to share this beautiful conversation I had with Jenet Erickson with you. Being just a few days away from Christmas, this felt like the perfect episode to share because it feels like it is just drenched in Jesus…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Cecelia Proffit

The Lord remembers me in my trials.

The Savior can heal my family. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ can help me love my family.

Waymakers

Inspired by the skill, spirit, and the example of Jesus, Waymakers forms peacemakers through transformative training and constructive engagement with conflict.

I can be kind to others.

Learning how big and beautiful and shared the world is, I try to share myself and my family more—to open myself to receive the grace God has to offer me. During sacrament meeting, I no longer try to contain my children to our pew (except during the sacrament itself). I let my baby wander the aisles. She shares her Cheerios and steals applesauce pouches and sits on the lap of a childless man in our ward. I tell my son, we are Heavenly Father’s and Heavenly Mother’s children, so we are all family. We can trust our family to help take care of our baby. We can trust our family to take care of us.

—Lindsey Meservey, “‘All Things Common’ Among the Courtyard”

We are blessed in our faith tradition to have an understanding of families that spreads so much farther and goes so much deeper than just the nuclear family unit. We believe in a family that can be sealed together for eternity, through countless generations, from child to parent to grandparent. It’s a family unit that is just as important and serves just as many purposes as the modern nuclear family. The branches of this eternal family tree spread wide enough to encompass siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles. Even when loved ones have passed from this life, we have the power to graft them onto our living tree through posthumous temple work. And, if you dig down far enough, you’d find that we all spring from the same roots. You. Me. Your neighbor. A stranger on the other side of the planet. Across distance and time, we share both the same heavenly parents and the same physical ancestors. We call each other “brother” and “sister” for good reason.

—Jeanine Bee, “Hymn of the Alloparent”

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The Lord fulfills His promises in His own time.

We, like Abraham, might be holding out hope for deliverance, and, as the knife draws ever closer, wondering if we were mistaken—if deliverance might not come. I believe the reader is meant to feel the agony of this experience, which throws into even sharper relief God’s deliverance at the very last moment.

This is not an experience I ever want to feel comfortable with or hear a satisfying answer for. It should feel extreme. It should feel horrifying. I think its literary power depends on that.

At the same time, allowing the story to put Abraham’s children in danger is a powerful literary device that drives home the ultimate point that nothing can prevent God from keeping God’s promises—not even God. God is faithful, even when faithfulness seems impossible, and even when it seems like God is the very Being who has betrayed or abandoned us. To an ancient audience acquainted with death, displaced from their homes, feeling like there was no possible way God’s promises to them could be fulfilled, wondering if God had in fact forgotten or betrayed or abandoned them, I can imagine this being an incredibly powerful reminder.

And so I don’t read this as much as a story about Abraham’s faithfulness to God as I do a story about God’s faithfulness to Abraham, and so to all of us. Even when it appears that God (or that following God) is the very source of our troubles and distress, God is faithful and God will deliver.

—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”

The times when God most wishes he spoke English are the times when he wouldn’t know what to say. The times when you’re praying so hard for something but it’s just not meant to be. The times when a wish you held dear is shriveling and he can see it’s going to die and he can see it’s going to take a piece of you with it. The times when someone hurts you, terribly, and you go over it all in your mind again and again wondering what you could have done differently—and that’s exactly the wrong question but it’s also the only question that gives you any sense of control. In many of these moments, God is as silent as the ashes left when the fire dies down. If he could, he would be silent in English, in your language, so that you could know that it’s not an absent silence but an active silence. A stilling of the soul of the universe in solidarity with your distress. A witness. God is never quite so focused on you as when he doesn’t speak.

—James Goldberg, “A Secret”

Wayfare

On God's Silence

“Silence is the first language of God…

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2 years ago · 27 likes · 2 comments · Gideon Burton

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Abraham was lucky

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a year ago · 9 likes · Michael Slawson

The Lord commands me to flee wickedness and not look back.

From a transformative perspective, worldliness is any attempt to find security through finite means—safety, pleasure, the esteem of others, and the insatiable need to control our circumstances. The gospel invites us to leave this worldliness behind and find security in the only Reality that is worthy of our hearts. We are not sanctified by perfecting the false self but by waking up to an entirely new dimension of self, whose center of gravity is Christ.

—Thomas McConkie, At-One-Ment (read an excerpt here)

The scriptures are full of stories of people being commanded to flee wickedness. The stories of the Nephites and Jaredites in the Book of Mormon gives us unique insight on what it means to “not look back”:

God's promise in the land is fulfilled only in a community of solidarity, love, and humility. The promised land is not a reward, a deserved birthright, or a promise of superiority. Rather, this disquieting truth emerges: The promise of God is found in how we live, not in where we live. Indeed, the promise of God in the land is not a guarantee of unchallenged continuity, dominion, and prosperity. The cycle of prosperity and destruction in the Book of Mormon is a cautionary tale, calling us to confront ourselves.

—Jenny Richards, “The Promised Land: A Cautionary Tale”

What did Lot’s wife do wrong?

“…But the men had not come for pleasantries. They carried a message. A big, terrible, tragic, sad, horrible, unbelievable message. Sodom, the bustling city they lived in, was about to be destroyed. “Your walls will not protect you from this,” they explained. “Leave now and don’t look back.”

So Lot and his wife grabbed their two youngest daughters and a backpack with toothbrushes, water, and snacks, and headed out the door. But before they could go, they had to warn their oldest daughters, their son-in-laws, and their grandkids.

But the son-in-laws thought it was a joke, and the eldest daughters didn’t want to wake the children, and they didn’t even believe in angels anyway, and the whole story all felt a little ridiculous. It was probably just another trick to get them to come back inside the walls. But they were not going to be duped. They were not going to be scared. They were not going to leave. Yet Lot’s wife persisted. “If you’re not going to come with us now, promise us you’ll run at the first sign of danger. Don’t wait a second longer. Promise me, please. Promise me.”

And off Lot and his wife and their two youngest daughters went. They ran out beyond the city wall and down the road. They ran through the night and into the morning. As the sun was rising, Lot’s wife trailed behind the other three. Her run became a jog and then a walk. She looked ahead at her youngest daughters, who were moving swiftly away from danger. And then all at once, she looked back. She had to see if the rest of their family was following or if an army was coming or what terrible destruction might be approaching.

Maybe there was still something she could do for her eldest daughters. Maybe they’d see the danger in time. Maybe they’d still come running. Maybe she could help carry the children. But her youngest daughters also needed help. They weren’t safe yet. Plus, they were the ones who listened. But they were not in as much danger. And she didn’t know if she should help the people who needed it most or the people she was most able to help. And so she didn’t know if she should move forward or go back. She was stuck in paralysis.

Paralysis, a definition:

So often in life, we are stuck. Not between a rock and a hard place or in the mud or from a headlock. More often, we are stuck between two good choices. Do you want licorice or gummy bears? This toy or that one? To clean or to play? These are all good things, and sometimes you will get stuck picking between them. You won’t be able to decide whether to go north or south, left or right, up or down. You will want to pick the best option, but you won’t know how. And so you will be stuck trying to figure out what to do. This is paralysis.

Lot’s wife was in paralysis. She couldn’t decide to go forward or backwards. She stood frozen like a pillar halfway between them, her eyes looking back but her feet facing forward, not moving an inch either direction.”

Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is a similitude of God and His Son.

When I think of Abraham placing wood for a burnt offering on Isaac, seeing the trust in his son’s eyes, I think of my own son’s eyes. But then my stomach turns and my chest tightens. I don’t want to stay in that moment, or the moments that follow. Abraham binds his son, lays him on the altar, takes the knife in his hand. I want a reason to look away from that experience, replace it with some grander purpose. I want meaning to soften the edges of the story of a parent accepting the necessity of killing his own child.

Do I miss something when I rush past that discomfort? …

Is it possible that Genesis 22 is another instance of God inviting one of his children to empathize with him? James 2:23 teaches us that “Abraham believed God . . . and he was called the Friend of God.” True friendship surely involves reciprocal empathy. Abraham’s ability to reciprocate God’s love for him increased when he better understood what it was like for his friend to choose to sacrifice a child.

—Katharina Paxman, “Learning to Sit with Sacred Discomfort”

I can trust God to keep His promises.

Here, and in later chapters, we see a God who is relational—a God who can be talked to, questioned, negotiated with, and argued with. We see a God who wants to be in committed relationship with humanity, a God willingly and actively bound to another person in a covenant relationship. Notable to me is that in this relationship, God goes first; the only thing required of Abram at this point is willingness and trust. We might see here a reflection of a principle taught in the First Epistle of John—“We love [God] because [God] first loved us.”

—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”

Abraham obeyed the Lord.

I don’t think I believe in “Abrahamic tests.” An “Abrahamic test” is God asking us to do something that is in clear violation of moral law and our conscience, in order to demonstrate that our obedience is to God, and not to any deeply held sense of right and wrong.

God is saying: “You must trust and obey me, even if I ask you to do something that seems unambiguously and monstrously evil, like slitting your child’s throat.”

I need scarcely begin enumerating the evils committed in history by people who thought they were acting according to God’s command, or at least with God’s approval. Examples are numerous and usually catastrophic. They give us good reason, rooted in human experience, to distrust any notion that God might in certain instances override “moral law” just to prove he can do it.

But there’s an even better reason to question the “Abrahamic test” idea. I actually think we misread and misunderstand the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Travel back to Abraham’s time. Abraham grew up in a world in which deity was to be placated. Humans generally believed their survival and prosperity depended on staying on their god’s good side. Gods controlled things over which humans had no control—rains, floods, drought, pestilence, invasions, etc. So people often offered up a portion of their harvests or flocks, partly in gratitude but mostly to keep the gods happy and on their side.

But the gods could be fickle and unpredictable. Sometimes the sacrifices didn’t seem to be enough. How would you ever know for sure if you had offered enough to make your god happy? Better to err on the generous side, so just to make sure the gods were sufficiently appeased, many ancient cultures would offer the most valuable thing they had: human life. Men, women and children were put on the altar to appease a jealous, fickle, but powerful god.

We are given to understand that Abraham himself was nearly offered up on the sacrificial altar before his escape from Ur. And so it would have been a great disappointment, but perhaps no great surprise, when God told Abraham to do the unthinkable: kill his only son. After all, Abraham probably thought, that’s what gods sometimes require. Abraham’s god was acting just like all other gods in his world.

And so, the way we usually tell the story, Abraham proved his faith and love for God by his willingness to take a blade and slit the throat of his obedient son Isaac.

Except that he didn’t; and this was the moment history began to change.

In that very dramatic moment in which Abraham draws his knife, God sends an angel to stop him, and by stopping him, God will teach Abraham and Isaac (and the world) the most revolutionary truth of all.

“Abraham, stop! No, I am NOT the kind of God who would ask a man to murder his son.”

“I am NOT the kind of god your fathers worshipped. I am NOT capricious and vengeful and egotistical and bloodthirsty.

“I am NOT the kind of God who would ask you to do monstrous and morally repugnant things. On the contrary, I want you to learn to become moral and good.”

“I am your Father. I am merciful. I can be trusted. I love you and I love your son Isaac. I want to enter into a covenantal relationship with you.

“I’m NOT waiting on your sacrificial gifts before I will bless you. I have gifts for you now if you love me.”

