After their miraculous and dramatic conversion experience, Alma and the sons of Mosiah wished to spend all their days and energy teaching the truths they had learned. The sons of Mosiah refused to inherit the kingdom from their father and pleaded with him to be allowed to preach. In Alma 17:13 we read that "they separated themselves and departed one from another, trusting in the Lord that they should meet again at the close of their harvest; for they supposed that great was the work which they had undertaken."
These courageous brethren traveled and struggled for the next 14 years. Each one fell into unique circumstances. Some, such as Ammon, had great success preaching. For others, we learn in Alma 20:30 that "as it happened, it was their lot to have fallen into the hands of a more hardened and a more stiffnecked people; therefore they would not hearken unto their words, and they had cast them out, and had smitten them, and had driven them from house to house, and from place to place, even until they had arrived in the land of Middoni; and there they were taken and cast into prison, and bound with strong cords, and kept in prison for many days."
At the end of 14 years, these brethren met again with Alma on the road. Imagine what they would want to say to each other! In Alma 27:16 it is succinctly stated, "Behold, this was a joyful meeting." Perhaps this is a bit of an understatement. What do you think they had to say? What experiences would they have wanted to share? What would be the most profound and hard-earned lessons they would be eager to teach?
Brothers and sisters, just like these early Christians, we are on our own epic journeys. We left our heavenly home most likely with great excitement and more than a little nervousness. For whatever reasons, best known to our heavenly parents, we have each followed a unique path. Some have been given the most difficult of worldly circumstances, both physically and spiritually. Others of us have been placed on paths of comfort and knowledge, perhaps on paths that are so dangerously comfortable that we take the most important lessons of life for granted.
This is seeing our lives in the eternal perspective as journeys for growth, watched over by loving heavenly parents. It is a grand view which allows us to make sense of the confusion we otherwise face every time we try to find meaning in our lives. If we can keep this eternal view, then problems become challenges to be learned from rather than mountains of discouragement. Our brothers and sisters become fellow travelers rather than our competition or our enemies. If we see ourselves in this grand eternal view, then every chance meeting we have, such as this devotional today, is a time for excitement. This is "a joyful meeting," and I would like to spend it sharing with you, my brothers and sisters, my fellow travelers, some of what I have experienced. Much of it may not relate to your specific challenges, and, in the short time we have, much of it will seem brief or superficial; but I pray that, through the Holy Spirit, some of it will be valuable and help you on your personal voyage.
If you grew up as I did, with that curious mix of skepticism and open-mindedness of the New Englander, not really accepting anything but ready to believe everything, what would be the most remarkable aspect of Latter-day Saint philosophy that would catch your attention? What is the most profoundly soul-expanding aspect of our doctrine you can imagine? For myself it was the concept that God is our Father, not in some superficial way used in prayers and songs but in the deepest sense of fatherhood, with all that it implies about us as children. As a child of God, as unimaginable as it seems, I can become, and He wants me to become, like Him one day. If we grasp this firmly, we will gain a self-awareness and understanding that will shape every word we speak and every action we take. We will live and serve as is fitting for our potential. What other perspective could possibly take us more certainly to our fullest achievements? If I am a child of God and you are a child of God, how will we act toward one another? Can we respect one another and allow for one another's imperfections? When I was a child, I would watch my father use a hammer. I could barely lift the hammer and certainly could not pound a nail in straight, but my father could do these things with ease. He did not ridicule my weakness but cultivated it, knowing one day I would be able to use the tools he had mastered. Will we one day feel the same about those spiritual powers which seem so impossible for us to exercise today?
