The Lord can help me make good choices when I am tempted to sin.

No, David was not a remarkable person. But he was a remarkable king. And you are also a king. You are not one thing but many. You are goodness and badness all knit together. And to be a good king is to be still. To look inside. To breathe. To hear. To know. And when you find weaknesses, look for hidden strengths. And when you find strengths, look for camouflaged weaknesses. And always look for help. Your friends and family are not perfect. But they will still fight for you. Look for their strengths. See their goodness. Trust that God can create an army out of broken pieces. And with this army, you will face giants. And when you do, don’t look away. Even if what you see is ugly, bad, and shameful. Be like David, look and trust. Because God is great enough to deliver you and everyone else from even the worst parts of ourselves.

The gift of discernment helps me distinguish between right and wrong.

The universe is like that; we think we are evaluating, assessing the merits of the music we hear, the painting before us, the words and deeds of friends or critics. In a sense, of course, we are called upon to discern and to choose. But in another, perhaps deeper sense, we do not ourselves determine what is good or beautiful, or worthy or wrong. We are always revealing the composition of our own souls in every act of passing judgment.

—Terryl Givens, “The Weight of Water”

Usually, a tree grows its branches until the crown encounters neighboring trees of the same height. Its branches stop growing instead of entering the others’ space, creating separation lines and boundaries in the sky. Rather than encroach, the tree finds greater benefit from coexistence. Trees have a sophisticated system for measuring light and telling time. They can tell whether light is coming from the sun or being reflected off leaves. When they discern that light is being reflected off leaves, they know there’s another plant nearby and that they need to slow down growth in that direction. It’s also a way for trees to optimize light exposure for everything under the canopy.

Above all things, our Mother Tree is love expanding outside of time. Her reach is endless. Her branches extend out into the world, responsive to seasonal changes, elemental shifts, and to all of Her children. She knows how they need to grow. In the crown of the tree, we begin to see as our Mother sees (D&C 76:7–10; 1 Cor. 13:12); we walk in the way of discernment (Prov. 9:6). In all the regions of the Mother Tree, we are taught how to distinguish truth from falsehoods, reality from delusions, and to embrace that which binds through love.

We heed the Mother’s voice in our hearts that says we are one.

As we learn to trust Her more, we in turn open ourselves to greater visions of what is real and lasting. “Farther up is further in.” We descend lower and lower and ascend higher and higher to continue to discover both ourselves and Her. In this process of remaking ourselves time and time again, we sink deeper into our own humanity and ascend higher into our divinity—the one embracing the other. We learn the holy power of the interconnectedness of all things past, present, and future. As we’ve seen, Her wisdom moves us to consider life at macro and cosmic levels.

—Kathryn Knight Sonntag, “Crown”

In the end, Solomon died and was buried. And worms and roots ate his flesh. And on top of his grave grew a few lily flowers. And they were more beautiful than any of Solomon’s palace rooms, or his throne, or his clothing. And before he died, he wrote one last proverb for the people to remember him by. And if he had a tombstone, he would have had this written across the front. Because it was the truest and wisest thing he ever wrote:

After everything I have learned and done, after gaining all the wisdom of God and spoiling it on myself, I have one conclusion: Obey God.

And he was right. Because ultimately, at the end of everything, God wants our hearts, not our minds. And to obey God is to serve him. And to serve him is to serve his children.

Through covenants made in the Lord’s house, the Lord dwells with me.

Find everything we’ve published in Wayfare on the temple experience here.

But according to Doctrine and Covenants 93, the idea of worship is more than just the location itself—it is understanding who God is and believing that we, too, can actually become all that he is. The crux of the section occurs in D&C 93:19, stating that we “may know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time, receive of his fullness.” Suddenly, mortality is more than Plato’s cave, where we are only able to glimpse the shadows and flickers of a life beyond this one. Rather, worship is an act of unalloyed submission toward God because we know that he can thrust us to heights that our finite minds cannot imagine.

—Sarah Shumway Day, “Lending a Child to the Lord”

Find everything we’ve published in Wayfare on covenants here.

The primary work of LDS rituals is to invite us into relationships. Sometimes the word Church members use to describe these relationships is “covenant,” a term that can feel archaic and even legal. Church members often talk about “covenants” as though they are contracts in which each signatory promises something contingent upon the performance of the other, as though the relationship with God established in the temple endowment ceremony is comparable to executing a mortgage agreement.

But I think that sort of interpretation reflects, again, the world of shopping and commerce modern Americans are used to, when in fact the implication of the rituals themselves points less to commercial contracts, in which two people exchange something, than to the establishment of kinships, which are personal relationships that cannot be obliterated even when one party behaves badly. All throughout scripture, after all, God declares that his covenant with his people will never be canceled even if the people violate it. Isaiah 54:10, for instance:

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.

The rituals of Latter-day Saint worship, I think, point us in this direction. They don’t exist to give us information that we need to better fulfill a contract. Instead, they invite us to behave as though we are always already in relationships in which we give to each other out of care and kinship.

—Matthew Bowman, “Rituals of Becoming”

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

“His heart was not perfect with the Lord.”