And so God’s first gift to Abraham was the ram in the thicket. But that was only the beginning. God is going to show Abraham what His love is really about, blessing him so richly that, through Abraham, all of humanity would eventually be blessed.

—Bill Turnbull, “Is Abraham’s story really our story?”

Explore the covenants of obedience, sacrifice, and consecration in this episode of Sanctuary:

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

The Extraordinary Gift of Life: An exploration of covenants with George Handley

Gosh, I really can’t express how much I loved this conversation with George. It felt like a celebration of life—and an invitation to live and love it more fully. This conversation explores the five covenants we make in the temple, with particular emphasis on the first and the last: obedience and consecration. George shares his personal journey of coming…

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3 months ago · 8 likes · Cecelia Proffit

Big Questions

One of the most difficult aspects for me to reckon with when reading the Old Testament is that, while these are literary stories communicating a larger message about God, many also portray human experiences in which God appears to command or condone things I believe are deeply immoral. How can we simultaneously find devotional value and literary power in a story while strongly condemning immorality and naming what’s wrong as unequivocally wrong? Should we even try?

Such is the case with the story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in Genesis 12–22. It is a story with aspects I find deeply moving and inspiring, while also feeling morally repulsed by the enslavement and abuse of Hagar, the use of Hagar’s body to give Abraham and Sarah a child, the endangerment of Ishmael, Hagar, and Sarah by Abraham, and the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. Though I am aware that some of these actions were permitted by the culture of the time, I believe these things are wrong—even morally abhorrent. I believe God does not ask parents to kill their children (even as a test or lesson), God does not ask us to sacrifice or endanger another person even in the pursuit of a worthy goal, and abuse is never even tacitly endorsed by God.

At the same time, I find that when I zoom out and look at Genesis 12–22 as a whole story—including the hard, immoral, repugnant parts—it has the capacity to tell a compelling and moving narrative about a God who is deeply invested in deliverance and human dignity.

Let me explain what I mean.

—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”

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God will bless me for my faith and righteous desires.

Though I was a fervent woman of faith, this nightmare scene psychologically reflected the strange place I found myself after soul-suffering more than 80 cycles of infertility interspersed with miscarriages. My womb became a tomb, and I felt forsaken. The poetry of Lamentations 3 expressed my suffering, and I was tormented by the fear that this was somehow my own doing.

My years-long dark night of the soul was permeated with anxiety that God caused or allowed suffering because I deserved it. Per the evangelical theology of my upbringing, sin separates everyone from God and punitive wrath naturally follows as part of divine justice—part of God’s nature. Though I believed in the atonement of Jesus Christ, I was also taught that I could grieve God’s Spirit with my imperfect choices or lack of faith—causing the Spirit to depart. This implied that I could separate myself from God again (and again) and that I deserved suffering, whether caused or consented to by my just Creator. For me, this belief intensified inner fragmentation. I couldn’t reconcile my seemingly pure-heart desire to bear Life with the repeating death of hope or the literal death that my body carried and processed multiple times. My heart began to feel like catacombs.

Yet, as Weil articulated,

“It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. . . .

If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” . . . [and] we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God”

—Lenée Fuelling, “The Womb of Suffering”

God wants me to make and keep covenants with Him.

Notably, God’s response to Abram’s questioning is not to condemn or to withdraw the promise, but to consistently reassure and reiterate God’s promise to Abram. The account in Genesis tells us that Abram believed God (the Hebrew word denotes trust in a person or a relationship, rather than intellectual agreement), and that God counted this as “righteousness,” which we might understand as being in “right relationship” with God.

Again Abram is reminded of God’s promise to give him a land and an inheritance, and again—even in, and perhaps because of, this trusting relationship with God—Abram questions how he can know God’s promises will be fulfilled. God’s response once again is not to reprove or punish, but to recommit to Abram in a ritualized covenantal ceremony, speaking to Abram in a language he would understand.

Here, and in later chapters, we see a God who is relational—a God who can be talked to, questioned, negotiated with, and argued with. We see a God who wants to be in committed relationship with humanity, a God willingly and actively bound to another person in a covenant relationship. Notable to me is that in this relationship, God goes first; the only thing required of Abram at this point is willingness and trust. We might see here a reflection of a principle taught in the First Epistle of John—“We love [God] because [God] first loved us.”

—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”

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Abraham paid tithing.

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What should we do about money? In particular, what should we do when some people have a lot and others have a little? Wealth, and more generally our means of procuring and disposing of our material possessions, has been inextricably bound up with our desire to live a godly life since the time Adam was commanded to sacrifice the first of his flock. The C…

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Beynish Pays Tithing

Heshel was with Bishop Levy in his office one week, going over the afternoon’s appointments, when Beynish walked in, carrying a shopping bag, from which he unloaded seven large jars of schmaltz…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · James Goldberg, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and Mattathias Singh (he/him)

Jesus Christ will lead me by the hand.

When he hears you cry out in panic on that icy road, he sees the ice. He guides your hands back into a path where you have traction. And he doesn’t need to understand your self-justifications to notice when other parts of your life are spinning out of control. If you let him, he’ll always nudge you back into some stabilizing friction.

He knows when you’re sick. Long before the day when you’ll complain to him about that pain in your abdomen, he’s already trying to prepare you for the moment when doctors will perform a scan, find the tumor, share the diagnosis. You speak English and the doctors’ words will sound strange and distant even to you. God won’t tell you in words that you’ll make it through this. But it’s not language that’s going to get you through the worst times anyway. It’s someone who loves you, reaching out to take your hand.

—James Goldberg, “A Secret”

I can be a peacemaker.

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Presidents' Day in 2026

As we pause this Presidents’ Day to reflect on the legacy and weight of national leadership, we are reminded that the work of tending to our shared civic and moral life belongs not only to those in office, but to all of us. We have gathered a collection of essays that invite us to move past partisan thinking, em…

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2 months ago · Tricia Cope

Waymakers

Inspired by the skill, spirit, and the example of Jesus, Waymakers forms peacemakers through transformative training and constructive engagement with conflict.

God hears me.

I had cause to reflect on the first person to be visited by an angel in the Old Testament, the enslaved¹ woman of Abraham and Sarah, named Hagar. When Sarah is found barren, she gives her servant Hagar to Abraham, so that she may provide him with a son. When she discovers the plan has succeeded and that Hagar is pregnant, she “deals harshly” with Hagar, causing her to flee to the wilderness (Genesis 16:6, NRSV). An angel finds her in the wilderness by a fountain and assures her, “The Lord hath heard thy affliction” (Genesis 16:11, KJV). At this moment, she calls God by a different name, not the traditional one commonly found in the Old Testament. She calls him Elroi. Elroi in Hebrew means “the god who sees me.” The same God who saw Abraham and promised him that he would be the father of a great nation saw Hagar, Abraham’s slave woman, and made her the same promise.

—Grace Chipman, “I Have Called Thee by Name: Reflections from a Prison Educator”

Big Questions

One of the most difficult aspects for me to reckon with when reading the Old Testament is that, while these are literary stories communicating a larger message about God, many also portray human experiences in which God appears to command or condone things I believe are deeply immoral. How can we simultaneously find devotional value and literary power in a story while strongly condemning immorality and naming what’s wrong as unequivocally wrong? Should we even try?

Such is the case with the story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in Genesis 12–22. It is a story with aspects I find deeply moving and inspiring, while also feeling morally repulsed by the enslavement and abuse of Hagar, the use of Hagar’s body to give Abraham and Sarah a child, the endangerment of Ishmael, Hagar, and Sarah by Abraham, and the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. Though I am aware that some of these actions were permitted by the culture of the time, I believe these things are wrong—even morally abhorrent. I believe God does not ask parents to kill their children (even as a test or lesson), God does not ask us to sacrifice or endanger another person even in the pursuit of a worthy goal, and abuse is never even tacitly endorsed by God.

At the same time, I find that when I zoom out and look at Genesis 12–22 as a whole story—including the hard, immoral, repugnant parts—it has the capacity to tell a compelling and moving narrative about a God who is deeply invested in deliverance and human dignity.

Let me explain what I mean.

—Cecelia Proffit, “The God Who Sees”

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There is spiritual safety in following the Lord’s prophet. Following the Lord’s prophet will bless me and my family.

The Flood was an act of God’s mercy.

The family of Adam and Eve had grown from a neighborhood into a town into a city into a nation. They were living, and growing, and farming, and shepherding, and marrying, and having babies, and getting older and older. And when they got really old, something very sad happened. They died. And some people died even before they were old. Some people just got sick and then never got better. Others got hurt or had an accident and died very suddenly. And every time someone died, it felt terrible. Even when they were old and worn out and ready to go, it still felt so, so bad, like it wasn’t supposed to happen.

And the people began to fear death more than anything. And the fear of death made their lives feel short, like there wasn’t enough time or money or attention. They competed for food, wealth, and fame because they all wanted to be remembered forever, as if somehow that would keep them alive. And so the world filled with war and blood and, of course, death. And this made God sad because their fear of dying was only causing more death. …

—Sarah & Josh Sabey, “Noah, who tried to save everything”

God will keep His promises to me.

We live under clouds of fear. Daily life’s grind and grime wear out our bodies and souls. Wars rage on; the world changes faster and more maddeningly than we ever could have anticipated; natural disasters spread destruction; family challenges burden our hearts; loved ones grow sick; we experience gutting loss.

And yet, the light of Christ’s peace still breaks through. Because Christ loves us, because he knows fear and overcame fear, He can help us to fear not. Christ lifts us out of despair, ennui, and fear, but also meets us in our heartache, allowing us to step out of our gloom and look forward with trust in His promises. “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

—Megan Armknecht, “His Gospel is Peace”

Elder Robert M. Daines eloquently articulates, “When prophets and apostles”—and I would also include God—“talk of covenants, they aren’t like coaches yelling out from (red velvet) bleachers, telling us to ‘try harder!’ They want us to see our covenants are fundamentally about relationships. . . . They are not rules to earn [God’s] love; He already loves you perfectly. . . . Covenants are the shape of God’s embrace.”

—Travis Hicks, “My Side-by-Side God”

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As He Cleaveth Unto You

Our covenant theology contains an interesting paradox. If we’re not careful, promises made with God to bind us to him can become an internal cultural status symbol—a way of organizing ourselves into implicit hierarchies of spiritual worth and deservingness. At the same time, our covenants have the potential to free us from all external human expectation…

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7 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Peter Mugemancuro

Tokens or symbols help me remember my covenants with the Lord.

Although I didn’t see it at the time, Grandma created for us a sacred ritual with the cool caramel taste of root beer, the slow, joyful work of seeking tiny treasures, and the gentle rhythm of rosary beads sliding through her reverent fingers. In root beer, I learned that I am loved, that happy times together bond us, that a little sweetness makes things better. In sea glass, I saw that broken things can become new and beautiful, that letting our rough edges smooth isn’t something to be avoided, and that beautiful discoveries are there to be found but require patience and diligence. In the rosary, I remember that I am a part of history both sacred and familial, that girls like me are creators of meaning, that we matter, that the repetition of our story, women’s story, will never be in vain, and that our pleading, yearning, and seeking are consecrated by God. Build love, accept our Heavenly Parents’ refining hands, remember women’s vital role in faith, family, and church: these are the lessons lovingly imparted through Grandma’s rites of root beer, sea glass, and rosary. You are loved. You are redeemable. You are essential.

