What ordinary, extraordinary work is God doing in my life?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: April 13 - April 18
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.
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”