Hush and I were asked to give talks last week in church. Here's mine. I'm putting it on here for my records and to share with my family, but if you gain something from it then coolio.
And because it's important, here were my outfit choices:
And this is what we ended up lookin' like.
I have 4
kids, one husband, two parents, five colors in my hair, seven siblings, 9 pairs
of boots and 1 faith. As you know if
you’re here, faith is not easy to come by.
Rosemary Wixom spoke of faith in her talk “Returning to Faith” on Sunday
morning of Conference, which I wager is the session most widely heard,
especially if you came from my family of nascence. My younger brother tells a story of entering
the mission home in the fall and on the Saturday of Conference weekend he was
mystified by all the people getting suited up in their church clothes. He couldn’t figure it out, were they going to
take sacrament to people or something? His
companion told him they were going to the Saturday Conference session, and he
scoffed in disbelief. There’s no church
on Saturdays! Whoops. We always spent Conference Saturday visiting
our grandmother and evidently the “talk radio” my dad played in the car and we
were unable to hear because the seven of us were bickering in the back seats
was actually LDS Conference.
I was,
however, raised in the LDS faith. I was
taught about Christ and about the Plan of Happiness, then called the plan of
Salvation, we were fully active and I had a fairly reasonable testimony. My religious upbringing was not unlike that
of the woman Sister Wixom discussed on Sunday morning:
She shared a
story that involved a woman who was raised in the gospel, married in the
temple, and loved to learn and discover truths.
While searching for truths her questions became harder, and so did the
answers. Sometimes there were no answers
– or no answers that brought peace. Eventually,
as she sought to find answers, more and more questions arose, and she began to
question some of the very foundations of her faith.
This story
is very familiar. Every adult who
chooses to continue in the faith of their father’s goes through a process of
owning that faith, and our faith evolves.
Perhaps it’s because I am currently living in the nexus of the LDS faith
and therefore hear more about the faith challenges of the community, but it
seems to me that many pieces of LDS history are becoming more accessible and
therefore more problematic for some members.
Most of these elements are familiar – polygamy in the early church, the
translation of the BoM, the history of the Pearl of Great Price. Even more
recent issues such as the Book of Mormon musical coming to town, all the
discussion around gay marriage, the new sizing of garments – all of these
things can be stumbling blocks to even the most faithful members of the church.
I was in the
SF bay area last week visiting my family.
One night around midnight the quiet house suddenly jarred. For those of you who have been in an
earthquake you are probably familiar with the rapid fire analysis your brain
does when an earthquake starts. First
you think, did something hit the house or was that an earthquake? A second more of shaking confirms earthquake. Then you gauge the size – is it big enough to
cause problems like the 1989 quake? Or
just a little bump? Do I need to grab
all four of my children and go outside?
Earthquakes are extremely disarming because you don’t know how serious
it is and you have to make very quick assessments. The earthquake last week was a few seconds
long and only a 3.6, which is fairly minor.
Light fixtures swing but that’s about it. The only injury was sustained by my sister
who ran to my children. She stepped on a
Lego.
When we are
plodding along in our spiritual journeys we often run into what I like to think
of as Faith Earthquakes. These are the
little shocks, the jarring bits of conflict that for some reason cause us to
stumble. Maybe something from the pulpit
rubs you the wrong way. Perhaps a member
behaves in a way that is frustrating.
Maybe it’s a lesson about families and you’re sitting there being all
single. These are our Faith
Earthquakes. Now I know that the
children are ready for Earthquakes because this week they participated in the
Great Shake- Out earthquake drill (and earthquakes hardly ever happen in Utah). They are prepared for any kind of shake-ups because
they are taught in primary that Christ brings peace and comfort.
3rd
Nephi 14 provides the counsel we need in these situations, and I want the
primary children to think of a song that talks about the exact same thing: A
wise man built his house upon a rock and the rain came down and the floods came
up and the house on the rock stood firm.
I believe
the rock in this story is Christ and the basic tenants of worshipping him:
reading the scriptures and saying prayers.
Those are the foundations of my belief and personal experience has
taught me that Christ, prayer and reading scriptures can help me through
difficult times.
When we run
into Faith Earthquakes we can take a step back and think ourselves through
them: is this an earthquake that has the
power to shake my faith? Is the earth
moving under my feet, is the sky tumbling down?
Do I need to grab my children and
flee?
Most of the
time the answer is no, this is minor and cannot shake me away from my faith. But in all of our lives at different times
the big ones inevitably come. And we
need a plan.
A few years
ago my faith was seriously shaken in a most unexpected way.