But as we still our hands and close our eyes during prayer, we are reminded that some of life’s most magnificent truths cannot be articulated. The ineffable will always remain irreplaceable; many of the things that matter most can only be understood, as the Little Prince once reminded us, as matters of the heart. Even if our hope is to make meaning of the information that flows into us unendingly from the digital world around us, we must make space away from those incessant inputs if we are to have hope of finding truth or meaning. Especially in a world where attention has been commodified, balkanized, and monetized, closing my eyes can represent a powerful and purposeful declaration that not all of my attention is for sale. Some sacred precincts of my heart and soul cannot be bought or sold on the open digital market; some private inner sanctum remains available only to me and to God.

…In this context, the act of bowing my head during prayer is a radical act of choosing the object of my devotion. Even if I can only glimpse the character of the divinity I worship, yet this is a God I can actively seek and to whom I choose to be devoted. Unlike the nameless and faceless algorithms that rule the digital universe, the God I seek to worship is a pair of Heavenly Parents who are infinitely defined by mercy, justice, hope, benevolence, and love. Thus, choosing to bow my head in deference to this definition of divinity is both a symbol of my humility before God’s love and also a manifestation of my commitment to become more loving.

—Tyler Johnson, “Form as Function”

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” writes Pope Leo in his 40,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence, “is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

It’s a stark contrast, the Tower of Babel or the City of God. As Pope Leo writes, Babel was “supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” while the City of God, by contrast, “rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones” and “rediscovers a common language—not one of uniformity, but one of communion.”

…For Cheney, the core concern around AI has to do with maintaining our individual agency, which, alluding to a Latter-day Saint scripture, he defines as “the choice to act rather than be acted upon.” This is the central sentiment of his company’s manifesto (or “doctrine,” as Cheney calls it). It’s also a sentiment I encounter frequently in different tech circles on the Wasatch Front—a sentiment I find simultaneously inspiring and troubling.

…But we might ask: What if the primary problem we’re facing is that “those who choose to act” aren’t as introspective, generous, or wise as they should be? What if the problem isn’t so much a lack of bold action, but a lack of wisdom, which weaves together the active and passive elements of agency?

…If we are going to build the City of God we must stop laying the blame primarily on communities that are slow to adapt and start calling out those who use their agency to expand their dominion against the will of others.

We must, above all, recognize that without wisdom, what we call “progress” is, in reality, its opposite—an abandoned tower to nowhere.

—Jon Ogden, “Agency Without Wisdom”

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With the help of the Lord, I can overcome any challenge.

One person with faith in Christ can make a difference.

In this conversation with Father Jim, we talk about the difference between kindness and people-pleasing, about staying connected to religious institutions that can both nourish and wound us, and why he believes doubt is a natural part of a living, growing faith. In a moment when so many public voices feel reactive and divisive, Father Jim stands in conviction without losing compassion—offering a steady, grounded wisdom that feels deeply needed right now.

Listen to our conversation with Brian McLaren on his book, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. This book is an empowering call to action and an invitation to do the kind of inner work that makes us brave in the face of real fear and uncertainty. Brian asks, “What if it doesn’t turn out? How will we face the future if things get worse instead of better?” He offers gentle encouragement to reach deeper into ourselves and find a stronger, more resilient type of hope: the kind that, as Václav Havel said, “is not the certainty that things will turn out as we wish, [but] is the conviction that some things are worth doing, no matter how they turn out.” We think this episode offers real wisdom and a fresh perspective on how we can navigate these challenging times with faith, hope, and love:

“Jonathan loved [David] as his own soul.”

Forgiveness is the sure path to peace and healing.

We need compassion, but we also need to have a way of naming when we harm other people, and we need a way of restoring. And when no one is really responsible, no one is really forgivable.

There’s this sense that no one is really responsible, but also you can’t be redeemed. There’s a gracelessness about our public conversations. There’s a gracelessness, and a resistance to the idea that anyone can really change.

The radical claim of my faith is that anyone can change. No one is beyond the reach of grace. It’s my most controversial opinion. And our desire to externalize evil from ourselves into other groups and other people means that we resist that, because “evil is out there, not within me,” is a much more comfortable position psychologically. …

I think part of the reason I want to reclaim sin and its healthy liberatory form is it might help us re-find our way back to forgiveness for ourselves and for each other.

—Elizabeth Oldfield

The Lord can give me direction.

The term “epistemic confidence” refers to a person’s confidence in their own ability to know what is true and false—they recognize themselves as having the authority to know independent of others. Anderson contends that women often lack confidence in their own knowing, as well as their own ethical commitments and practices. She observes, “Confidence as a social phenomenon, but also as a practical disposition of trust in, or faith with oneself as another, remains vulnerable to personal contingencies,” such as gender and other factors that socially shape bodies.¹ To have confidence is to be able to say “I can” in regard to knowing and acting in a way that is congruent with that knowledge; yet too often, gender and other factors of embodiment leave a person feeling that within their social context they cannot know and act in accordance with that knowledge.