If I do not believe in God, what then? We learn in 1 Corinthians 12:4 that "there are diversities of gifts." If you have the gift of knowing or the gift of believing those who know, hang onto and treasure that gift; do not doubt it. But what if you do not have such a gift of knowing? How can you believe? As a philosophical type, I never was an atheist. If we emphatically state that there is no God or that there is nothing beyond what we can observe with solid experiment, we could be excluding a vast reality more magnificent than anything we have imagined. That has seemed to me to be too narrow-minded. Still, I was agnostic for many years, always skeptical of those who seemed to believe without questioning. Now I realize that questioning is the very essence of our faith. Questioning is what brought Joseph Smith to prayer. Questioning, coupled with some lonely life experiences, is what brought me to experiment with my first heartfelt out-loud prayer to a God I hoped would be there. I can honestly report that life has been a whirlwind ride ever since that day. This is expressed so beautifully in Alma 32: "Now, as I said concerning faith--that it was not a perfect knowledge--even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge. But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words. Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves--It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me."[1]
Here is the great secret: faith is a choice. We choose what to believe, and from this we are also choosing how we will live. If you have a scientific mind, you might be saying, "Wait a minute, what about proof and reproducible experiments?" There are a few observations to make in this area. First, all truth should ultimately be consistent. When we have all knowledge, we will certainly find there is no contradiction between pure science and pure religion. Religion and science are complementary tools to get at what is truth. Next, if you criticize religion for its basis in faith, just what do you think science is founded upon? Science is, at its core, based upon a set of beliefs, postulates which we choose to have faith in. We run with those postulates so long as they continue to answer questions for us. Profoundly, we continue to keep our faith in those postulates even in the face of unknown and confusing discoveries. Truly, it is a limited mind that does not allow many unanswered questions to float in the background, waiting for new and expanding information. If you have some familiarity with modern physics, then you know that the most extraordinarily successful models we have--quantum theory, relativity theory, and the standard model of particle physics--have apparently irreconcilable differences, but we have faith that some broader view will one day explain both what we know and what we do not know.
If faith is a choice, then what should we choose to believe? I know of no better path to happiness than that given in the thirteenth article of faith: "We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul--We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things." This simple path of prayer and faith has proven itself over and over in my life, and I encourage you to see if it will do the same for you.
Once we choose faith, we make a discovery: that miracles are real and happen all the time. We just need to look for them. Miracles can occur on a grand scale but are also happening daily in the most common of circumstances. We simply need "eyes to see" and "ears to hear," as proclaimed by both Moses and Ezekiel.[2] Becky and I recently had a flat tire to teach us just this lesson. A flat tire after midnight over three hundred miles from home did not seem like a very good miracle, until we realized that only a few minutes before this happened, we had left the high-speed interstate highway and were now on a much safer road close to our destination. Also, just a week earlier, after first having a vehicle safety inspection, we had taken the same car full of young people over a dangerous high-mountain pass, where a flat tire would have been disastrous. Miracles occur every day, if we look for them. When we see the smallest miracle in our lives, it is proof that God is still there; we are not alone or forgotten.
Now for some practical applications of all this. Suppose your life just doesn't seem to be going well. Suppose it is particularly painful for you to watch those around you who seem to have it all--success, happiness, and spirituality. Even the pictures in a Church magazine are hurtful, as they portray a family life much different from what you are experiencing or grew up with. Maybe your childhood and teenage years were stolen from you by life's circumstances or the actions of others. Maybe there are problems in front of you today that seem too large to face. What possible good are God, faith, and an eternal perspective for any of this? Where was God through all of this anyway?
The grander view of our journey, from our entrance into this life, through all its challenges, and onward to our return to our heavenly home, is what brings sense to all this confusion and prevents us from getting discouraged by the difficulties of the moment. We see that we have fellow travelers. When frustrated with yourself and others, remember that you and they are doing hard things. We can be one another's best support. We need one another and can help one another. None of us should allow ourselves or those around us to feel isolated. This requires a large measure of love and forgiveness. We must stop judging ourselves and others. Surely none of us is perfect. I see our culture fail at this in at least two profound ways: First, we compare ourselves to an imaginary picture we build of those around us. These are frail people just as we are. Those who seem so successful and popular are at heart just as uncertain, lonely, and anxious as we are. We need to cut ourselves a break and allow ourselves to be human. Second, if we are to cut ourselves a break for being human, then we must also allow others to be human. Others make mistakes, do thoughtless things, and forget their promises. God is working in their lives just as He is working in ours. Let them be imperfect, and let them still be your brothers and sisters. We must not take this trip alone. When we judge others, we forget that our habit of passing judgment may actually be a greater fault than whatever little thing it is we perceive in another. What a wonderful thing that the Lord works with all of us no matter what our flaws may be. The Lord has given great advice for both these situations: About forgiving ourselves--Mosiah 4:27: "It is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength." About forgiving others--Matthew 7:3: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Perhaps due to abuse, addictions, or family drama, we find we must separate ourselves from family members. By all means, do whatever is necessary to be safe and free from the drama which may try to imprison you and prevent your growth. This may even continue for years, but, if at all possible, try not to totally disown a parent, sibling, grandparent, or child. God is working in their lives as surely as He is working in yours. Leave the door open at least a faint crack in preserving some relationship so miracles may later become visible.