—Amy Watkins Jensen, “Tokens of Meaning”

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

A Faith Matters podcast for curious, open, & honest conversations as we explore and re-discover the temple together.

By Faith Matters

Following Jesus Christ is the only way to Heavenly Father. Following Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven.

I think it must have been terribly frustrating and divisive to have lived in Babel after the Lord had confounded the language of the people. The inability of those people to communicate with each other must have caused enormous discord and confusion. Perhaps today we are suffering from a similar malady—an inability to listen to, value, and understand each other. But God has not done the confounding. We have done it to ourselves.

—Kathy Kipp Clayton, “Ward Choirs”

In contrast, we see many attempting a purely upward trajectory, demarcated by performative markers. This futile path, described in scripture as “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7), is exemplified by the Pharisees of the New Testament and in the story of the Tower of Babel. Those invested in the tower tried, as many have, to get to heaven without doing the radical (and radial) soul work required. They attempted to build an outward manifestation of what they should have been cultivating inside: communion with God. Thinking they could climb to heaven, they rejected their own transformation path, their hearts, and God Themselves in the process.

—Kathryn Knight Sonntag, “Communion and Consciousness”

Soon, they thought, we will be in heaven and we will knock on God’s door and say, ‘Hello there! Can we stay with you?’” And they imagined seeing God and how he would respond. He would certainly be proud of them for finding their way back home and maybe even a little impressed.

But God was not proud of them, though he was a little impressed. Working together, they managed to build a most remarkable skyscraper. It was an architectural triumph. There was something so right about what they were doing. They were looking for heaven. And they were doing it by working together. But there was something very wrong about why they were doing it.

The whole grand endeavor was being motivated by fear. Fear of the world. And fear of death. And while they thought they were running towards God, they were running away from him as well.

Because God did not live in the sky. He was not hiding behind a cloud. Heaven was not up there at all. It was going to be built here, on the beautiful earth God had created. And so God wanted his children to stop building a ladder to climb to heaven, and to start building heaven, on the very world they were trying to escape.

God didn’t want them to fear the world, or to run away. He needed his children to face their fears. To love the world so they could help fix it. They didn’t need to run back to God, because he was coming for them.

Because heaven was not a destination in the sky, but a project. It was a community built not with bricks but with people. This big tower was getting in the way of what they ought to be building. And what they ought to be building was a community. And this community would grow sideways, not upwards.

—Sarah & Josh Sabey, “The people who ran away from the earth”

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Do All Roads Lead to Winnemucca?

Early one summer morning more than twenty years ago, a group of twelve elders left Carson City, Nevada. We had a three-hour drive through the desert to our zone conference in Winnemucca, where we hoped to arrive with plenty of time to wash our dusty cars before inspection and then listen to our mission president’s farewell address…

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9 months ago · 9 likes · Bryan Gentry

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I can help build Zion.

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Zion is not just the millennial community that greets the Savior upon His return and lives with him in peace for a millennium. Zion should come now. Zion is a physical place and a figurative community. Zion is a place of diversity and peace. In Zion, we have everlasting joy.

—Samuel Benson, “A Zion for All of Us”

Zion, ultimately, is a city of friends, but with friendships deepened by a sacramental relationality enabled by the love of Christ—an alchemy of grace where acquaintances can be transformed into kin. For Latter-day Saints, perhaps our most beautiful doctrine is that families are forever, and so are our friendships. “That same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.”

—Zachary Davis, “A Feast of Friendship”

Zion is not just a location on a map, but a way of relating to each other and to God: “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.”(Moses 7:18) … We, too, look toward Zion and yearn for a time when we as a people can “have our hearts be knit together in unity and in love towards one another.”(Mosiah 18:21) We suggest three guiding principles or practices from our field of psychology that can lead us toward Zion: proximity, empathic listening, and humility. As we focus our minds and hearts on the people of Zion, Zion becomes a way of being.

—Ben Ogles & M. Esperanza Dotto, “Facing Zion”

Jesus Christ is “the King of Zion.”

A kingdom that doesn’t look like a kingdom—this is Jesus’ favorite subject, or we might say, his favorite gag. And mirth is part of the point. Think of how he describes the kingdom as filled with little children, how he dubs James and John the “Sons of Thunder,” or how he dresses the Prodigal Son, foul-smelling and dirty, in his father’s best robe.

—James Egan, “Laughing with Jesus”

As Latter-day Saints, we believe that we will build Zion by consecrating ordinary things to the Kingdom of God—including our ordinary selves. The Kingdom is not a holy place that we find or inherit. It is an ordinary place that we make holy through our constant attention to the purpose of our existence. Our ordinary planet will become a paradise, and ordinary people will become like God. This, too, will be ordinary in the original sense of the word; it is the state of existence that has been ordained since the foundations of the world. The Zion we build will be the culmination of ordinariness, which will become a thing of great beauty and eternal wonder.

—Michael Austin, “Immanent Grace”

To change your mind—to repent—is to see this worth and potential. It is to see that everyone is a child of God. It’s to see a world where each person is deserving of forgiveness, a world where even our enemies are worthy of love, a world where we have the capacity to extend grace to all people just as God lovingly sends rain and sun on all people. This is the good news of the kingdom, a kingdom where, unlike the gospel of Augustus, everyone is a brother and a sister, independent of worldly status.

—Jon Ogden, “Finding the Gospel by Seeing Differently”

God weeps—and rejoices—for His children.

I believe that the Son and the Father weep because they refuse to look away from evil. They choose to share in our suffering. When Enoch questioned the Father for weeping, the Father asked him to look, really look, at man’s inhumanity to man. And Enoch “looked upon [the people’s] wickedness, and their misery, and wept” (Moses 7:41). Enoch had been preoccupied with the salvation of his own community. So preoccupied, in fact, that he had succeeded in creating a Zion that God had lifted into heaven. Enoch’s efforts had raised the living. But the Father had to remind him of those who had been left behind, of those who still suffered down in the dirt. In the process, Enoch learned that God’s life was not a life without suffering, because God’s love was not confined to those who loved him. He realized that to love like God meant to suffer like God.

—Jordan Watkins, “Suffering Towards Godliness”

In the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord shows Enoch a vision of “all the doings of the children of men” (Moses 7: 41). The vision is well known for its image of a God who weeps, the Restoration’s response to the question of divine passibility. There is something spiritually sobering about the fact that God’s divine nature does not spare him suffering, that part of what makes him divine is his capacity for suffering. And God’s emotional experience seems contagious to those who draw near him. In Enoch’s vision, there’s a lot of “sorrow, grief, [and] anguish” to go around.² Indeed, multiple Restoration scriptures depict the cosmos as necessarily suffused with suffering (for example, see 2 Nephi 2:11). Why is this?

One reason may be that suffering eschews the superficial. Consider that God’s weeping over his children’s (mis)use of their agency causes Enoch to weep and stretch forth his arms. We also witness that Enoch’s “heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7: 41). These are powerful, poetic metaphors for spiritual growing pains. Enoch learns in an embodied way that increased light and knowledge come at the cost of suffering (see Ecclesiastes 1:18).

Suffering in this sense has nothing to do with pain for pain’s sake. It is rather more akin to compassion (from the Latin compati, to bear or suffer with). Suffering as I mean it here would combine both (1) Lehi’s reaction to his vision—he “cast himself upon his bed” because he was so “overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen” (1 Nephi 1:7), and (2) the pillars of Alma’s covenant community, including a willingness to help others bear their burdens (see Mosiah 18). This is the kind of suffering the Savior referred to when he declared that “all these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good” (D&C 122:7), and when He gave the injunction to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees” (D&C 81:5).

—Ryan Davis, “Hie to Kolob”

[Joseph Smith] gives us the Book of Moses as a kind of an addendum, but also kind of corrective to many of the incorrect definitions, descriptions of God and his interactions that take place in the Bible.

… I and Fiona think that Moses 7 was given by direct revelation in our day in the context of trying to correct the damage done to the plain and precious truths, and so it has a higher place in our canon of inspired writ.

And so for us, the God who weeps with us and sorrows with us is the standard by which we evaluate what we think are some less than inspired depictions in scriptures.

—Terryl Givens, “So Who Wrote the Bible?”

The Lord knows that this is a place where hatred causes wars. Where greed can cause the very atmosphere of the earth to become a place where “much heat and the barrenness thereof shall go forth” (see Moses 7:8). Where when love is withheld in the name of efficiency and in the production of stuff, inequalities and injustice follow.

What is God’s actual response in this chapter? He weeps. He is heartbroken. Because in this universe of suffering, the response he wants from us is to help relieve that suffering as agents agenting on behalf of helping, succoring, mourning, and yes, weeping in the face of such cursing and suffering. Our role is the one in which goodness can, on an individual, agential, and supportive level, relieve suffering. …

I love this chapter in all its complexity. It shows us a vision of the eternities and the possibility of overcoming suffering through ministering to others, just as God does: suffering with others, weeping together with God and one another. Defining, indeed, a Zion people.

—Steven Peck, “The Lord Weeps for His Children”

God wants us to be “of one heart and one mind.”

Today our conflicts and divisions are wide and varied. Religious vs. secular, believers vs doubters, right vs. left, old vs. young, etc. There’s a strong pull to choose your team and create purity tests—to claim that those who don’t agree with you are a “them” and that only those who are on your team are pure.

But when you see yourself and others fully, you realize that there ultimately are no teams. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either,” writes Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” There is only endless complexity unfolding inside and between each of us, an ever-shifting blend of good and bad—a hope for a brighter future together.

—Jon Ogden, “There Are No Teams”

We have been called to bring forth Zion, to become “of one heart and one mind.” I don’t believe that means that we think or feel in exactly the same way, but rather we live the truth that the flourishing of one requires the flourishing of all, that we are each beloved members of God’s family, and that we are each wrapped up in the great shared story of Christ’s redemption. When we join our hands together, we can build a new City of Holiness, and in the process, find our “hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another.”

—Zachary Davis, “The Divided Mind”

The city of Enoch in the Book of Moses built a Zion community by being of “one heart and one mind” (Moses 7:18). The latter-day project of Zion began with the Lord’s command for everyone to “esteem his brother as himself” (D&C 38:24). To esteem is to respect, and the process of becoming of “one heart and one mind” begins with respecting those who differ from us. By virtue of God’s gift of agency, we are inclined to individuate and diversify. In carving out our own identities, we are engaging in the preliminary work of oneness. We need to be different so that we can choose to be one. Respect for others’ differences within the walls of Zion creates unity, not uniformity.

—Hanna Anderson Ringger, “Oil and Vinegar: The Role of Friction in Forming Zion”

We err, I think, when we see the great commandments as prescriptive statements, as though loving God and our neighbors were the purchase price of eternal salvation. The great commandments are not injunctions on how to qualify for heaven after we die, but instructions for how to build heaven while we are still on earth. The Kingdom of God is, by definition, a society in which everybody focuses their attention on God and each other—rather than on their own needs and desires. The overwhelming message of the New Testament is that we can have this society anytime we want it, but we cannot have it cheaply, because the only way to create it is to give up everything else.

—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”

Heavenly Father wants me to choose to follow Him.