Women are often at a remove from their own knowing and, as result, from acting with integrity in accordance with that knowing, precisely because they lack this epistemic confidence. They doubt even their own experiences, including spiritual ones, because they believe their knowledge and epistemic confidence must be mediated by others. As the post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly put it, “Women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.”² In order to protect not only women but all people from such detrimental circumstances, we must allow God to mediate our relationship to the Church and also recognize that just as with Hannah, sometimes it is those in power that need to re-examine their assumptions and perceptions, rather than just the less powerful people whose views may come into collision with them. If I had better understood this more than half of my life ago, I believe I would have made better decisions, ones that were more in line with my understanding of my personal revelation, and been willing to stand my ground when the legitimacy of that revelation was called into question by others with male bodies and institutional power.

—Deidre Nicole Green, “Envying Hannah”

Camille Johnson taught in the April 2023 General Conference that the yoke is a covenant relationship. The yoke is a tool with four critical elements.

The first element of a yoke is proximity, meaning closeness and familiarity. The oxen are measured and the yoke is designed to keep them comfortably near one another. The distance between the two oxen is crucial so neither loses sight of or a sense of relationship to the other. A good yoke has the element of safety; when worn correctly, the yoke protects the young ox from pulling too hard or quickly and risking injury. The weight of any one task might be too much when pulled alone, so working within a yoke protects the oxen from harm. Another crucial factor of a yoke is its ability to provide direction. The oxen can guide each other within the yoke and sense each other’s movements. When it is time to change direction, the younger ox can feel the experienced ox turn through the yoke. The final critical element of a yoke is that it is enabling; the yoke allows the oxen to do more than they could do alone. They can do the master’s work with more strength, for a longer time, at a better pace when they work together.

Covenant relationships are likewise enacted to create proximity to the Savior, safety from the harms of sin, direction and purpose, and enabling power.

—Brooklyn Miller, “Burdens and Yokes”

When I encounter a crisis in my own life, my first inclination is to put my head down and get to work—I feel like I just need to do something. However, the Lord doesn’t often give me a laundry list of things to do or fix, but more often quietly whispers, “Be still.” “Be still and know that I am God” is its own kind of action (Ps. 46:10; D&C 101:16). And sometimes it is the most difficult thing the Lord asks of us. That was true in the 1833 crisis: The Lord assured Joseph and the Jackson County Saints that in a future “day when the Lord shall come, he shall reveal all things,” but for now, their charge was to be still (101:32).

Joseph’s waiting did not paralyze him. He did what he could for the Saints in Jackson County with the information and the direction he already had. And sometimes, as we wait and lean into the darkness, we find our own answer by doing the opposite—the principle of indirection.

—Janiece Johnson, “Divine Silence and Indirection”

Good friends can be a blessing from God.

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, “A Heaven of Friends”

I find it striking that Jesus referred to himself as our friend. It signifies friendship as a holy, divine love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” he said toward the end of his earthly ministry. “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:13–14, KJV). Christ’s invitation to friendship is an invitation to see ourselves as he sees us—as worthy of love. It is also, I think, an invitation for us to see Christ as he wants to be seen—as approachable and open.

Friendship binds our selves to others through attention, care, fun, and joy. This binding is not limited to linking ourselves and others; friendship connects us to places, communities, to our pasts, and to our futures.

- Megan Armknecht, “A Heaven of Friends”

Jesus Christ is my Eternal King.

Straight out of the wilderness, before anything else, Jesus preaches the good news of the kingdom of God — a kingdom that, contrasted with the kingdom of Augustus, blesses the meek, the merciful, the hungry, the poor, and the powerless.

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

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Jesus Christ is my King.

Straight out of the wilderness, before anything else, Jesus preaches the good news of the kingdom of God — a kingdom that, contrasted with the kingdom of Augustus, blesses the meek, the merciful, the hungry, the poor, and the powerless.

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

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”

This is our origin story. We are a people who have been persecuted and mocked. But our response is not—cannot be—contempt. We were expelled from American society, and we wandered, and we built. Now, we have been called back to the society that cast us out—not to exact vengeance but to make peace, to share what our long exodus taught us about community building, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

We live in a moment when much of our public life runs on contempt. The measure of a political leader, these days, is often the fury he or she can generate against those who think differently. The Book of Mormon, read carefully, is in part a long warning about exactly this dynamic. It is the story of a people who let contempt harden into faction, faction into conflict, and conflict into collapse. And it holds out, as its most radiant counter-image, a society in which there were no “manner of -ites,” no contentions, and where “every man did deal justly one with another.”

Our apostolic leadership has named what is being asked of us. President Dallin H. Oaks, has called on us to “use the language and methods of peacemakers.” He has urged us to “moderate and unify” on contested issues, to “seek fairness for all,” and to resist the temptation to pursue total victory in our civic disputes. The historian Patrick Mason has observed that among all the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers” is unique. The others describe conditions of the soul, but this one commands an action. President Russell M. Nelson taught us that “the Savior’s … true disciples build, lift, encourage, persuade and inspire. True disciples of Jesus Christ are peacemakers.”

—Thomas Griffith and Joshua Topham, “Our Origin Story”

God calls people by prophecy to serve in His kingdom.

In the restored Church, of course, I also associate the term prophet with the president of the Church. And I wouldn’t want to claim a presidential or priestly authority that is not mine. But even if we stuck to the verb and asked if I prophesy, I would balk. In English, to prophesy is not primarily to proclaim or to call. To prophesy is to pierce through time, echoing the future before it happens. …

I don’t know what the future has in store. Ask me what the world will be like in four, forty, or four hundred years and I’ll tell you I’m no prophet. But there’s more to prophecy than prediction. Ask me what my children and grandchildren might wrestle with and it’s different. I still don’t know. But I’ll crack my heart open to feel for the possibilities.