I was again
visiting my parents and staying at their home when a few police officers
knocked at our door. When I saw them I
was not alarmed, I have an older brother who used to get in trouble from time
to time and I expected it to be something related to him. He’d caused my parents a lot of grief. When they came in they told me that there had
been a car accident and that my brother Nate was dead. I’d seen Nate about a half hour before and I
told them they’d made a mistake, he was just here. But there was no mistake and the officer told
me to find my parents and siblings and let them know. I then walked up the longest staircase I’ve
ever walked to tell my dad that his eldest son was dead.
When I woke
him I told him that there was terrible news, the worst possible news about Nate
and that the police were downstairs. And
then I prayed.
My brother
was a lot of things – clever, charming and super cool. He was a pro skateboarder and
snowboarder. He was not married and had
no children. Nobody else was killed in
the accident and there were no drugs nor alcohol involved. Three years ago yesterday he was basically
just plucked from this earth.
Now we are
taught a lot of things about death and life after death and I thought I
believed and understood them. But at
this time my faith fell flat. I didn’t
know where my brother was. He had been
baptized but stopped attending church in his twenties. He wasn’t living a righteous lifestyle – he
was righteous but not righteous. My
religion tells me that he is in some version of an afterlife, but frankly my
faith had not followed that leap.
The months
following his death were a dark time for me.
How could my brother and I be headed to the same place if he had made so
many bad choices? How could life continue with one of the eight of us just
gone? What had Nate’s 37 years
meant? I wondered if Shakespeare was
right and I could not get that part of MacBeth out of my head: Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last
syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to
dusty death. Out out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury signifying nothing.” Nate’s
life had not followed the traditional plan that we are taught. Did he fail the test? What happens when your family member
fails?
It was a
pretty major faith earthquake for me. It
felt weird having his funeral in the church building where we were raised
amongst the Young Men’s teachers who had worried about him. I wondered if he had ever felt comfortable
there, being a black sheep. I wondered
how much the religion divided our family.
I doubted.
But there
was still light. There were my children
and my family, and we were in it together.
There were good friends. There
was the sun in the morning and the moon at night. There were so many blessings in my life and
the day still dawned whether or not I knew for sure where my brother was. My brother’s death was a major faith shaker,
but it wasn’t enough to shake me from Hope.
My children
still needed someone to take them to primary so that they could learn about
Christ and hope. Elder Uchdorf counsels
us to doubt our doubts. And so, with a
heart laden with questions and doubts, we continued to go to church.
Sister Wixom
shared a story from the writings of Mother Teresa. In a 1953 letter, Mother Teresa wrote: “Please
pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show
Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me. It has been like this
more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’ Ask Our Lord to give me
courage.”
Archbishop
Périer responded: “God guides you, dear Mother; you are not so much in the dark
as you think. The path to be followed may not always be clear at once. Pray for
light; do not decide too quickly, listen to what others have to say, consider
their reasons. You will always find something to help you. … Guided by faith,
by prayer, and by reason with a right intention, you have enough.”5
I like to
think of faith as a pyramid. There are
pieces of religion and truth that I do not yet know or understand about my
faith, there are holes in my pyramid.
Goethe wrote, “It is the nature of grace to fill the places that have
been empty.” That’s why I’m here – to
find a way to fill those holes and make my pyramid impervious to Faith
Earthquakes. I believe that Christ fills in those holes –
that He is the bridge over the troubled parts and that I can be strong in Him.
So I don’t
have perfect faith, but Christ said in 2nd Corinthians “My grace is
sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.” We are all far from perfect, but the
scriptures are full of imperfect people.
Jacob was a cheater. Peter had a
temper. David had an affair. Noah got drunk. Jonah ran from God. Paul was a murderer. Martha was a
worrier. Thomas was a doubter. Moses stuttered. Zaccheus was short. Abraham was old. And Lazarus was dead. That is the type of ward I want to belong to:
spiritual giants, followers of Christ despite their weaknesses, flawed people
who come to church seeking to be made whole.
The Church I want to belong to isn’t a museum for good people, it’s a
hospital for the broken and humbled.
Christ
surely has enough grace for the rest of us who come upon Faith
Earthquakes. I belong here, learning
about Christ and worshipping Him, and so do you.
In the meantime,
between now and when we know everything and are totally perfect, we have to
find what President Monson calls “Joy in the Journey” which is similar to the Japanese
concept Wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese
world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. I think this world view beautifully applies
to faith: our faiths are works in progress, continuously changing – for the
better if we nourish them, for the worse if we dwell on the things we do not
know. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
counseled “Hold fast to what you already know and stand strong until additional
knowledge comes.”9 The standing strong is the part that impresses
me most. Wabi Sabi essentially means to
find beauty in the “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.”
If
Mother Teresa could live her religion without all the answers and without a
feeling of clarity in all things, maybe we can too. And maybe we can find the beauty in our
weaknesses and imperfections because those weaknesses are where we need the
light of Christ most. “Ring the bells
that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in
everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
I bear
testimony that I need Christ to fill in all of my cracks and to carry me through
my earthquakes.
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