Jesus Christ will come again in the last days. Jesus will come back to earth.

The twin projects of Mormonism are Zion and exaltation. It’s about creating communities here on this earth in which there’s no male or female, or rich or poor, or bond or free, or Jew and Gentile; we’re all one in Christ… And, we’re never going to solve all the problems in this life. It is why we have a lively hope in life in Christ after we die. It is why we look forward to the resurrection because we know that that’s when Christ will wipe away all our tears. And so we keep Zion and exaltation together, and we do both projects at the same time.

—Patrick Mason, “Who is the Church for?”

Moses 7 presents the consummation of the Godhead’s grand design for the universe: “We will receive them into our bosom and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made” (Moses 7:63–64). This moment of climactic (re)unification captures the ultimate achievement for which Christ labors, a community fully integrated in love and harmony, bound to each other and to their God, after a harrowing but educative journey through mortality. Zion is the goal toward which humankind, in collaboration with the Godhead, is striving. All humanity—having been battered and bruised psychologically, emotionally, and physically during their mortal sojourn—are made whole through the atonement. Zion is the concrete manifestation of a universal at-one-ment eventuating in a new world, immersed in the light of the Holy Spirit.

—Fiona Givens, “Atonement, Vengeance & the Hope of Zion”

Sin limits my ability to see, feel, and hear the things of God.

“The Bible is not merely the history of God's self-revelation to man, it is the history of the making of man capable of receiving the revelation.”¹

The limited ways in which God’s revelation comes to us is not a consequence of his silence. Slowly, we are being made capable of receiving it. There is an apprenticeship to it. As we cultivate a life of studied reflection (the “pondering” that preceded Joseph F. Smith’s great vision of the dead and Joseph’s section 76), and the “study[ing] it out” to which Oliver was commended (9:8), we prepare ourselves to be receptive to the highest influences.

—Terryl Givens, “Learning to Receive”

God calls me to do His work despite my weaknesses. God can help me do hard things.

Even as we diligently seek Christlike attributes and eschew their inverses, we must remember that such strength is grace granted to those who are humble before God. “Because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong” (Ether 12:37). Our weaknesses must be revealed for this strengthening process to start. Perhaps Kierkegaard said it best: “To need God is Man’s highest perfection.”

—Spencer Holte, “Moroni’s Grace”

The gospel of Jesus Christ was taught from the beginning.

The third covenant that we make in the temple is the Law of the Gospel. The Higher Law. The New Covenant. Jesus’s “Kingdom Manifesto.”¹ It is the only covenant that bears the shape of a cross: with it, we promise to embody the two great commandments spoken by Jesus—the vertical command “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind,” and the horizontal command “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Forming not only the heart of Christian discipleship but the very shape of the cross itself, the Law of the Gospel is an invitation to fashion our lives into a cross of love. The breathtaking invitation in this covenant quickens and expands my theological and spiritual imagination.

Jesus’s “higher law” teaching is often synonymous with his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel (5:1–7:29). This sermon, unlike any of Jesus’s other messages, is an extended monologue that contains no parables. Although many assume the intent of this “Kingdom Manifesto” is to answer the question of how one attains a secure place in a heavenly afterlife, I see Jesus turning our attention away from life after death and towards this world—here, now, in this aching masterpiece of creation, fractured and full of grace. In giving us the Law of the Gospel, Jesus is inviting us not to linger in familiar patterns of thought, but, instead, to behold with renewed minds the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in the present moment, where righteousness reveals itself in the rhythm of a life aligned with divine love.

—Jenny Richards, “Homeless Jesus”

This vision of a church that persists as a continuous thread in the world’s history, consisting of devout souls and inspired voices, finds expression again and again in our scriptures and teachings, though it has often been overwhelmed by simplistic distortions and assumptions about truth monopolies. The Lord refers to “holy men [and women]” that are unknown to most of us but not to Him; Joseph himself taught of the need to seek out the best “words of wisdom” from our textual heritage, and to “gather all the good and true principles in the world,” from every religious tradition available to us.¹ We should search for and be taught by these “voices in the wilderness,” not to corroborate what we believe but to enrich and expand and enlighten our limited perspectives.

We know—but it bears repeating—that the LDS church is one historical instantiation of a broader fullness. A narrow definition of that “fullness,” however, may have taken our minds in directions that poorly serve history and the church. The term deserves interrogation, and a broader, richer understanding of it may lead us toward new, more creative ways of conceiving of our institution and our personal engagement in God’s work.

—Terryl Givens, “The Abounding Church”

“Teach these things freely unto your children.” Heavenly Father wants parents to teach their children.

Faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, and receiving the Holy Ghost prepare me to return to God.

My search for a life in Christ requires a new kind of seeking and an entirely different orientation to my works. Works stop being a way to carry me into future grace and start being a way to orient me to present grace.

Consider baptism, one of the many works we do. I was baptized by my dad when I was eight years old. I have a photo of my baptism day, standing in front of the stake center with my family. With the summer sun in my face, I am smiling and squinting. I don’t remember much about that day. I remember a boy in my Primary class also got baptized. And I remember the water was warm. I assume that I was pleased to be making that big step. I made a choice I didn’t remotely understand. But I did it gladly.

Afterwards, I learned more about what this decision meant. I went to Primary and Young Women’s. I learned about the temple and the promises we make there and how everyone would have the chance to be baptized in either this life or the next. I tried to choose the right and sometimes chose wrong. The sacrament was a way to renew the covenants I had made at baptism. These covenants, I learned, were like a two-way contract between us and God. We made promises, and God reciprocated. We lived good lives, and God would eventually welcome us home.

Many years later, though, questions arose. What was it about baptism that made some people fit for heaven and others not? Why require such a seemingly arbitrary entrance requirement for heaven? Sure, there is deep symbolism built into baptism, but wasn’t it still just symbolism? It seemed that when all was said and done, God would be less interested in the symbol and more interested in the real thing—the transformed heart.

While these questions simmered, I heard a Jewish rabbi speak, and something became clear. While this rabbi was only tangentially speaking about covenants, he reframed them for me. He said that he was sometimes asked by people who were not Jewish, “What makes you so special?” The implication was, “What gives you the arrogance to call yourselves a chosen people?” Latter-day Saints could ask themselves this same question: among the billions of people who have lived on earth, why would God give this unique piece of saving information to just a few favorites? Who made us the teacher’s pet?

The rabbi’s response to this question was simple: God chooses those who choose Him.

This felt like a mic drop moment. It was so basic. Could it be that this was the essence of covenant? Fundamentally, it’s not about reciprocal duties, but rather, reciprocal relationship?

And could it be that at the heart of every covenant we make is this one same truth? It’s not just separate and distinct agreements made at baptism, during the sacrament, and in the temple. It’s not a legal contract with pages of clauses. It’s one promise. It’s one choice. It’s saying yes to gracing. Fundamentally, it’s not making covenants (plural), it’s living in covenant (singular). It’s living in Christ.

Baptism is not fundamentally about keeping some people out of heaven and letting others in. The symbol is an invitation. Baptism says, “Salvation is here.” Right now. Enter God’s presence and start living life as it was meant to be lived. Baptism says, “In Christ, your old self has died and your new one has risen.” Don’t wait. Enter into the divine dance now, so that when you mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those who stand in need of comfort, you will do these things differently. You will do them in Christ.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, “Gracing”

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The Fall was a necessary part of God’s plan.

Jesus Christ offers hope and redemption. Jesus Christ saves us from the Fall.

What does it mean that Adam was to “rule over” Eve?

The Proclamation… boldly claims that men and women are intended, by divine design, to be “equal partners.”

As a result, it seems increasingly obvious to me that, in our day, defending the family means rooting out our world’s misogyny.

Defending the family means defending women from both the subtle and violent forms of degradation, abuse, and marginalization that riddle our world. It means taking seriously—perhaps for the first time in the history of the world—the solemn declaration that God intends men and women to be equal partners.

In my view, this will be the defining moral issue of our generation.

—Adam Miller

Sanctuary: Discovering the Temple

Unveiling the Meaning Behind the Creation Story: A conversation with Jared Lambert

Jared Lambert is a historical linguist specializing in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. He is a former military linguist in the United States Army and previously served as the lead linguist over sacred materials for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, working directly with temple-related content. Jared holds multiple degrees acro…

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4 months ago · 7 likes · Cecelia Proffit

I need agency and opposition to grow. I can choose the right.

While in the temple one day, I understood something new through the narrative. In my own personal study I had learned that the Hebrew word אָדָם, translated as Adam, means “earthling” or “humankind.” The Hebrew word חַוָּה, or Eve, means “life,” specifically “divine life;” that is why she is the mother of all living. As I watched the narrative, I thought of how the natural man in all of us, or the Adam, chooses to stay in paradise where there is no growth because there is no discomfort. The divine life in all of us, or the Eve, chooses to receive knowledge of good and evil, even though it causes pain and suffering, because it is also the only way to find joy.

—Abigail Eve Harper, “Temples of Flesh and Blood”

“The woman made me.” “The serpent tempted me.” If we look for that paradigmatic moment, that morally instructive part of the story upon which to build our own life of discipleship, it seems to be this: Agency means the freedom to choose. If not our first, impulsive response to the world, then our response to that self we have just witnessed. And in that response, we are free to grow in a more and more godly direction until we are perfect in Christ.

—Terryl Givens, “The Primal Sin”

Satan seeks “to deceive and to blind” me.

Read an excerpt from Elizabeth’s book Fully Alive, included in Issue 4 of Wayfare, where she explores the modern temptation of acedia, or an inattention to life, and offers concrete suggestions and spiritual practices for overcoming it:

Wayfare

Attending to Life

When I pine for my phone, I can feel it on my skin, a tingle akin to a lover walking into the room. Patricia Lockwood calls it “the portal,” glowing with the promise of significance and connection. Smartphones act like the enchanted Mirror of Erised in…

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a year ago · Elizabeth Oldfield

Read more about the temptation of acedia in “Sitting in the Dark” by Duncan Reyburn, also included in Issue 4 of Wayfare:

Matthew Bowman examines the temptation to idolatry in “Spiritual Cartography”:

Martin Luther said that “whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.” Idolatry tempts you to invest a fallible and limited human idea or institution or practice with absolute faith and confidence. Idolatry is the child of certainty. It leads you to reject the possibility that you might be wrong. …

Because we worry about our own flaws, we invest power in things that we hope will protect us from failure. We project confidence, we feign certainty, we embrace righteous anger. We believe in simple answers. And then we grow vehement about defending the things we have invested in, since deep down the anxiety remains, because money or ideology or doing this thing or that won’t help you fix all the ways this world is broken. It can’t.

Idolatry destroys because it is a product of anxiety that only feeds that anxiety in turn. Idolatry is like scratching a mosquito bite; it is satisfying in the moment, but in the long run the underlying problem only grows more inflamed.

(Learn more about the sin of certainty in our conversation with Pete Enns.)

