Chapter 47: The Dot

 BLAAAH!

That was a jump scare, just so you know.

If you ever don’t know how to greet someone, just hide as you see them approaching and jump out at them. It’ll usually go over very well, I promise.

Another week gone by! This one wasn’t especially extraordinary, unless my brain is hiding some explosive events from me. I’m just cruising along with my assignments and can’t wait for the temple to reopen. I’ve got three quick highlights.

1. I got to join a multi-family FHE last night and teach a lesson on baptism for one of the kids who recently turned eight. Pretty interesting teaching without a companion.

2. On the media team at the GSD, we’ve been tasked with assembling a memory book for this past year, including each service missionary’s testimony and photos from all our events. Essentially it’s a yearbook 😆. I’ve been on a yearbook team before, but there’s only two of us on this project and we’re building it from the ground up. It is unreal how hard it can be to make design decisions, but we’ve at last picked a direction. Wish us luck!

3. I arrived at the Road Home to discover our donation pile had shrunk significantly since the week before, which made further progress much more noticeable. So, I went on a roll! I was determined to make at least half the leviathan of accumulated charity vanish into organized beauty. Then, a ways into this newfound momentum, a couple women arrived in a big van to drop off FIFTY-ONE bags. They’d made an appointment, but they hadn’t told us just how much they were bringing, so Gayla had to explain to them that though their generosity is appreciated, we just don’t have room for that much clothing. Many of our bins are already overflowing as it is, making organization and accessibility more of a concern than having enough to go around. These pleas fell upon deaf ears, however. They were determined to see every last bag added to our receiving area. Gayla stood her ground for some time, but when they wouldn’t relent…onto the pile the bags went. All dreams of neatness evaporated. Gayla even predicted this would happen when I mentioned hoping to make a lot of progress. Later, to add….I guess injury to injury?…I got back from a lunch break to discover numerous other bags piled on TOP of the fifty-one. Apparently another lady had arrived heavy-laden with S T U F F to drop off, and she was even more argumentative than the ones before. Funny how donating clothing, a very straightforward act of kindness, can be spun to seal our doom 😆.

 The donation pile when I had hope...

The donation pile after I had hope...

Ah yes, the thought-sharing portion of the email. We’ve arrived a little early this week, haven’t we? And with little more than utter chaos bouncing around in my skull and no study journal within reach to refer to like a cheat sheet, I think I’ll call upon on something that occurred to me a few months ago.

Various blessings can be framed as selling points of the gospel.

Come join us and follow Christ! Here’s why!

• Knowledge of the atonement brings me peace and hope.
• Events are more meaningful when I know a loving God watches over me.
• Attending church gives me the stability of a supportive community and opportunities to remember the Savior.
• Covenants motivate me to live a better life.
• etc., etc.

But with every tangible blessing I point to that comes from a dedication to my religion, I seem to hear a voice from the world that proclaims “We have that too! No faith in Christ required.”

Now, you’ll have to forgive me while I lean really heavily into acting out a hypothetical persona. Buckle up, cause here are five points of anti-faith.

1. “You think repentance is the only way to put things right? Why lean on an unseen personality for forgiveness when you can just do your best to put things right and strive to improve? If feelings of guilt won’t go away, that’s a sign you’re struggling with obsessive scrupulosity, and you should probably see a therapist.”
2. “You think knowledge of final judgement is the only way to motivate me to do good things and avoid bad? That’s just called being wise and self aware. Follow natural law and think ahead. That’s all you need.”
3. “You think your the thoughts and feelings from your religious experiences support the existence of a God? Well I have similarly powerful thoughts and feelings all the time, and they don’t support your conclusion. I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
4. “You think this supposed miracle here or that religious text there proves your belief? Well I’ve got a rational explanation for it, and even if I’m wrong, just because I don’t understand how something happened doesn’t mean I have to shift my entire world view to accommodate it.”
5. “You think the only way to live a happy life is to prepare for an unseen afterlife? Well I don’t believe in an afterlife, and I don’t see a need to. I’ve accepted the eventual death I face. In the meantime, I AM living a happy life. I love what I do, I’m doing my best to live well, and asking for anything more would only make me discontent with what I have.”

“Bottom line? Once you let go of your religious practices, you’ll see they were never necessary in the first place to live a good and meaningful life. Christ didn’t overcome sin. Sin never existed in the first place. Christ didn’t overcome death. Death is a reality we must learn to face.”

Does all this remind you of a certain someone in Alma 30? I appreciate that the Book of Mormon details a few anti-Christs and the prophets’ responses to them, because they are very real voices in our day too.

Now, there are various ways to respond to these points, but many of them aren’t very sophisticated or genuine. They sometimes just boil down to, “You’re lying to yourself!” or, “My joy is better than yours!” I think these are overly dismissive of other people’s experiences.

No, the insight that sits best with me on this topic is that many of the tangible blessings of the gospel, from feelings, to principles, to prosperity, really can be mimicked outside of the realm of a belief in God. We truly do lean quite heavily on our faith that one day we will meet Christ face-to-face and know of a surety who the Lord of All Creation is. Before that day, one can easily come to a different conclusion.

But though my blessings alone don’t completely distinguish me, I take a bit of comfort knowing that this is old news. Think back in the book of Exodus. Remember how the Lord sent Moses and Aaron to free the Israelites, and used miracles as a sign to the Egyptians of His authority? One particular detail stands out to me.

“And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments.

For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” (Exodus 7:10-12)

See also verses 20-22.

The Egyptians didn’t just see the miracle and pointedly ignore it. They replicated it. I see an important message in this. The power doesn’t lie in the miracle alone. It lies in where it came from. This belief will continue to be critiqued, deconstructed, and counterexampled by pragmatists, materialists, and rationalists alike for the rest of time, but it is a belief to which we must hold all throughout. And, when all is said and done, we do have a point of comfort. We see it at the end of that example in Exodus. Egypt matched the Lord’s serpentine transfiguration several times over, but in the end, only one snake endured, engulfing the others completely. Which was it? For all their enchantments and claims to authority, what was Egypt’s fate in the end?

The unbelieving and even the wicked will have joy for a season (3 Nephi 27:11), maybe as many as several seasons, but we are not a seasonal-minded people.

In a past zone conference we were shown a black dot on a white background. We were asked,

“What is this a picture of?”

“A dot.” Most would answer.

Then came the response, “And yet, the dot takes up the least amount of space on the canvas. Is the picture not almost completely white aside from a single point of darkness? Don’t get wrapped around what is immediately before you and assume this life is everything. Remember your eternal nature.”

God be with you,

Elder Tolman

I came across this shirt when sorting donations and it made me smile.