And maybe that’s the spirit of prophecy. A weighing of the world as it was, and as it is, and as it will likely continue to be. And a turn toward the One who carried everything.

—James Goldberg, “The Spirit of Prophecy”

Once I drew lines between predictions and events like a game of connect-the-dots. But I no longer think about prophetic language as having a one-to-one correspondence between forecast and fulfillment. Now I imagine that prophets glimpse the future at times because they recognize the patterns beneath the surface of history. They see time in shadows and types. Maybe history is like a cloth being folded back and forth over underlying forms. Or maybe it’s like music. When we listen to a musical note, we’re not hearing a single pitch. We also hear overtones, a series of higher pitches with frequencies that resonate with the fundamental tone. Maybe prophets hear the music of the world better than we do.

—James Goldberg, “The Spirit of Prophecy”

“To obey is better than sacrifice.”

There’s a difference between being obedient to eternal principles, and compliance and people pleasing… And so I think it’s important to tease out doing the right thing for the right reason, and doing what someone else tells me to do, even when there’s dissonance and it doesn’t actually feel right.

It’s really distinguishing between, what does God actually want, and what does this human being understand God to want? And that’s really tricky territory for all of us. And I absolutely believe that God wants us to grow through those kinds of situations. There’s a reason that there’s dissonance—that’s where we grow, and that’s how we become godly. That’s how we become divine is by those kinds of collisions.

I think it’s really a matter of why am I doing what I’m doing? Am I doing it because it’s in line with what I believe about God and how I understand eternal truth? Or am I doing it just to check the box or stay on the safe side and not step out of line of kind of human expectations or institutional expectations. At the end of the day, that’s a really personal thing that we each need to wrestle with and determine for ourselves.

I absolutely have a strong testimony of obedience and its value. And I see that as distinct from things like compliance and people pleasing or conforming to institutional expectations.

—Deidre Green, Learning to Trust Your Own Inspiration

Are we capable of choosing selflessness over survival, compassion over indifference, sacrifice over fear? Would love, courage, and friendship endure within us if the world around us collapsed into darkness?

In a magnificent general conference talk given in October 2000, President Dallin H. Oaks sought to answer this question. In his talk “The Challenge to Become,” he emphasized that faith isn’t simply about acquiring knowledge or holding testimony. It is a call to become; to have our nature, desires, thoughts, and actions changed, rather than simply add information.

“It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become.” …

This sobering truth challenges the notion that we can simply “go through the motions” of religious life, reciting prayers without feeling, giving charity without empathy, or observing the Sabbath day without inner rest. We reject such superficiality; ours are not religions of heavenly bookkeeping, where commandments are deposits in a cosmic account. Instead, the commandments form a divine roadmap, guiding us toward our highest potential. They are the blueprint for refining our essence, polishing away impurities like selfishness, anger, or indifference, until we shine with the light of holiness.

—Jarrod Grover, “Becoming the Heart God Desires”

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”

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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4 months ago · 10 likes · Cecelia Proffit

“The Lord looketh on the heart.”

On the surface (in the kingdom of men) the poor and the meek have failed, and small things like sparrows, lilies, a pinch of yeast, and mustard seeds are essentially worthless. But in the kingdom of God, beyond the surface, these small things have tremendous worth and potential.

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”

Poisonous political rhetoric, no matter whence it comes or where it is directed, deserves such strenuous resistance because it suggests an idea that is not true. We cannot be divided into good people and bad. We are, all of us, deeply flawed, complex and contradictory. Most of us try most of the time to get things right, and most often fail to get things right, at least completely, because that is the nature of living in a complex, flawed, and fallen world. But if our membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can help to remind us that everyone we encounter in every circumstance—as well as each of the nameless and faceless people who make up the statistics with which politics so often deals—are literal children of celestial parents, then our beliefs can transform our political behavior. They can help us in this arena, too, to try to be more like Jesus. And that, at the end of the day, is what we are always called—and have covenanted—to do.

—Tyler Johnson, “From Contempt to Affection”

Wayfare

Civic Love

After years in law and public service, I often find myself haunted by a simple question: What can I do now? I no longer hold office. I don’t have the microphone. But I still feel responsible. I still care deeply about how we live together as communities and as a country. So I find myself circling back to something basic—something spiritual: What if our …

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7 months ago · 6 likes · Rich Vial

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Jesus Christ can turn tragedy into triumph.