Thomas McConkie teaches us more about where sin comes from and how to follow the example of Jesus Christ in overcoming temptation in “Divine Vulnerability”:

The moment we feel intense sensations building up in our bodies, our instinct is to escape. In an effort to escape the reality of our embodied vulnerability, we often say things and do things that are harmful to ourselves and to others. We justify our actions because we feel at a deep level that if we don’t do something to escape, we’ll be overwhelmed with pain, or possibly harmed beyond repair. In a gospel context, we can understand this psychological process as the drive toward sin. … In our worst moments, we’ll justify any kind of behavior it takes to escape the specter of being swallowed alive by our core vulnerabilities. Sin in this sense is a vain but understandable attempt to avoid our deepest suffering. …

To the extent that we’re willing to not only endure but embrace our personal Gethsemanes, we curtail sin’s capacity to tempt us. After all, if we’re willing to feel absolutely every experience that the Divine consecrates for our sanctification, what need is there to act out? What power does sin have to tempt us in the end? Christ is the living incarnation of this path.

… The task is simple but difficult: Let your eye be single to God’s Glory. Let this sanctifying Light infuse the most vulnerable parts of yourself again and again. In exactly the most disturbing moments of your life, you can train yourself to open up, relax, and trust that something from beyond is making you holy.

… Every time we crash, every time we fall apart, we can stop and realize that this is an opportunity to be tender and fully embodied with this disturbance, with the most vulnerable parts of our humanity. As we do this, we discover exactly where we stand in need of healing. We feel our wounded humanity being redeemed.

“I, the Lord God … clothed them.”

In the Judeo-Christian garden story, partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil precipitates the fall and opens Adam and Eve’s eyes to their nakedness, which is to say, to their brokenness or vulnerability on the one hand and to their physical attractiveness on the other. Nakedness thus serves as an important metaphor in the biblical account for the birth of opposites, namely fear and desire. So, if opposites coming into Adam and Eve’s purview coincides with covering themselves and entering a fallen state, then, by analogy, reclaiming that former state of wholeness would suggest unlearning opposites and uncovering oneself, which is to say, experiencing a second or spiritual birth—naked as it were—and an awakening to the underlying oneness of all things.

—Tony Brown, “Fire and Water”

I suggest that the garment is neither a vestige of a magical worldview nor an arbiter of Victorian ideals of modesty; rather, its purpose is to be formative of a person’s subjectivity. It forms Latter-day Saints as consecrated individuals and forms us as followers of and in likeness to Christ, who epitomized consecration. The garment is symbolic of the veil of the temple, which is not only symbolic of Christ but is also the place in which we present ourselves before the divine. In an embodied way, we pronounce our total presence, availability, and openness to divine call, the tangible equivalent of verbal exclamations of women and men in the scriptures who played pivotal roles in salvation history by declaring, “Here I am!” Such a pronouncement is to me the essence of consecration, and I believe that the garment represents my perpetual position before the veil, reminding me that I am forever at the disposal of the divine.

—Deidre Nicole Green, “Clothing Ourselves in Christ”

God will accept my sacrifices if I offer them with a willing and obedient heart.

My chronic grief about not being a great musician makes me wonder earnestly about the disconnect between what I think God would like and what I can actually give. It occurs to me sometimes that most of what we bring to the altar is not nearly as valuable as we suppose. The difficulty of figuring out what the Lord wants from us is illustrated in Genesis by Cain’s rejected sacrifice, articulated again in Samuel’s insistence that “to obey is better than sacrifice,” and the psalmist’s recognition that “thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” The Nephites are instructed that their “burnt offerings shall be done away, for I will accept none of your sacrifices and your burnt offerings.” And just before the Saints at Kirtland are asked to give a tithe of money to build the temple, a new kind of sacrifice, they’re reminded that “all among them who know their hearts are honest, and are broken, and their spirits contrite, and are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice—yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command—they are accepted of me.”

Perhaps we need to be told exactly what to sacrifice because we aren’t very good at recognizing what is valuable. Maybe Paul’s description of gifts within the body of Christ isn’t just about other people’s gifts that we wrongly think are less worthy than our own, but about our estimation of what it is we ourselves have to offer.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary:

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked.

Maybe artistic gifts, like all the others, are useful for bringing us to the place where we can offer all that we really have to give—our brokenness, our need, our yearning to know and be known.

—Kristine Haglund, “The Beauty of Holiness”

Wayfare

Cain

From the beginning, he was willful and always wanting more. Gardener that I am, I hoped to train his nature toward stubborn love of God and desire for growing good. At first, it seemed to take— his arguments with Abel ended. He worked the land, married well, made outward offerings to the Lord. But something inside was amiss, something no mother imagi…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · Merrijane Rice

I can pray to Heavenly Father.

Wayfare

Prayer Language

We are to add est and eth to every verb, a tradition leftover from a time when the words meant dearest, love of my life. Now, they are meant to make the language holy (sacred, not secret), set apart like a sabbath. Thou art. Apparently, I shouldn’t love you the same way I love gelato or the call of a chickadee on a lonely afternoon, as if they we…

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3 years ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Darlene Young

Wayfare

Prayer

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a year ago · 13 likes · Tricia Cope

Which translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament are we using?

• The NRSV for accuracy of translation

  • The HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible offers the full text of the New Revised Standard Version as well as in-depth articles, introductions, and comprehensive notes by today’s leading biblical scholars, and the New Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV with the Apocrypha offers even more scholarly depth, commentary, and appendices.

• The NIV for bright language and moving interpretation

• The Hebrew Bible, a three-volume translation with commentary by Robert Alter, for literary power and intellectually fun footnotes

• The English-Hebrew Tanakh from the Jewish Publication Society

  • The Jewish Study Bible combines the entire Hebrew Bible—in the celebrated Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation—with explanatory notes, introductory materials, and essays by leading biblical scholars on virtually every aspect of the text, the world in which it was written, its interpretation, and its role in Jewish life.

How does one determine the best translation?

Let that question occupy us over a lifetime of study! If you have only the KJV now, enjoy that: it’s a classic translation that formed modern English and the canon as we know it today. If we can save up to purchase whatever our carefully checked favorite translation is (remember that not all translations bring value), we will enrich our study and our bookshelves over time: maybe add and use a new translation every four years? LDS scholar Ben Spackman’s blog has many smart recommendations. —BP

You can use a website like BibleGateway or BibleHub to look at a single verse in every English translation, or to read different translations side by side. Anne and Roger Pimentel did an episode of their podcast “And Yet We Believe” all about different translations of the Bible called “Other Bible Translations: We’ve Got Options,” and they also have an instagram post that gives a helpful overview of some popular choices. —CP

What resources can help make the Old Testament more accessible to children?

The Bible Storybook by Josh and Sarah Sabey (For Little Saints), also available as a podcast from Faith Matters called Scripture Stories for Little Saints, is a beautiful way to tell these stories to children (and bring fresh insights to adults!)

Other Bible Storybooks we use in our house include:

• Read Wonder Listen

• God’s Stories as told by God’s Children

• Shine On

• The Book of Belonging

• The Peace Table

• The Just Love Story Bible

• The Pilgrim Book of Bible Stories

My preference is for gender-neutral language for God, culturally appropriate illustrations (melanated skin tones), stories that are inclusive of women and girls, and no penal substitution atonement theory, so that’s reflected in my choices here. You can often read a sample story or two online, or check them out from a public library before ordering, so you can see if a particular book will be a good fit for your family.

I also like following Meredith Miller on Instagram and Substack, and I’m looking forward to her new book coming out in March called Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture. The description says it combines “creative Bible storytelling for kids, fun and engaging conversation prompts for families, and key contextual information for adults. … Each story is accompanied by historical, literary, and cultural background to help parents understand the original form, audience, and intention for the story. Meredith frames each story to help grown-ups talk with kids about how the story’s original audience would have understood it, so kids can understand the life-giving story the Bible invites us all into.” —CP

Scholar Ben Spackman, whose excellent recommendations have been shaping my study for over a decade, recommends The Bible Story Handbook for Primary-age teaching. —BP

What resources can help us focus on doctrines and principles with children and youth?

In Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From, Pastor Meredith Miller writes about how to use the Bible to primarily help children develop a trusting relationship with God (rather than to primarily teach children to obey.) She writes, “I think God, not humans, should be at the center of any story we tell to kids, the one around whom every other event or human action revolves. Every story includes a cast of characters made up of humans, God, and sometimes other aspects of creation, but when we tell a story, we should first look at how God feels, how God responds, and what attribute of God we see highlighted in this particular encounter.” You can read a short excerpt about this here, and find the book online or at your local public library. –CP

What resources will help us center women and women’s stories? Where can I find a feminist approach to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?

Check out Womanist Midrash by Wilda Gafney. “Gafney uses her own translations and offers midrashic interpretations of the biblical text rooted in the African American preaching and rabbinic traditions to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Grounded in rigorous scholarship, this volume employs solid womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Afro-Asiatic world, expanding conversations of and about biblical interpretation.”

I also like to follow comefollowme_women on Instagram—they recommend Seeing Women in the Old Testament. —CP

Seeing Women in the Old Testament by Carli Anderson, Rebekah Call, Lori L. Denning, Amy Easton, Amy H. Fisher, and Catherine Gines Taylor is terrific. —KH

For the more scholarly inclined, start with Lynn Matthews Anderson’s Dialogue classic (1994) article “Toward a Feminist Interpretation of Latter-day Scripture.” For a broader feminist reclamation of the stories of women in the Old Testament, consider Womanist Midrash. For a useful and beautiful Deseret Books resource, check out Women of the Old Testament. In no particular order, a few scholars include Janice Merrill Allred, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Claudia Bushman, Rebekah Call, Amy Easton-Flake, Maxine Hanks, Janiece Johnson, Jennifer C. Lane, Carol Lynn Pearson, Margaret Merrill Toscano, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and, of course, the Church also offers its own course outline for studying women in the scriptures. —BP

What resources will help us understand the historical context of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?

There are whole shelves devoted to this question: of course the commentary from the NRSV will more than satisfy most readers. But if you want more, why not start with a book that puts the context right next to the text? Consider (another Spackman recommendation) the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, a modern translation of the Bible that outlines at length the context behind each story.

Another excellent introduction comes from Deseret Book: Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament. —BP

The World of the Old Testament: A Curious Kid’s Guide to the Bible’s Most Ancient Stories by Marc Olson is aimed at middle grade readers (ages 9-13) but has tons of helpful information for adults, too. You can look at the first few pages (including the table of contents) here. —CP

What additional resources can help make Bible scholarship more accessible?

Hope and Healing in the Hebrew Bible offers a gentle introduction to “Gentile” scholarship on the Old Testament for Latter-day Saints. While writing with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints clearly in mind, and frequently referencing sermons and writings by General Authorities, Michael Huston introduces readers to important scholars like Walter Brueggeman, Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, Michael Coogan, and Kate Bowler. This beautifully balanced approach succeeds in its aim of showing that reading the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Tanakh through multiple interpretive traditions deepens and enriches the ways that Latter-day Saint Christians can understand these writings. He reads some familiar sections—creation, exodus, David and Bathsheba—and some that we tend to skip over—Leviticus, the story of Huldah, the Psalms—in ways that both honor and challenge conventional LDS readings. This book will reinvigorate your Sunday School preparation or perhaps even teach you how to love the Old Testament for the first time! —KH

I love Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans – “Drawing upon recent scholarship and literary analysis, Evans creatively retells our favorite Bible stories, explaining their contexts and possible interpretations, and then connects these ancient stories to our present-day ones. … Readers are invited to fall in love with Scripture all over again without checking their intellect—or their imaginations—at the door.”

