How does God accomplish God's work? Where can I find holy places?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: March 16-22
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.
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”
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”