We had lost our Rose. In that emptiness, I had also lost the God who would keep children safe, a God who could protect, a God I had been certain about. I had always prayed to a God who knew the future and could rescue, and more importantly, a God who wanted to. …

I had believed that if I obeyed, if I was good, if I worked hard, if I had enough faith, if I stayed in safe places, and if the people I loved stayed in safe places, then bad things would not happen to me or those I love. Mistakenly, I must have believed that I could control God’s blessings and ensure God’s protection with my behavior. When this idea shattered, I was left with a God who felt undeserving of my trust and love—a God who left. False ideas about God clung, like a heavy throat unwilling to clear. …

My silent, walking prayers became an act of courage—a belief that we aren’t alone, that a power exists beyond us, that this power witnesses our struggle. When I let go of God protecting everyone, God became a confidant, an inner knowing that I could trust with my worst moments. Rather than someone who didn’t help, God became someone who never leaves. Rather than someone who will prevent tragedies if we are good, God became someone walking beside every person, bearing the weight. Soon, God became the steadfast presence prompting urgent action for my neighbors—one by one (3 Nephi 11:15; 17:21). Though I used to believe God protected the righteous, now I see that God stays with the broken. As must I.

—Katie Lewis, “The Silent Vigil”

I can trust that God will guide and help me regardless of my situation.

Thus, when Jehovah brings the people to Mount Sinai and offers them a covenant relationship with him, he elaborates on his purpose behind giving Israel a covenant: “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:4–6). This, then, is the vision of the law of Moses and the Sinai Covenant: “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” The law of Moses should not be understood as a bad law, given to bad people, but was instead a way for the Lord to help Israel, then and now, to become the kind of people that he wants them to be.

Even before Jehovah gives Israel a single commandment, the Israelites affirm, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Rather than describing a people who are wicked and rebellious, Exodus begins with the depiction of a people who are willing to do anything God asks them, even before they know what that is going to be. This is an act of tremendous faith on the part of the Israelites, as they choose to put their trust in a covenant relationship with Jehovah even before they know what the parameters of that bond are going to look like. A covenant with the Lord is not intended to be transactional, where we keep God’s commandments in order to get what we want. It is instead based on our trust in a divine Heavenly Father who wants us to be like him and has prepared a plan to that end. The covenants we make today are part of the plan, and so were the covenants in ancient Israel.

—Avram R. Shannon, “God’s Trustworthiness and Becoming a Kingdom of Priests”

To receive the Lord’s help, I need to trust Him and obey His commandments.

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…

Listen now

4 months ago · 8 likes · Cecelia Proffit

I can hear and obey the voice of the Lord.

Wayfare

Envying Hannah

I don’t know about you, but some of my biggest regrets in life involve acting outside of integrity by betraying my own understanding of right and wrong. This includes discounting my own inspiration from the Spirit of God, often in deference to others. Regrettably, there have been times in my life where I have acted as though I did not take myself or my personal revelation seriously—or at least as seriously as I should have. My experiences are at least in part a result of gendered messaging around the idea that people who are embodied differently than I am can be privy to a spiritual knowledge about me, and my life, that can trump even my own self-knowing…

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2 months ago · 24 likes · 3 comments · Deidre Nicole Green

Heavenly Father hears and answers my prayers.

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

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The Lord forgives as often as I repent.

In his essay Deep Unmet Needs, Lindon Robison explores the way we respond to our needs, and how sin can be seen as “springing from unmet needs.” He uses the people in Judges to showcase that springing from our need to belong:

There are two ways we satisfy our need to belong: by fitting in or by finding our community.

Fitting in

To fit into a community, we adopt the values, customs, traditions, and objects of worship of the group we wish to join. To fit in, the children of Israel abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and worshiped other gods including Baal, Ashtaroth (Judges 2:12-13), the gods worshiped in Syria, Sidon and Moab, and the gods of the Ammonites and Philistines (Judges 10:6).

Belonging

Paul taught us not to “conform to the world” (Romans 12:2). Instead, we need to find a community where our ideal self feels at home, where we feel accepted for who we are. In the early church, some Jewish sects insisted that Gentile converts fit in by following the Mosaic law that required them to be circumcised. In contrast, Paul taught that belonging to Christ’s church, converts needed an inward circumcision of the heart, something they had already experienced (Romans 2:27-29).

You can also listen to “Repentance as Transformation,” a conversation between Thomas McConkie and Adam Miller on the Faith Matters podcast:

And listen to “Stories and Sin: A Conversation with Adam Miller,” which includes a question about how to help our kids develop a healthy relationship with these concepts:

God stands evermore at the door and knocks, even to “battering our heart,” in John Donne’s words.⁴ Yet until our heart softens, we can never expose that stony heart to that which “gives life to all things.” Spiritual death is self-imposed. In light of this litany emphasizing ourselves rather than God as the source of alienation and pain, the hardening of our own hearts—through self-loathing, disappointment, shame or guilt or stubbornness—the word repent carries new valence. It is not about “doing penance,” as the term was translated in the Latin Bible that had the monopoly on Christian understanding for 1500 years. The point is, “change your heart,” “melt those walls of iron,” “open the doors to forgiveness,” “let my love in.”

—Terryl Givens, “The Shock of Love”

I can inspire others to have faith in the Lord.

Consider the prophet’s teaching that God does not condemn someone simply because of their religious affiliation and that all will be judged according to the light and knowledge available to them. Rather than feel relief that this can serve as a “Get-Out-of-Missionary-Conversation-Free Card,” what if we offered this knowledge to the world? …

Though the gospel teaches there is one way to eternal life, the restoration expands access to that way. Every other road can eventually intersect with the strait and narrow path that leads to life, giving every child of God the opportunity to reach salvation. This knowledge means we do not need to condemn others with our warning voice, but it also does not need to pacify us into silence. Instead, it can motivate us to shout for joy as we share this mercy with everyone.