The Bible For Normal People podcast and books aim to bring the best in Biblical scholarship to everyday people. They have an “adult version” of their children’s storybook God’s Stories as told by God’s Children—it’s the same content, minus the illustrations. If you’re interested in scholarship around the composition of the Bible, you can listen to (or read a transcript of) The Bible For Normal People podcast Episode 125: Pete Enns – Big Ideas that Shaped Biblical Scholarship: Julius Wellhausen and the Pentateuch for a crash course in the documentary hypothesis/source criticism/literary criticism, and check the show notes for links to even more resources.

The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler also offers some helpful insights and context; I borrowed my copy from my public library. —CP

I love the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary series. —SMG

I’ve found the YouTube videos at BibleProject quite good, especially as a starting place (billed as nondenominational, the content has an evangelical Christian leaning, which can be great for sparking reflection—“Do I agree with that statement?”) Having accessible (animated) content as a discussion starter is very helpful. For starters, they have a YouTube playlist of short videos on “How to Read the Bible.” –LF

Bible scholar Dan McClellan’s videos have often done a wonderful job catching Latter-day Saints up on the leaps made in biblical scholarship over the past 50 years. —JO

How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel offers more scholarly/academic commentary. Blair Hodges’ Maxwell Institute interview with Kugel is also wonderful.

Deseret Book recently published BYU Professor Joshua Sear’s short, accessible LDS faithful reorientation, A Modern Guide to the Old Testament. (Don’t let the title fool you: it, like much of Ben Spackman’s work, helps reorient us to read the Old Testament through nonmodern eyes.)

There are many titles that promise to make the Old Testament simpler, and I understand the instinct here but consider the opposite for a second: what if, instead of looking for simpler, we could make our approach to the Old Testament harder and healthier, more plain and more reflective? What if, instead of seeking simple answers from experts, we prayerfully asked ourselves plain and simple questions and then let our own study provide the drip-drip-drip of insights, even revelation? For that, in my opinion, we have exactly the right book, one that has probably shaped my study of the Old Testament more than any other than the text itself, BYU philosopher James Faulconer’s The Old Testament Made Harder. Its conceit is rather brilliant: it only asks questions (well informed and framed questions) and it gives no answers. Published in 2014 (before the Come Follow Me manuals), this book may be, yes, the simplest shortcut to deepening and more reflective scripture study. Recommending especially for teachers looking to prompt inspiring questions and more reflective discussion. —BP

The Maxwell Institute is also starting a weekly series where scholars reflect on the Old Testament as Latter-day Saints study it in Come, Follow Me called Old Testament Reflections.

Where can I find a timeline or graphic showing when everything happened and where to find it?

The Church has issued several resources: here’s a linear overview (without dates) for the Old Testament at the start of Come Follow Me; here’s an at-a-glance timeline as well as a more detailed chronology. All dates should be understood as approximate (especially around the mythological stories). —BP

What resources can help me understand Isaiah?

The LDS tradition offers a distinct approach to Isaiah and its relationship to restored scripture: namely, BYU religion professor and LDS philosopher Joseph Spencer has helped renew and restore understanding of Isaiah through two (of his many) scholarly books A Word in Season and The Vision of All, both of which reinterpret the words of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. How does the Book of Mormon read Isaiah? Start with a YouTube interview with the author. —BP

How to read the Bible: The Changing Cosmos and Tuesday Afternoon Tests

Beyond what to read, there is also how to read—and Wayfare editors recommend reading the actual text and then finding inspiration in it.

A good study of scripture slowly stretches us in two directions simultaneously. Our study should both (1) estrange (or defamiliarize) and (2) connect (or refamiliarize) ourselves with the meanings in scripture text.

In other words, a next-step understanding of scripture should, first, involve reading the actual text. That means not knowing all the Sunday School answers (especially in Sunday School!), actually letting the text challenge our understanding, and taking a bit more risk, curiosity, and awe in interpreting the text as our understanding of the gap animating past and present grows.

Whatever else we conclude, a close reading of the Old Testament will remind us again and again that ancient Hebrews lived more differently than Latter-day Saints do (and should). (How many Semitic-speaking Canaanite nomadic pastoralists originally from Mesopotamia enduring enslavement, conquest, and exile have you met at Cafe Rio recently?) Call this first test “the changing cosmos test”: does our approach to scripture study help us find inspiration across worlds of difference between the worlds that produced ancient scriptures and our world now reading it?

And, then, just as importantly, our study aims, second, to reconnect us back more firmly to the present world; in other words, our study succeeds when it passes what we might call “the Tuesday afternoon test”: how does our study of scripture reanimate or color how we live, say, the coming Tuesday afternoon? (We might just meet plenty of folks suffering discrimination at Cafe Rio!)

These two tests stretch us in both directions on purpose: the changing cosmos test defamiliarizes (or estranges) us from the world that produced the text because we are actually reading and understanding the text in its context, and the Tuesday afternoon test refamiliarizes (or connects) the insights from reading the text to our everyday lives here and now.

No less than heaven on earth can be found and rebuilt in the spaces opened up in such soul-stretching saving readings.

For even more from Wayfare this coming year on the Old Testament, be sure you are subscribed to Wayfare, then go to manage your subscription (wayfaremagazine.org/account) and turn on notifications for “Wayfare Theology.”

To receive Come Follow Me resource roundups from Faith Matters in your inbox, first be sure you are subscribed to the Faith Matters Substack, then go to manage your subscription (faithmatters.org/account) and turn on notifications for “Come Follow Me”.

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This business of creating is not what I originally thought. I used to picture Adam and Eve developing from the dust like some kind of abracadabra magic. I imagined creation from nothing, ex nihilo, in a specific place and time—be it 4000 BC in the Middle East or Adam-ondi-Ahman, or two million years ago in Africa. Whenever it happened, I imagined that afterwards, God wiped His hands, wrapped it all up, and then moved on to more pressing business.

No. It seems to me now that creation is more an ongoing tinkering project, a long discovery embedded in deep time—a gathering of available resources, a repurposing of the material of the world to build new forms and new bodies. It’s taken millennia for creative hands to pull together the stuff to fashion me and all my other fellow humans, not an instant. And rather than being finished, God is still in the work—a master chef, pulling from a little of this and a little of that, taking stock of ingredients from the nearby gardens, pantries, woods, and stores to add spice and flavor.

God is still creating bodies and spirits and me.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

“By mine Only Begotten I created these things.” Jesus created the earth.

For the ancient Jews, a very popular creation narrative in their part of the world would have been an Assyrian creation narrative that was about this ancient family of gods who were the only things that existed. And one was named Tiamat. And Tiamat was like a giant crocodile… and what happens is there’s a fight among this family of gods. And one of the gods, one of Tiamat’s sons, takes the top jaw and the bottom jaw and rips Tiamat in half. And one half of Tiamat becomes the earth and the other half of Tiamat becomes the sky, and the blood of Tiamat, the blood clots, are made into human beings.

Now, if you take that as your story, what does that say about the universe? The universe is about chaos. The universe is about conflict. The universe is about violence. And we are the product of chaos and violence. And that’s where we find ourselves. And I can see how that story would help people think, yeah this is a bloody messy world out there and we got thrown into the middle of it and it was bloody and messy before we got here and here we are trying to make our way through it.

Read the biblical story and what happens? It doesn’t start with a family of gods having fights, it starts with God saying let us make (there’s almost this sense of a community saying,) how about we make a beautiful earth, and it’s all good, and it’s all peaceful, nobody gets killed to make anything, there’s no bloodshed, the world is good.

Now if you just take that story, that Hebrew story, put it in conversation with the Assyrian story, I can see here’s how the Jewish people were taking the dominant story of their time and saying that story is not good enough. We need a better story than that.

—Brian McLaren, “Embracing and Challenging Scripture”

While scriptures generally focus on why the earth was created, we also learn from the restored accounts a few important things about how. As just one example, we read in the Book of Abraham that the Creation didn’t happen instantaneously or over a few short days, as many believers used to assume. We learn rather that our sense of time is quite different from the Lord’s and that the Creation took place over the course of a much longer period and in stages (see Abraham 3). This account is compatible with what we have learned from science about the age of the earth.

From the restored gospel’s creation account we learn that the earth was created out of unorganized matter. Our Creator is more a director of a symphony of life than a magician who pulls rabbits, rats, and rattlesnakes from his Creationist hat. His creative power lies in the capacity to partner continually with nature’s laws and with pre-existing chaos in order to make novelty and life possible. I believe this too resonates with what contemporary science tells us about how the universe and life on this planet have emerged.

—George Handley, “A New Story of Creation”

In the beginning, we are told, God moved upon the face of the waters, divided light from darkness, brought forth herb-yielding seed, set lights in the heavens, and created great whales and winged fowl and every creeping thing, using atoms from stars as His medium. The whole process required as much aesthetic sense as technical ability. Eventually, God’s children were set on the earth, with their own charge to create.

Immersed in grace, God’s people would follow suit. Moses would create a people chosen by God out of a people who frequently forgot Him. Noah would create a refuge from the storm. Joseph of Egypt would create family reconciliation from estrangement. Esther would create a way to save her condemned people—as would Jesus. Isaiah would create prophetic poetry that would point to truth through all ages. And Peter and Paul would create community among a hodgepodge of Jews, Greeks, and Romans, all bound by a testimony of Jesus.

In my own sphere, I occasionally emulate my creative Heavenly Parents—the Ones who fashion their grand creations from grass, pond scum, and stars. Immersed in grace, I gather orange construction paper, green grapes, Jesus Christ lizards, and whatever else I can find, recycling and repurposing the stuff of my little universe. I create a meaningful life from a jumble of days—order from chaos, light from darkness, and beauty from ashes.

One day I hope to find it all on God’s fridge—and proclaim that it was good.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

I am created in the image of God. I was created in God’s image.

I see a different God in Joseph Smith’s revelations, one more similar to the God of Genesis, who says, “Let us create.” One commentator writes, “The ‘let us’ language refers to an image of God as a consultant of other divine beings…. Those who are not God are called to participate in this act of creation…. The ‘let us make’ thus implicitly extends to human beings, for they are created in the image of one who chooses to create in a way that shares power with others.”²

—Terryl Givens, “The Abounding Church”

Just as birds and dragonflies are filling the measure of their creation by sparkling with iridescence in the sun’s light, and just as stones and strings and bells are simply themselves by making the sounds of stones and strings and bells, human beings are who they are when they are themselves. And we are most ourselves when Christ is at play in us—when we show justice, embody grace, and manifest Christ through our actions and faces. Christ plays in ten thousand places, through all of creation.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

Knowing that I have a Heavenly Mother who looks like me, who has a body maybe not exactly like mine but pretty close to mine, with all the parts that I have, and that that’s good? … It creates confidence in me, and I don’t feel the same desire to hide. To know that the functions and the parts of my body are divine gives me more appreciation, and I think that for women knowing the goodness of their bodies and the goodness of their sexual response and being able to tie that to our divine mother, that’s really powerful.

—Bonnie Young, “Sex Educated”

As children of endlessly creative Heavenly Parents, we have a birthright—the divine gift of creativity baked into our bones. Our creative possibilities, as Dieter F. Uchtdorf explained, include not just any talents that can be displayed on “a canvas or a sheet of paper.” They do not solely require “a brush, a pen, or the keys of a piano.” Rather, “creation means bringing into existence something that did not exist before—colorful gardens, harmonious homes, family memories, flowing laughter.” It’s delving into the chaos, again and again, to bring shape and meaning to whatever is without form and void.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.

