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“Awake
my soul, rejoice o my heart,” said Brigham Young University-Idaho
faculty member Christine Geddes quoting Isaiah during Tuesday’s
devotional in the Hart Auditorium. Geddes, who teaches both French and Book
of Mormon classes, compared and contrasted waking up physically to waking
up spiritually.
She
began by sharing some of her son’s childhood experiences. He was a
very deep sleeper and would often walk and wander in his sleep.
Occasionally he put himself in precarious situations and was only brought
to safety when awoken or carried away by others.
“It
seems that the Lord must also go to great lengths to wake us up and save
our eternal lives. It’s amazing how frequently the scriptures use
this metaphor suggesting that we in the mortal natural man state, are
spiritually asleep and very difficult to wake up to God’s saving
realities,” she said.
“King
Benjamin, Alma, Mormon, Isaiah, Paul and others warn their people and us to
wake from an ‘endless sleep’ to a sense of our utter dependence
on the Lord; to awake from a lively sense of our guilt, to righteousness;
and to awake to a remembrance of our duty to God,” said Geddes,
citing several scriptures.
“It
is as if these servants of God ancient and modern are begging us. . . .
They want us to see things as they really are. ‘In the end, we will
have either chosen to act in accord with things as they really are or we
will have opted for the fleeting things of this world,’” she
said, quoting the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell.
Geddes
reminded students of the film “The Truman Show” and the
character’s challenge to wake up and escape the only world he ever
knew and challenged them to escape their self-created realities and
limitations.
“Could
it be, brothers and sisters, that some of us are putting stock in the vain
imaginations of an unreal world?” she questioned. “Are we
sleep-walking our way through our one chance at mortality, not realizing
that we are drowsily following popular values, fashions, attitudes and
opinions of those who never trusted or believed in God?” she asked.
“Opinions
cannot change laws or absolute truths. Opinion will never make the earth to
be flat, the sun to dim its light, God to die or the Savior to cease being
the Son of God,” said Geddes, quoting President Spencer W. Kimball.
Geddes
went on referencing C.S. Lewis and Alexander Pope making analogies to
people living in their dream worlds unknowing of the falsity thereof. She
then talked about “one of the breath-takingly beautiful realities of
the gospel of Jesus Christ...the gift of repentance.”
“Will
we wake up the enabling, healing power of the atonement in this life and
the exalting, glorifying power of the atonement in the next life?”
said Geddes.
“[God]
requires our permission and our participation in our own healing; we have to
be awake enough to believe it, awake enough to ask for it or enough to
reach out and obtain it,” she said. “I’ve got to be
actively involved in the healing process.”
Next
week’s devotional speaker will be Joseph Fielding McConkie, professor
of ancient scripture at BYU in Provo,
Utah.
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