—Bryan Gentry, “Do All Roads Lead to Winnemucca?”

How can women specifically inspire others? Learn from these podcast conversations:

The Lord can work miracles when I trust in His ways. The Lord can use small things to do great work.

In his essay Tuned to the Covenant, Ryan A Davis explores the story of Gideon and his men at the well of Harod:

As a literature professor, I can’t help but notice in the story a narrative urge to induce a sense of wonder at the miraculous power of God, to remind Gideon that “with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26, NIV). I mean, what sane person would look at an opposing army described as “thick as locusts” (Judg. 6:5, NRSV) and think a force of 300 soldiers sufficient to engage? As scriptural passages go, Judges 7 is an impressive hold-my-root-beer moment precisely because God’s ways are not ours, nor are ours his (see Isaiah 55:8). So the arithmetic logic of the story is by design; the culling of the soldiers is part of the plot. We read in anticipation of the outcome of their story, just as they must have waited—perhaps with anxious faith—for the Lord to reveal the wisdom of his strategy. When they vanquish the Midianites, their faith confirmed, the narrative tension resolves. Their success no doubt brought them relief; it also provides us the psychological closure so central to the structure of stories. Thus through the magic of narrative, we are made (or at least invited) to jointly, if not coincidentally, marvel with Gideon and his soldiers at the wisdom of the Lord’s curious and counterintuitive ways.

And yet, there is a detail in the story that remains cryptic despite playing an important narrative function. If Gideon was meant to understand that without God there was no hope, and if we as readers are meant to marvel at God’s ability to work mighty miracles with a less-than-mighty force, then why did God instruct Gideon to select those soldiers who “drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs” instead of those who “got down on their knees to drink” (Judg. 7:5, NIV)? What is it about the knee-drinkers that disqualifies them, and what makes those who lap like dogs fit for Gideon’s force?

It wasn’t until I learned about the bi-hemispheric brain of birds that my confusion began to dissipate, replaced by greater light and knowledge…

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God strengthens me as I am faithful to my covenants. Keeping covenants gives me strength.

Find everything we’ve published in Wayfare about covenants here

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, “Dancing With Christ” (an excerpt from Gracing)

The final segment was a 2.5-kilometer run. Beginning the run, I felt like I had no reserves left. I jogged slowly but began to notice people around me who were walking. That sounded great to me. I didn’t want to do this in the first place, and I’ve had to deal with a bunch of dumb stuff up to this point, I reasoned. So, I think I’ve earned the right to walk for the final kilometers of this stupid triathlon.

Just as these thoughts entered my head, I noticed someone jogging beside me, matching my speed instead of passing me by. It was my bishop, who encouraged me to come in the first place.

Panting, he said, “Don’t give up just yet. I know you’re better than that. To be honest, I’m pretty tired too. But I told myself I would run the whole race. So how about you help keep me accountable? You don’t let me stop running, and I won’t let you stop running until we’ve both crossed that finish line. Deal?”

As I reflect on that triathlon all these years later, I think the power we receive from honoring our covenants is a lot like the strength and invigoration I felt while my bishop ran beside me, saying, “You can do this. I’m right here.” The role my bishop was playing is what I feel most accurately represents God’s role within a covenant relationship. Not an employer or a cheerleader but rather a collaborator. Honoring our covenants isn’t like being hired to do grunt work, but rather invited to join in the work of divinity.

—Travis Hicks, “My Side-by-side God”

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”

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The word of God can make my way prosperous.

The authority of scripture lies in the faith and hope that such an experience can be repeated again and again as we read its pages, including those that we are tempted to pass over.

- Nate Oman, “The Joys & Dangers of a Textual Faith”

Both faith and works are necessary for salvation.

Wayfare

The Rituals of Life

In the years that I was away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I served as a pastor in a Protestant denomination. Ritual, the liturgical calendar, and contemplative practices were all daily rhythms that wrapped my being in shrouds of life. As I felt called back to the Church, I feared those shrouds would unravel in tattered strands a…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Brandyn

The partnership of this dance feels to me like salvation. Understanding this, 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.

…

Works performed in response to grace are an expression of our intimate connection to God and all creation. We’re in partnership with God—in gracing.

- Hannah Packard Crowther, “Dancing with Christ”

In Matthew 7:21–23, the Lord describes a group of busy church people who say they’ve been prophesying and casting out devils and doing many wonderful works in His name. At first glance, this group appears to be doing all they can to build up Christ’s kingdom and draw others closer to Him. Yet, when they presented Him with their lengthy checklist of works, His reply wasn’t at all what we may be expecting. Rather than thanking them for their efforts or giving them credit for all their faithful service, His words were not only blunt but unbelievably shocking: He said, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

As a church member with my own list of “wonderful works,” it almost hurts to hear Jesus say that. Why in the world would He reject those who are trying to do good? Why would He call their works—the very service they said was being done in His name—iniquity? The reason He provided is simple: “I never knew you.” Or as Joseph Smith translated it, “Ye never knew me” (Matthew 7:23, footnote a).

