The Church Will Prosper

In Tuesday's live BYU devotional, Scott M. Ritter quoted a scripture that I've been thinking a lot about recently:

"As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints." (D&C 121:33)

I've been thinking about that with respect to Anne Osborn. See my blog of Sunday, June 29, 2008. Recording our thoughts in black and white helps to solidify them and to reveal previously unrecognized correlations. This is the epiphany that resulted:

The Church will continue to prosper.

Why? Because the Lord is providing a steady stream of souls of Anne's caliber who have amazing spiritual experiences and who then become powerful tools in His hands.

In Tuesday's devotional, Ritter also offered a number of interesting quotes about the effects of the Spirit. (He also commended and praised Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which was startling but with which I totally agree, but that's for another journal entry.)

It's as I generalized from one full-time mission and three stake missions: If a person sheds tears during the first discussion, that person will be baptized and will remain active. It's not necessary. We saw many who were not immediately so affected but who were still baptized and remained active, but from the handful of examples of those who were so affected, it appears to be sufficient.

Why? Because we are more convinced by our feelings than by our intellect. Bruce Springsteen was right when he said, "I continue to do this [make music and go on concert tours, etc., even though he has plenty of money for the rest of his life] into 'old age' [he's 58] because of the way it makes me feel and because of the way I can make others feel." (A quote from tonight's 60 Minutes.)

And that's what the Holy Ghost did to Anne Osborn. It provides the most intensely euphoric "high" possible. People know, intuitively, that they should have and should be having this "high" and they try to find it or find out how to get as close to it as possible.

So much of what people believe will lead them to it turns out to be a chimera. I'm not saying that Springsteen's music falls into this category. Music, if wholesome, leads to this high, though often only the way I-80 leads to Cheyenne. We can get on it and reach Cheyenne, or we may get on it and then get off at Park City or maybe even at Parley's Way. To reach the destination our numinous sense perceives and longs for, we have to go way beyond Springsteen. Anne found this way and fully pursued it.

And, as D&C 121:33 says, the Lord doesn't give us this high just to make us feel good. It's accompanied by tremendous insight and knowledge. The mysteries of the heavens are opened to us. The Holy Ghost places pure knowledge into our minds and this is always accompanied by this highest of all highs and greatest of all joys. Nothing else even approaches this for compelling conviction. It is knowledge in its purest sense.

Because of Anne, and so many, many others like her, the Church will prosper and continue to prosper.

We can be part of that if we choose. We can allow ourselves to become amenable to the greatest blessings, insight, and joy the Lord has for us and be a great benefit to the Lord, or we can take the first convenient exit off that freeway or even plunge into the tragic dead-end of a chimera pursuit and become irrelevant.

It's our choice.

Thinking of Nothing is a Productive Thing to Do

There's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity.

The lead article in this week's MormonTimes has the headline “Noise reduction” with subhead: “Making time to reflect allows spirit to connect.” It derives strictly from LDS sources and quotes multiple prophets including President Hinkley. The bottom line is that we need to allocate time for pondering and meditation, and this time should be free of noise and other sensory stimulation, and that is difficult in today's world.

Of course I enjoy some of the non-LDS confirmation sources as well.

The Larry Fleinhardt character of NUMB3RS is an introspective genius who tends to perceive the human condition in terms of cosmic metaphors. He seems to believe in meditation and he practices it but characterizes it as “trying to think of nothing.” The writers skillfully leave it to the viewer to decide whether this is valid and, if so, whether it's productive.

I believe that it is both valid and productive. There are a number of documented evidences for this. I will reference two:

1. A recent NOVA episode and a recent 60 Minutes report both featured the same study that shows that deep sleep facilitates learning and memory. Subjects are instructed to type an unfamiliar and awkward sequence of numbers with the non-dominant hand. It requires many minutes of practice to do it easily and accurately. Twelve hours later they are found to have lost quite a bit of facility and accuracy, as expected, unless they have had a significant amount of sleep during that time. In the latter case, it is found that both the speed and accuracy have significantly improved! In other words, while the person sleeps, the brain is constructing new connections to facilitate the activity and this is found to occur during the deepest part of the sleep – the delta-wave sleep, the time when the person is most nearly comatose.

“Let me sleep on it and get back to you,” is a reflection of the historic recognition given to this phenomenon. Many people have observed that they go to bed with confusing, insolvable problems in their heads and wake up the next morning with confusion dissipated and the solutions clear.

This is found to benefit both learning and memory. A person of my age spends much less time in this deep sleep phase and this is seen to be a possible factor in an older persons degradation of memory and of ability to learn new things.

2 In skilled meditators – e.g. the Dahli Lahma and his associates – where they are able to closely approach Dr. Fleinhardt's “thinking of nothing” state, brain scans show that the brain actually increases in its energy consumption, and a larger than normal quantity of the brain is involved in this energy-consuming activity. What is the brain doing when one would think that it is not doing much of anything? That brings up the advantages of meditation which are touted as ability to reprogram the subconscious, alter one's basic personality and intuitive/reflexive responses, and solve problems as mentioned in number 1 above, among other things.