It helps in these difficulties to realize that what we see and struggle with in this lifetime, in ourselves and in others, is just the packaging for our spirits. We are not the imperfect mind and body we inhabit. Depression and anxiety are not spiritual or character flaws any more than are diabetes and bad knees. These are all part of the package we received for this journey. Mind and body, with all the shortcomings we experience, are consequences of life in this imperfect world. This is a training ground, and the flaws are our challenges. One day we will see what each of us truly is, with healed mind and body, and we will be humbled to realize how we have misjudged one another. Some who seemed outwardly to be the most flawed will be revealed as the most pure.
Even though we forgive others, care about others, and want to lift others, we do not need to be like them. If you come from a family of dysfunction and even abuse, it is particularly important to recognize the heroic role you are playing. You are looking back at all the generations before you and saying, "From this point forward, it will be different." This does not mean you will always do the right thing. A hero is not someone who always does the right thing, but a hero is someone who keeps getting up each time they are knocked down, and keeps trying. The role you are taking is to see that change occurs, starting now. We all have aspects of our family culture, sometimes quite subtle, that we can improve for the next generations.
One of the most pervasive and nearly universal problems in our family cultures centers on shame. Starting in childhood, we all begin a lifelong career of making mistakes. We break things. We say the wrong thing. We forget things. We are unkind. We are careless. Every day we manage to do this. The healthy way to go through life is to recognize our mistakes and resolve to try to do better, and then try again. Every day and every moment is a new opportunity, a fresh start. However, we have a quiet internal dialogue (and often a loud, spoken dialogue) that undoes this healthy learning process. This is the message of shame that goes beyond "Oh rats, I messed up" to "I am a bad person. I always get things wrong. I'll never be any good. Can't I do anything right?" We feed these shaming messages to ourselves and others all the time. We likely heard some of this as children and will find it hard not to use these expressions with others. This is a sneaky tool of Satan's which is keeping us from recognizing that true royal heritage that we have as literal children of God. Watch for and break this cycle whenever you can. Be that hero that breaks the cycle of shaming across the generations.
What about those mistakes we make that we can't fix? Sometimes we are so comfortable and successful in our lives that we think we can fix anything that happens. However, life has a way of shaking this out of us. Sooner or later we will make some mistake that we are helpless to fix. We make a bad choice. We do something dishonest. We hurt someone else. We break a commandment and don't see how we can ever undo the damage. What do we do to fix this? The truth is, after we have tried everything in our power, there are still some things that we cannot fix. However, this is not a time for shaming ourselves into thinking that we are horrible, evil, or bad to the core. Yes, we are human beings who make mistakes, but we are still of great worth. We are still royal children of God, and He has provided a miraculous way through the pain. This is the Atonement, perhaps the most mysterious and most wonderful part of all the wonders of our existence. Brothers and sisters, never give up. Never think there is no way out. Jesus Christ came to earth for exactly this reason: to provide a way out when we cannot find one ourselves. When things are going poorly, when we seem to have made mistakes that can never be undone, these are exactly the times for our greatest growth. These are times for a reset, for a new direction. These experiences give us the energy to change, and Jesus Christ's gift of repentance and the Atonement, one of those great unknowns we can scarcely imagine, makes the change possible.
Brothers and sisters, thank you for sharing your journey with me. I have given just a glimpse of truths that mean so much to me, about a living God who is our Father, faith that there is much more to our existence than first meets the eye, the reality of miracles, our need for one another, finding forgiveness for ourselves and others, keeping family relationships whenever possible, the importance of moving the next generation a little closer to perfection, the battle we must fight against shame, and the gift of the Atonement. I am grateful for this life and for that internal instrument we have which resonates whenever a chord of truth is played. I am grateful for our Savior and for His gift of the Atonement, which allows us to have healing hope for the future. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Alma 32:26-28
[2] Deuteronomy 29:4; Ezekiel 12:2