followers of my faith [Mormon Monday 12]

I've been reading from the 2006 BYU Women's Conference lately -- "Rise to the Divinity Within You" -- and one talk that has really gotten my attention is "Serious Reflection Precedes Revelation" by Maurine Jensen Proctor. Here is a link to the transcript.

Here is an analogy I particularly enjoyed:

Our life is like the journey the Jaredites anticipated across the stormy sea, where the mountain waves would dash them, they would be carried here and there by the winds and they would be tossed by strong currents.  This is a journey they could not survive in the dark.

Was there anything really wrong with the way I began talking to my daughter?  Given the situation, I was fairly calm, I was clear, I was also right.  The problem was, until the Spirit stepped in with His light, I was also totally ineffective.

The brother of Jared sought a remedy for the darkness. Putting his mind and muscle to the solution, “he did molten out of rock sixteen small stones, white and clear.”  I have tried to imagine the work and ingenuity it would take to molten stones.  What kind of grueling labor in those times was required to create a heat source that can molten stones, sweat dripping from your brow? 

Yet still, after all the brother of Jared could do, after hard labor and effort, and the best solutions of his own mind, still he had only 16 dark stones.  They were only able to shine when they were touched by the finger of God.

So often we are troubled and hurried, wearied and overworked. We create the equivalent of 16 stones in our lives, and that is where we leave it.  The world is so much with us that we do not take the journey to the mountain top and let the Lord touch all our dizzying effort with his finger and fill it with light.  Until he does, however, we are still traveling in the darkness.

Busy and hurried, too often we take “natural man” solutions, rushing from one task to another, checking off the items on our lists to do in a mad frenzy without the transforming power that spiritual insight always brings.  The alarm rings in the morning, and we are off and running, too often without climbing the mountain to have the stony pieces of our lives touched with light.

The rest of her talk dealt with how important it is for the scales to fall from our eyes, and how we can take the time to prepare for and seek the revelation that we deserve. As this is something I have always struggled with, it was a real, if you'll pardon, eye-opener (it's only a joke if you read the talk I guess).

May we always take the time to be filled with light.