As I pondered His words, it hit me that this is a major tipping point when it comes to all our gospel service. Notice that Jesus’s measuring line isn’t those who do church works versus those who don’t, but those in a relationship with Him versus those who aren’t. It’s a dramatic flip that turns much of our church culture completely upside down. After all, if what we usually see as righteous works can be called iniquity if they’re done apart from Him, perhaps it’s time to view our busy religious checklist in a whole new light.

According to this passage, either I seek the Lord’s direction in all my service and respond to those situations as prompted, or I’m not His servant at all. Though I’d spent countless years pursuing what I believed was important church work, this scripture showed me that I can’t safely assume He approves of all my intentions. No, I need to know Him, to hear Him, to receive direct, daily guidance straight from Him. What a tragedy if I spend my life working “in His name,” only to end up like these people—sure I’m doing His will, but ultimately being cast out of His presence!

—Jaci Wightman, “The Observant Minister”

With faith in Jesus Christ, I can experience God’s “wonders.”

And yet, we have been counseled to seek and expect miracles. By definition, a miracle is improbable and inexplicable. Logic tells us a fallen bird in a ditch cannot fly again, but hope transcends logic. “Hope is a living gift, a gift that grows as we increase our faith in Jesus Christ,” Elder Neil L. Andersen taught. Reframing hope as a gift, a divine bestowal, rather than something we have to muster ourselves from depths of personal and global struggles, makes hope seem possible. Sometimes praying for the miracle I yearn for feels like too far a leap, but I have no reservations over asking for hope—a single dandelion of brightness in the expanse of heaven’s garden of gift.

In mortality, hope often comes as a reorientation rather than a remaking—the ability to refocus on light rather than shadow. Jesus’s disciples did not escape the oppression of Roman rule or find liberation from poverty. While some experienced miraculous healings, those who followed Him were asked to give up things they loved. Many of them were executed or endured illness and imprisonment. Yet Paul proclaimed that “hope maketh not ashamed.” Peter asserted that Jesus Christ gave us all a reason for “lively hope.” Nephi encouraged followers of Christ to have a “perfect brightness of hope.” King Lamoni’s wife stubbornly insisted that while her husband showed every indication of death, he still lived. These faithful disciples’ circumstances had not been remade yet, but their eyes were turned to the Light, certain that through Christ, every shadow would one day be swallowed up.

- Loren Lemmons, “Dirty-Feathered Hope”

In a faith culture that values “bearing testimony” and the confession of certainty, we often equate spiritual depth with unwavering confidence in our shared beliefs. 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”

Obedience invites God’s power into my life.

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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4 months ago · 8 likes · Cecelia Proffit

“Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” I can choose to serve Jesus Christ.

One of the verses that for me really gets at the heart of our covenant theology is Jacob 6:5. After finishing a long sermon about God’s efforts to restore and uphold the house of Israel, Jacob invites his readers to recognize and act on divine love. He writes, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I beseech of you in words of soberness that ye would repent, and come with full purpose of heart, and cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you.” That last line—“cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you”—has always stood out to me. It reminds me of marriage (“Therefore shall a man . . . cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh”), but it’s also an urgent invitation. When I was a kid, my friends and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by asking each other to help us get up off the ground but then going completely limp when one of us grabbed the other’s hand. It’s very hard to pick someone up when they’re not pulling against you. For me this is the substance of God’s invitation: His arm may be extended and his hand stretched out still, but we need to take it and hold on intentionally if we want to make it onto our feet.

—Peter Mugemanchro, “As He Cleaveth Unto You”

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

“Be strong and of a good courage.”

The call to courage (root word cor, the Latin for heart) is not a call to charge into battle, replacing one amped-up emotion with another; it can be as simple as getting out of our amygdalas and into our hearts: vulnerably sharing our burden with a friend, sitting in the quietness of contemplation, or finding, as Peter Enns has said, a “deep trust” in God and moving forward in uncertainty.

—Tim Chaves, “The Sin of Fear”

Strength, then, does not come from clinging to an image of who we believe ourselves to be. It comes from acknowledging what we actually are—limits included—and allowing those limits to refine us. Real authenticity is not the freedom to remain unchanged, but the obligation to see who we truly are, and adjust accordingly.

—Rabbi Berel Feldman, “Tohu and Tikkun”

I must be baptized to enter the kingdom of heaven.

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 Crowther, Gracing

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“Love the Lord thy God with all thine heart.”

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. This has everything to do with how we allocate our attention.

—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”

With modern neuroscience, we understand that our hearts and minds aren’t fixed. What we do with our attention and how we train ourselves makes a difference in the way we experience the world.

And the fact that you use the word instrument there. Any of us who have learned an instrument also implies a level of practice and development.

Yes, it’s a craft. It’s a craft of the heart.

—Oren Jay Sofer & Stephen Kapp Perry, “The Craft of the Heart”

“Beware lest thou forget the Lord.”

I imagine the Savior preparing his friends for his upcoming death and departure. He knew that, although they loved him and would grieve over losing him, eventually their grief and sorrow would diminish. Their minds would return to the mundane and worldly. Human nature would make them forget. They would need a way to remember. So he gave them the sacrament. He gave them an act that symbolized him—a practice that gave them emblems, physical reminders of his body and blood, tangible tokens of the way he died, with a broken body and spilled blood. He created a time and a place and a way for them to quietly take into themselves these remembrances. He initiated a routine that would give them a way to commemorate him, honor him, reverence him regularly.