In the beginning of the book of Genesis, at the end of each day of creation, God pauses and reflects on what has been created in that day and then remarks that it was good, that it’s good, it’s good, it’s good, it’s very good.

And the first thing in the Hebrew Bible that’s not good is, it’s not good for a person to be alone. And actually, there are only two times in the whole five books of Moses where something is explicitly called not good. The other time that something’s called not good is when Yitro or Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, tells Moses that it’s not good for him to try to adjudicate all of the laws on his own. So again, it’s aloneness or separating yourself from the community that’s considered to be not good.

And so the response to the awareness of how not good it is for Adam Ha-Rishon, this first person, to be alone, is of course the creation of a partner for Adam and that partner of course is Eve. And there’s this incredible Midrash, this rabbinic tradition, that tells the story about the creation of Eve.

First, the idea from the rabbis is that actually the first being was not male or female, but actually was this one being that had everything contained in one, but was lonely, and actually had two faces. There’s some artistic representations of this that maybe you’ve seen, but had two faces, both facing outward, but they couldn’t turn toward each other.

The idea that the rabbis put forward is that that being actually had to be cut in half so that they could turn and find each other, and turn toward one another with love and with tenderness and with care.

So at the end of the sixth day of creation, which was the first day that human beings were alive in the world, the sun starts to set, and the sun has never set before for these people. It’s the first day of their lives. And so they’ve never seen darkness before. And Adam starts to get really worried and he starts to weep. And then it gets darker and darker and darker as the sun’s going down and he starts to wail. And then he starts to scream. He’s really scared and he thinks that the whole world’s going to end and that it’s his fault. He must have done something wrong. And Eve comes to Adam and sits across from him. K’negedlo, it says, just sits right across from him, and holds him and weeps with him through the dark of night. She doesn’t try to make it better for him. She doesn’t say, no, it’s not your fault, or, I promise you, you’re going to get through this, because she doesn’t know either. She’s also never seen the darkness like this. But she can assure him with her presence that she will be with him as long as the darkness lasts. And then together, they welcome the new dawn when it arises.

And I really read in this the idea that one of the most important questions that we can ask in life is, who will sit and weep with us through the dark night of the soul? Who’s willing to be with us, not just on the good days, but really through the hard times too? And not to fix us, and not to give us certainties and assure us that everything’s going to be fine, but to just be in the discomfort with us, to sit in the grief with us and to help hold us just with love and care until we are able to move to the next chapter?

—Rabbi Sharon Brous, “The Amen Effect”

I am responsible for caring for God’s creations.

Beyond being simply a scientific or political necessity, the care of the earth and of our natural environment is a sacred responsibility entrusted to us by God, which should fill us with a deep sense of duty and humility. It is also an integral component of our discipleship.

—Elder Gérald Caussé, “Our Earthly Stewardship”

In these restored accounts of the Creation, we also read that there is a spiritual creation before a physical creation, making not just human beings but all plants and animals “living souls” (Moses 3:19). When we interact with plant and animal life, in other words, we are dealing with physical forms that radiate intelligence and light– God’s glory. Plants and animals are our biological and spiritual kin. Latter-day Saint understanding of the Creation, in other words, grants unusual spiritual identity and transcendent meaning to physical life.

… The history of the world records that exploitation of the earth creates and exacerbates inequality among God’s children. This is why we have such a strong mandate to use natural resources with “judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion” (see D&C 59:20) and to avoid waste so as to ensure more equitable distribution of resources (see D&C 49: 20-21). These stewardship principles are beautifully outlined and described in recent talks by Elder Steven E. Snow and Elder Marcus B. Nash. Thankfully, the Church has placed renewed emphasis on these principles, and lay members have begun to celebrate these doctrines so vital for the 21st century.

Stewardship is a way to acknowledge our own creation and our own obligation to participate responsibly in God’s ongoing creation and thereby learn to become creators ourselves.

—George Handley, “A New Story of Creation”

God blessed and sanctified the Sabbath day. The Sabbath day is holy.

God created the world in six days and saw that it was good, and on the seventh day He rested. God blessed the day and made it holy. God’s children are commanded to hallow the Sabbath day— meaning to make it holy, to consecrate or sanctify it. We are to set it apart for rest. …

The rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of the Sabbath not simply as a day without something, but with something. Toil is replaced with an almost tangible holiness. The Sabbath, he writes, “is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. . . . It is not an interlude but the climax of living.” In other words, it’s not a means to an end but an end in itself.

Other religions have places of holiness—temples, cathedrals, and mosques. But Heschel says that for the Jews who were scattered and without a home for so long, holiness was created with cathedrals of time. This set-apart time has an aura of holiness.

He writes, Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world, unless one is initiated in the appreciation of eternal life, one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come. Sad is the lot of him who arrives inexperienced and when led to heaven has no power to perceive the beauty of the Sabbath.

It’s as if Heschel learned to welcome the restful paradise of heaven into an earthly day and to see the Sabbath as a harbinger of eternity.

—Hannah Crowther, Gracing

For most of the week, my value is in what I produce and what I consume. If I’m not careful my main goal in a day becomes being impressive and competent, subtly signaling my status with the things I buy, say and post.

Sabbath is the opposite. It is a line in the sand. Today I am just a person, and a person is beyond price. Sabbath is about valuing, fighting for and fiercely guarding rest.

… I have come to see sabbath as central for my personal project of connection, with myself, with my family and community and with [God]. It’s a relational reset every week, a bulwark against the instrumentalization of relationships and the commodification of time.

And rest is, fundamentally, about being human. About recognizing our limits when advertising tells us we are limitless. It requires intention, and working out what we do actually find restorative. … Proper rhythms of real rest rather than passive leisure consumption make focus easier when we need to work, make it more likely we will find joy and flow in it when we do.

—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Attending to Life”

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I am a child of God. As a child of God, I have a divine destiny.

Once upon a time, we were born whole—magnificent and holy. As literal children of God, we were fashioned with the spark of divinity. Perfect and pure. As we grew, at times we forgot that we were “trailing clouds of glory,” as William Wordsworth wrote, and we rejected the gift of grace because we were convinced that we could do it on our own. In our suffering, we forgot both who we were and whose we were. We built up walls to separate us from God and each other. But Jesus intervened, sitting with us until we remembered—and sharing His life with us once we did.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, Gracing

Joseph Smith … gives us the Book of Moses as a kind of an addendum, but also kind of corrective to many of the incorrect definitions, descriptions of God and his interactions that take place in the Bible.

—Terryl Givens, “So Who Wrote the Bible?”

Heavenly Father has a work for me to do.

The poor will receive the kingdom of heaven. The brokenhearted will be healed. The captives will be liberated. The blind will see. The bruised will be made whole. In the ultimate sense, this is the work of atonement and reconciliation that only our Savior Jesus Christ can fully accomplish. But in the more immediate sense, the call of the Restoration is for each recipient of Christ’s redeeming love to extend that grace by co-participating with him as “saviors... on Mount Zion.”

That salvation cannot and will not wait for the next world. The restoration of God’s people is here. The restoration of God’s people is now

—Patrick Mason, Restoration

With the Lord’s help, I can resist Satan. I can resist Satan’s temptations.

In this conversation, Elizabeth Oldfield explores the concept of sin through examining the seven deadly sins. She asks, What can envy teach us about having a stable sense of self, especially in this age of social media? Is acedia, or sloth, really about attention? How can we continually recall our attention to the things we hope will shape our souls? Elizabeth demonstrates that at the end of the day, the seven deadly sins aren’t a legalistic list of ways to be in debt to God, but a loving guide for how to be in right relationship with the people around us.

Read an excerpt from Elizabeth’s book Fully Alive, included in Issue 4 of Wayfare, where she explores the modern temptation of acedia, or an inattention to life, and offers concrete suggestions and spiritual practices for overcoming it:

Wayfare

Attending to Life

When I pine for my phone, I can feel it on my skin, a tingle akin to a lover walking into the room. Patricia Lockwood calls it “the portal,” glowing with the promise of significance and connection. Smartphones act like the enchanted Mirror of Erised in…

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a year ago · Elizabeth Oldfield

Read more about the temptation of acedia in “Sitting in the Dark” by Duncan Reyburn, also included in Issue 4 of Wayfare:

Matthew Bowman examines the temptation to idolatry in “Spiritual Cartography”:

Martin Luther said that “whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.” Idolatry tempts you to invest a fallible and limited human idea or institution or practice with absolute faith and confidence. Idolatry is the child of certainty. It leads you to reject the possibility that you might be wrong. …

Because we worry about our own flaws, we invest power in things that we hope will protect us from failure. We project confidence, we feign certainty, we embrace righteous anger. We believe in simple answers. And then we grow vehement about defending the things we have invested in, since deep down the anxiety remains, because money or ideology or doing this thing or that won’t help you fix all the ways this world is broken. It can’t.

Idolatry destroys because it is a product of anxiety that only feeds that anxiety in turn. Idolatry is like scratching a mosquito bite; it is satisfying in the moment, but in the long run the underlying problem only grows more inflamed.

(Learn more about the sin of certainty in our conversation with Pete Enns.)

Thomas McConkie teaches us more about where sin comes from and how to follow the example of Jesus Christ in overcoming temptation in “Divine Vulnerability”:

The moment we feel intense sensations building up in our bodies, our instinct is to escape. In an effort to escape the reality of our embodied vulnerability, we often say things and do things that are harmful to ourselves and to others. We justify our actions because we feel at a deep level that if we don’t do something to escape, we’ll be overwhelmed with pain, or possibly harmed beyond repair. In a gospel context, we can understand this psychological process as the drive toward sin. … In our worst moments, we’ll justify any kind of behavior it takes to escape the specter of being swallowed alive by our core vulnerabilities. Sin in this sense is a vain but understandable attempt to avoid our deepest suffering. …

To the extent that we’re willing to not only endure but embrace our personal Gethsemanes, we curtail sin’s capacity to tempt us. After all, if we’re willing to feel absolutely every experience that the Divine consecrates for our sanctification, what need is there to act out? What power does sin have to tempt us in the end? Christ is the living incarnation of this path.

… The task is simple but difficult: Let your eye be single to God’s Glory. Let this sanctifying Light infuse the most vulnerable parts of yourself again and again. In exactly the most disturbing moments of your life, you can train yourself to open up, relax, and trust that something from beyond is making you holy.

… Every time we crash, every time we fall apart, we can stop and realize that this is an opportunity to be tender and fully embodied with this disturbance, with the most vulnerable parts of our humanity. As we do this, we discover exactly where we stand in need of healing. We feel our wounded humanity being redeemed.

God’s work and glory is to help me gain eternal life.

“The twin projects of Mormonism are Zion and exaltation. It’s about creating communities here on this earth in which there’s no male or female, or rich or poor, or bond or free, or Jew and Gentile; we’re all one in Christ… And, we’re never going to solve all the problems in this life. It is why we have a lively hope in life in Christ after we die. It is why we look forward to the resurrection because we know that that’s when Christ will wipe away all our tears. And so we keep Zion and exaltation together and we do both projects at the same time.”

