Playing dress-up
[Catching up on ideas that were begun but have been in limbo while so much has happened with our move]
I heard a talk at Women's Conference some years ago by Patricia Holland that has stuck with me. I have not been able to find it online--wish I could--but I do have notes that prove it happened. She said that we talk a lot about living righteously so that we can come back to our Father in Heaven, but that our purpose is not just to be with God, but to be like him. Then she asked the question: how can we become like God without spending time with him?
It's not just keeping the commandments as a to-do list, but taking in his love and his promises and drawing close to our Savior. Spend real time with him, that we may be changed by it, through deeper prayer, service, pondering, and scripture study.
Some thoughts--If our whole goal were just to be in God’s presence again, why would we have left it in the first place? We were already with God in the premortal existence, but were painfully aware that we were not like Him physically or spiritually. We wanted to be like our Heavenly Parents and knew it was going to take a lot more than just dressing up in their clothes as little children do. We needed to fill their shoes—not just clomp around in them. The Atonement reconciles us with God so that we can again be with Him and enjoy sweet association, but how sweet can that association be if we remain unchanged? The goal is not just being with God, but being like God.
I heard a talk at Women's Conference some years ago by Patricia Holland that has stuck with me. I have not been able to find it online--wish I could--but I do have notes that prove it happened. She said that we talk a lot about living righteously so that we can come back to our Father in Heaven, but that our purpose is not just to be with God, but to be like him. Then she asked the question: how can we become like God without spending time with him?
It's not just keeping the commandments as a to-do list, but taking in his love and his promises and drawing close to our Savior. Spend real time with him, that we may be changed by it, through deeper prayer, service, pondering, and scripture study.
Some thoughts--If our whole goal were just to be in God’s presence again, why would we have left it in the first place? We were already with God in the premortal existence, but were painfully aware that we were not like Him physically or spiritually. We wanted to be like our Heavenly Parents and knew it was going to take a lot more than just dressing up in their clothes as little children do. We needed to fill their shoes—not just clomp around in them. The Atonement reconciles us with God so that we can again be with Him and enjoy sweet association, but how sweet can that association be if we remain unchanged? The goal is not just being with God, but being like God.
Lots of homes with children have a dress-up box. There are costumes, sparkly princess dresses, play hats, Mom's discarded high heels, items that are pressed into the roles of wizard robes, fairy tale garb, or dancing finery, or maybe cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. The kids have a ball diving into its treasures; perhaps they jockey for who gets what and which roles they get to play, perhaps they squabble a bit over those issues, and then get into the spirit of the story they're enacting and let their imagination loose.
Then, being children, they begin to get bored, or hungry, or tired, and all the imagination-sparking fluff and sparkle gets put away in the big box in the closet until next time, and they go back to being just kids again.
I think a lot of life is like that; we have wonderful, lifting experiences with the Spirit and then let them go, getting back into our mundane duties. We are transformed in an instant by some, changed incrementally by others, and our experience depends on where we are in our lives and how our Father in Heaven sees that he may tutor us. We learn line by line--even Jesus did, he told Joseph Smith through revelation. But because of what my mother terms aptly the 'daily-ness' of life we come back to earth and soldier on--or unfortunately might get turned around towards losing those feelings.
We know that our Father in Heaven is God because "he never does vary" and there is in him "no variableness or shadow of turning." (James 1:17) His love is perfect, unwavering, and his nature is perfect. We know through modern revelation that he became perfect in the long aeons ago.
We mere mortals, on the other hand, vary a lot.
I have a friend, a fellow gospel teacher, who talks about reaching the celestial kingdom and going to God School, where we will learn and become pure and perfect at some point in eternity. Each of us will be at a unique point on that continuum when we arrive, and each of us will have great joy as the burdens and emotional/physical/etc. handicaps lift away. Light will have no blocking impediments, and sorrow will be memory only, as all is swallowed up, and lifted up, in joy.
Doesn't that sound wonderful? The instruction process will surely be superior then...but it is that simple? It's sort of like thinking that it would just be fine to let everyone get to the other side and be taught the gospel in the spirit world
There is work to do here, to become all that we possibly can, and to help lift each other up. We are here for so many reasons, and it is crucial to get the experiences of mortality. It is precisely because of the handicaps, opposition, impediments, and uncertainties that this life is a test. I think the learning we do after this life will be predicated on having had those experiences here and comprehending them better. But they will be the foundation for progression. How much more meaningful is choice in a framework of buffeting storms, rather than of sheltered calm?
But I think it matters how close we can come here to the consistency of spiritual strength; it's always a zig-zagging line, but the plummets and rises, we hope, become more frequent soaring and short termed, shallower dips in those moments when we falter, rather than crashes. Neal A. Maxwell spoke of "soul-stretching" requirements in our mortality. I had once, in the middle of a wrenching time, the answer that not only do we need to comprehend our Savior better, but we go through these things so that we will know how to succor our own spirit children someday when we watch from above. The process of experience and learning is fixed on eternal, unchangeable principles. There is no easier way. There never will be.
Christ called Joseph Smith and the brethren, in Doctrine & Covenants 93, no longer servants but friends. James referred to Abraham as the Friend of God. To be able to be received, in his mercy and grace, accounted as such even before we have become everything that Christ is, gives new awe to the invitation:
Moroni 10:32 Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.
33 And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot.
Holy, ready, and able to stand with Him in the presence of our Father, filled with light.
Doesn't that sound wonderful? The instruction process will surely be superior then...but it is that simple? It's sort of like thinking that it would just be fine to let everyone get to the other side and be taught the gospel in the spirit world
There is work to do here, to become all that we possibly can, and to help lift each other up. We are here for so many reasons, and it is crucial to get the experiences of mortality. It is precisely because of the handicaps, opposition, impediments, and uncertainties that this life is a test. I think the learning we do after this life will be predicated on having had those experiences here and comprehending them better. But they will be the foundation for progression. How much more meaningful is choice in a framework of buffeting storms, rather than of sheltered calm?
But I think it matters how close we can come here to the consistency of spiritual strength; it's always a zig-zagging line, but the plummets and rises, we hope, become more frequent soaring and short termed, shallower dips in those moments when we falter, rather than crashes. Neal A. Maxwell spoke of "soul-stretching" requirements in our mortality. I had once, in the middle of a wrenching time, the answer that not only do we need to comprehend our Savior better, but we go through these things so that we will know how to succor our own spirit children someday when we watch from above. The process of experience and learning is fixed on eternal, unchangeable principles. There is no easier way. There never will be.
Christ called Joseph Smith and the brethren, in Doctrine & Covenants 93, no longer servants but friends. James referred to Abraham as the Friend of God. To be able to be received, in his mercy and grace, accounted as such even before we have become everything that Christ is, gives new awe to the invitation:
Moroni 10:32 Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.
33 And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot.
Holy, ready, and able to stand with Him in the presence of our Father, filled with light.
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