—Sunny Grames Stimmler, “In Remembrance”

Helping people in need involves generous hands and willing hearts.

I have experienced moments I can only call magical—whether sitting in the bishop’s office or at the side of a child as they fall asleep—where, almost in spite of myself, I find that the capacity that so often seems absent suddenly appears: beautiful and fully functioning. It is as if, in some instantaneous endowment of grace, I am, either because of or despite the infinitesimally little that I could do, gifted with the heart that was absent. Suddenly, blood that I did not know existed flows through a vasculature I did not know was there, bringing the life-giving oxygen of affection to people and in places I never knew I could understand or fully see. It is in these moments that I best understand what the scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus offering new life, or a new heart, or new birth, or new vision—of an understanding of a world that simply wasn't there before.

—Tyler Johnson, “Create In Me a New Heart”

The Lord invites me to choose between good and evil.

As a result, while supposedly trying to solve the problem of evil and suffering, reason can take us on a detour away from the question of how to imitate the love of God. The proper question for us is “How do I respond to suffering?” rather than “Why is there suffering?” Premodern thinkers assumed that they knew why we suffer and focused on how to respond to that suffering. Modern thinkers began by acknowledging that they didn’t know why we suffer and focused on how to resolve that ignorance. Joseph Smith’s teachings suggest that ultimately we do not know why there is evil, though we know it produces suffering. But if the question about the origin of evil and suffering has no answer, then his teaching should return us to the question of how we respond to them. …

To encounter suffering is to be called to do good without regard to the origin of suffering. As Christian theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann emphasized in the twentieth century, the trust of all Christians is that by responding to suffering in love, in imitation of Jesus, we can be recreated by the Father, made into new beings. The God of scripture, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, is a being who suffers with us, weak and vulnerable even when he has all the power there is. The human and then resurrected Jesus is the same God we see in all of scripture. Unlike the god of the philosophers, he is not a god who refuses to answer our cries, a god who, because he has a pure theoretical view of the perfect essences, has the answers to our theological conundrums but remains silent. Too often, however, when we think of God and our suffering, we do so in philosophical rather than scriptural terms. We forget that our God is who he is because he cares⁸—though, as Sam Brown reminds us, “It hurts to love us.”⁹

Given Joseph Smith’s revelations about the nature of God, persons, and the all-that-is, it seems likely that suffering and evil are inescapably aspects of all-that-is. There is no being without the possibility of suffering. Famously for Latter-day Saints, God himself suffers, and not only during his life on earth (Moses 7:28). Yet, even if suffering is inescapable and ultimately inexplicable, trusting in God means trusting that he has the power and ability to save us from sin and the resulting physical and spiritual death, whatever our suffering. God has the power to transform us into something new, to do everything he has said he will do (Alma 12:15). That means recognizing that there has been and will be evil and suffering and that we have been called to work with God by responding to them with love to repair this world and create a new world, called Zion, perhaps not a community of eternal bliss, but certainly a community of love.

—James Faulconer, “In Suffering, Love”

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.

Because of my covenants, I am part of God’s people.

Distributing the bread and water of the Lord’s Supper on trays that we hand to each other in the pews; solemnizing the promises of the endowment and the sealing ceremony through the intimate act of taking each other by the hand; eliminating the markers of distinction through a single uniform clothing in the temple.

All of these things encourage the Saints to understand themselves at the very level of the body as part of a new community separate from the world outside the ritual—a community of common commitment, kinship, and obligation. These are easy words to say. The purpose of ritual, though, is to inscribe these realities on the body.

—Matthew Bowman, “Rituals of Becoming”

Ultimately, the covenant of the Book of Mormon doesn’t just redeem the Lamanites but all the family of Lehi and Sariah and all those who have joined them (see D&C 3:17–18). . . . Because the plates and their story move both ways, they capture all the associated individuals and families not only in a chain but in chain mail, surrounded by linkages lineally and laterally, stretching in all directions. The chain-mail links include those in less traditional family situations who may not fit neatly into a conventional lineal inheritance, such as those who never married, widows and widowers, LGBTQ+ people, those who cannot have children, those who die prematurely, families who are separated, and anyone who cannot care for others. God wants all to be included in the covenant family. As Joseph Smith explains, “they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (D&C128:15).

—Sharron Harris, “The Widening Circle”

Prophets teach us about Jesus Christ.

We sustain the prophets not because of their own merits but insofar and inasmuch as they preach “the word of Christ with unshaken faith in him, relying wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save.” (2 Nephi 31:19; see also Moroni 6:4.)

Latter-day Saints are not Smithites, or Nelsonites, or even Mormonites. We are Christians. We look not to our prophets but with them to “Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”

—Patrick Mason, “Searching for Infallible Prophets?”

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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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2 months 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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2 months 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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5 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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3 months 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”

Wayfare

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

3 months 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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4 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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4 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…

Listen now

5 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…

Listen now

2 months 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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4 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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4 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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4 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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3 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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4 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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8 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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6 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”

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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…

Listen now

4 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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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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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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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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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”

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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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