—Patrick Mason, “Who is the Church for?”

God in the book of Moses says, Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. So what God forefronts, it seems to me in that revelation, is his actions in the world. And his actions in the world are about bringing his children exaltation and eternal life in his kingdom.

…The important thing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not it has the perfect theology that gives us the answer to everything in the world. The important thing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing God’s work in the world, and it has a necessary and vital role that God has given to it in his work in the world, and it’s trying to do that work.

And theology, that’s one of the tools that we use in doing that. But the primary purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of God’s children. It’s not to make sure that you’re never mistaken.

—Nate Oman

I lived as a spirit before I was born on earth.

Everything begins in hope. All that the Gods voiced, every hopeful “And God . . .” is followed by “. . . and it was good.” What was good was that our Heavenly Parents created a world, and in that world a garden, a garden of hope for a future of fruitfulness and fecundity, of hope for a beginning where love would expand, flow outward to fill the universe, and overflow the bounds of space. And into this garden with infinite hope and love they placed our first parents, and they called it the Plan of Happiness. As premortal beings looking down from the heavens on that beginning, our hearts were filled with boundless, borderless light and love and with immense hope for what it all meant for us. …

Ours may be the most hopeful religion in the world. With its teaching of an embedded premortal hope, with its optimistic theology of the necessity of mortality, with its promise not just of exaltation but of universal resurrection and near universal glorification, and especially with its concept of loving and infinitely patient Heavenly Parents, Mormonism constitutes the ultimate hopeful news that, as Job says, God has set his heart upon us (Job 7:17). Our Parents’ ultimate hope is that we will set our hearts on and return to them—that we will make it home, back to the birthplace of all the hopes that yearn within us.

—Bob Rees, “A Perfect Brightness of Hope”

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The Old Testament testifies of Jesus Christ. I can learn of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament.

I feel like I grew up reading scripture, being trained to look for what you’re supposed to do. Like they were sort of instruction manuals and examples of people I should live my life like. Like go be courageous like Esther, you’re supposed to have the faith of whoever, like oh go learn how to live your life from the scriptures.

And then I encountered the story of Jacob from Genesis… and when I read it I was like… nobody wants to be like him! And then the rest of the children of Israel, I was like, that’s a dumpster fire! I don’t want to read that story to my kids at night as like the hero series book!

But then I was like, wait, that actually makes me love their stories even more. Because when you read them, you’re like, there’s no hero in this story. And then it’s like, oh, exactly. The hero spot has been left open for who the true hero really is of scripture. And I started to read scripture differently. I want to look for, what do I learn about the heart and the nature and the character of God when I read. That’s my number one approach to reading scripture.

Then it became worshipful, because I read them not for instruction sake, although I think they give great advice. But my thought process is, I’m reading them for good news, not good advice.

—Dave Butler, “Infinite Ways to God”

The point of Scripture is not to tell us something. The point of Scripture is to do something. The point of Scripture is to introduce us to God and invite us to participate with God in the revelation of who and what He is. …

We probably in general do Scripture a disservice if we come into our reading of it with the expectation that it’s going to provide something like a consistent, systematic account of the nature of God and the whole of reality and our place in it. In my experience, it’s not that kind of thing.

Scripture is a kind of grab bag of thousands of years worth of often profoundly divergent descriptions of different experiences that people have had of God, both individually and collectively.

And, as scripture, it’s my responsibility to take all of those accounts seriously, but it’s my responsibility especially to take them seriously as occasions for God to reveal himself to me, not as occasions for me to simply nod my head and agree with whatever I think it says at the surface level of the text.

—Adam Miller, “Seven Gospels”

I read the Bible in the morning. It’s my founding text, the narrative I locate myself in. Its strange oblique stories act as a counterweight to the cultural soup I’m swimming in the rest of the time. It never fails to provoke, inspire or infuriate me.

I am currently reading the Bible with a group of friends. We call it “wild Bible study” because in reading and chatting together we are not after one right answer, not seeking to solve anything. I used to try to read it like this, not least because many Bible study notes do make it feel like the text is a puzzle to be solved, its vivid and dense language in need of putting into doctrinal boxes. I found that approach boring, so I stopped going to Bible studies. Now I don’t worry that there are many things I don’t understand, whole books and passages I don’t know what to do with. I don’t think either Bible reading or faith itself is about resolution. It is a lot more like poetry, drama or music, which any good teacher will tell you are not completely amenable to the question “But what does it mean?”

I want only to keep tasting it, turning it up to the light like a crystal to see just how much it holds.

—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Attending to Life”

I don’t think the Bible gives us certainty. I think it gives us a sort of a quilt of beliefs, or a diverse set of of religious expressions that span over a thousand years. And we get to enter into that. But to suggest that we’re going to derive from that certainty, is I think setting us up for a big fall.

—Pete Enns, “The Sin of Certainty”

The Bible isn’t a law book. The Bible is a library. And the value of a library is not that it tells you what to think, but that it teaches you how to think by showing you the history of people changing their thinking.

—Brian McLaren, “Embracing and Challenging Scripture”

Jesus Christ is Jehovah in the Old Testament.

Paul says the greatest picture and manifestation of the heart of God that we have is Jesus on the cross. There are pictures of his love and there are pictures of his character throughout scripture. But the one that’s nearest, Paul says, to who he is, is Jesus on the cross.

… I read 1 Samuel and I say, that does not look like the self-sacrificing God on the cross, so there’s something wrong with that picture. My understanding of it, the transmission of it, even I’d go so far as to say Samuel’s interpretation of the revelation could have been wrong. … I don’t know what it is. But what I do know is there is something I am not understanding or something wrong about that particular story. Because the construction of the Bible, there’s so much in there. Who wrote it? When was it written down? What was your source? What did they assume?

… I’m really hesitant to throw away the nature of God by a story like that. And so one I do have that is nearest and closest to the character of God is Jesus on the cross. And so I begin there always. That’s what he’s like. That’s how devoted he is to me. That’s how far he was willing to go to rescue me.

So I do see stories that contradict Jesus on the cross. And I just say, Oh, I actually am going to take Jesus on the cross as my measuring stick. I’m going to measure every story against that one.

—Dave Butler, “Infinite Ways to God”

The Lord restored many “plain and precious things” through Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith made it abundantly clear that he was not part of the evangelical tradition that was working toward a model of inerrancy. Quite the contrary…

He gives us the Book of Moses as a kind of an addendum, but also kind of corrective to many of the incorrect definitions, descriptions of God and his interactions that take place in the Bible.

It’s also the case that in very recent years, both Elder Oaks and Elder Holland have used almost identical language to say, we do not believe the scriptures are the source of ultimate truth. They both use that exact language, right? They say, the spirit is the source.

The scriptures are an imperfect reflection that is filtered through culture and history and individual fallible minds. And so I think the important thing is to approach the Old Testament with respect and with deference and with a kind of intellectual humility that we don’t have all the answers and we can’t make all the pieces fit together perfectly.

…I and Fiona think that Moses 7 was given by direct revelation in our day in the context of trying to correct the damage done to the plain and precious truths, and so it has a higher place in our canon of inspired writ.

And so for us, the God who weeps with us and sorrows with us is the standard by which we evaluate what we think are some less than inspired depictions in scriptures.

—Terryl Givens, “So Who Wrote the Bible?”

The Old Testament helps me understand my covenant relationship with God.

The greatest heresy in the history of monotheism is a misunderstanding of chosen-ness. It is the assumption that some are chosen for exclusive privilege, when in fact to be chosen by God is to be chosen for loving service. …

There’s this set of dynamic tensions that God says to Abraham. God says, I’ve chosen you to bless you and to be a blessing. I will make you a great nation, but through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed. …

The blessing is not exclusive. It’s instrumental. And that sense of being chosen, that chosen-ness, doesn’t mean that I’m better than anybody else. It means I’ve been chosen because God loves everybody. I have the privilege of trying to be a channel of of God’s love, not to people I’m superior to or separated from, but to people who God loves too.

—Brian McLaren, “Life After Doom”

I heard a Jewish rabbi speak, and something became clear. While this rabbi was only tangentially speaking about covenants, he reframed them for me. He said that he was sometimes asked by people who were not Jewish, “What makes you so special?” The implication was, “What gives you the arrogance to call yourselves a chosen people?” Latter-day Saints could ask themselves this same question: among the billions of people who have lived on earth, why would God give this unique piece of saving information to just a few favorites? Who made us the teacher’s pet?

The rabbi’s response to this question was simple: God chooses those who choose Him.

This felt like a mic drop moment. It was so basic. Could it be that this was the essence of covenant? Fundamentally, it’s not about reciprocal duties, but rather, reciprocal relationship?

And could it be that at the heart of every covenant we make is this one same truth? It’s not just separate and distinct agreements made at baptism, during the sacrament, and in the temple. It’s not a legal contract with pages of clauses. It’s one promise. It’s one choice. It’s saying yes to gracing. Fundamentally, it’s not making covenants (plural), it’s living in covenant (singular). It’s living in Christ.

—Hannah Packard Crowther, “Dancing with Christ”

Through covenants, our Heavenly Parents collaborate with us in the messy fields of life. Living covenants requires not only faith but also action and longing, even in the face of darkened belief. Covenants are an urgent invitation to hold onto God the same way he holds onto us, allowing God to continually return to us. Like the energy required to create a chemical bond between two atoms, covenants motivate us to form bonds with the people around us even when it is difficult. Covenants immerse all in Christ’s love. They are the shape of God’s embrace.

—Tyler Johnson, “Why Covenant?”

Read what other Wayfare authors have written about covenants and covenant living here.

Heavenly Father wants to make covenants with me.

I’m sure you have heard that you will make covenants. And you have probably been told that covenants are like promises. You promise to do some things, and God promises to do others. And that’s true.

So far, you have made fairly simple promises. You promised you would go to bed after one more story. You promised you would eat what I made without complaining next time. And while those are pretty small promises, you were not able to keep them. But the covenants you will make at baptism are so much bigger and so much harder. You will promise to always remember God, always stand as a witness at all times, in all things, in all places. Every thought, word, action, all turned over to God. How do you even begin to try to do that?

I don’t know. After twenty-five years of trying myself, I have not managed to keep the promises you are about to make. Not even close. I was baptized when I was eight, and I have been underwater ever since, drowning in commitments that I am still completely inadequate to uphold.

If you are like me, and there’s good DNA evidence to suggest that you are, then you are not going to be able to keep your covenants. You will fail. And you will fail often. You will fall flat on your pants, and then you will shake yourself off and say, “Okay, I’ll get it right this time.” But you won’t.

Instead, you will make even bigger, more impossible promises. Promises like, “I’ll give everything I have and am to God.” But you won’t do that either, even though you try really hard. And you will probably become frustrated and embarrassed. And at some point you might wonder, what is the point of making so many promises that you are never going to be able to keep?

… I think the point is that you can work and strain all your life to pay your debts, to keep your covenants. Maybe you could even manage to do it all perfectly. Read your scriptures daily, pray always, get to church ten minutes early, etc. And still you could entirely miss the point. The point of your covenants is not to fulfill a contract, or balance a checkbook, or climb your way out of a debt. The point is the relationship. The point is being God’s son.

—Sarah Perkins Sabey, “Covenants by Immersion”

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