In other words, there's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity. If we rely on thinking, reasoning, observing, and activity alone without the quiet interludes to allow the subconscious sorting, cataloguing, referencing, and correlating activities that turn data into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom, we are impeding, even laming our effectiveness.

If we can't find time to sit down and meditate without grabbing a book, a TV remote, a game control, or counter-cross-stitch, we are denying ourselves a great deal.

And, of course, the temple is an ideal place for the kind of meditative reflection mentioned. We should not have to immediately grab the scriptures when we sit down in the assembly chapel or even in the Celestial Room. The Lord wants to reveal amazing mysteries of the kingdom to us. We should give him the chance. Prayer is supposed to be a two-way conversation.

Claire Casitgates Legs

It's been a big week for Claire and her two-wheeler. She crammed to prepare to be in the Evergreen parade. She was close to being able to ride without the training wheels, but not quite close enough.

Her cramming did some good and now she's much more at ease with the bike. Today, even after the parade, she wanted to go, go, go on her bike -- long trips with Mommy and Daddy who accompanied her on foot (Grandpa concentrated on the shorter practices up and down the hill in front of the house).

Such activities produced a new effect for her: leg aches! She became noticeably irritated with her legs and chewed them out for slowing her down! She then insisted that they stop at a bicycle gas station which she identified and had to point out to Mommy and Daddy. After pausing there for 30 seconds, she declared the bicycle gas tank to be full and off they went again. That particular round trip was close to two miles. She did a much longer one earlier with Daddy. Good exercise for all of them.

Two weeks later, she was riding comfortably without training wheels. If there were a local parade for the 24th....

(And now I've learned to upload pictures! Getting them positioned where I want them is another issue. Anyone got any hints?)

Claire's Cute, Too

Our kids generate blogs primarily to comment on the cuteness of our grandchildren -- and that's a very valuable function.

That's not my primary function, but we can do it, too, since we have Claire two days a week, and tonight is a special sleepover in preparation for the 4th of July parade tomorrow morning.

Though not yet having started kindergarten, Claire's getting to be quite a little mathematician. For instance, she can add 2+2, 4+4, 4+3, and even 7+7. The latter is quite a stretch considering her finger-counting technique. She can count almost indefinitely. Almost. Grandma said, "Look, Claire. The temperature is 99 degrees! What comes after ninety-nine?" "Ninety-ten," she responded without hesitation. (Well, if it had been the generally accepted answer, it wouldn't have been worth commenting on. Right?)

When Grandpa got back to the table, Grandma and Claire had a monkey-quiz for him extracted from the sack of the Carl's Jr. kiddie lunch. (Carl's Jr -- her choice tonight.) Grandpa even got some of them right. "I want to do it again!" stated Claire.

"OK," said Grandma. "What time is it when 20 monkeys chase one banana?"

"Twenty after one," said Claire.

"Where does a 2000 pound gorilla sit when he's tired?"

"Anywhere he wants!"

"What did the banana say to the monkey?"

"Nothing. Bananas can't talk."

"What kind of key doesn't open doors?"

"A gorilla!"

OK. Some things can be over rehearsed.

Maybe someday, I'll even learn how to post pictures.

Glory in Weakness

I watched Br. Barnes devotional a second time. It's nice to have it DVR'd. These are significant points that speak to me:

1. Weakness is not sin. Sin is a conscious violation of God's commandments. Weakness is a gift from God (as clearly defined in Ether 12:27).

2. The atonement of Christ does not change us to eliminate our weaknesses. It changes us to accommodate and deal effectively with our weaknesses and to be strengthened by them.

3. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, begged the Lord thrice to take his "thorn" away, but was blessed, instead, to glory in his thorn for the good it brought him in Jesus Christ.

A new thought to me, therefore, since I have the same weakness as Br. Barnes -- fear of looking bad -- is that I will always have this fear of looking bad, but that I will be strengthened as I become more effective in dealing with it. Same for all my other weaknesses.

Fear of Looking Bad

Michael Barne's in today's BYU devotional, touched a powerful chord. In a discussion of Ether 12:27 and of 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10, he used his own weakness of "the fear of looking bad" as a case in point. I recognize this, with this exact wording, as a serious problem for me. In a recent discussion with Melinda, who is very good at expressing her personal concerns, and in on-going discussions with Carolyn, who, after four decades feels equally free, I understand this fear to be common to all three of us -- and therefore possibly to many more.

I am impressed with Brother Barne's thorough examination of Ether 12:27 (a scripture which was also a favorite of Mom's, Ireta C. Head's, and which she considered to be useful to me because she often drew my attention to it), and I refer everyone to this examination. It is available on http://www.byub.org/devotionals/ and should soon be downloadable and viewable online.

If I can come up with a bottom line to this half-hour devotional, it is the concluding clause in Ether 12:27: "...then will I make weak things [i.e., the fear-of-looking-bad mentioned above] become strong unto them," and 2 Corinthians 12:10: "Therefore I take pleasure in [my weaknesses] for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, then am I strong."

But I advise everyone to watch/listen to the entire devotional.