Okay--pausing to catch our breath ;-)

Pondering: Taking Time to See Past the Surface

Okay, okay.  I know.  Getting four personal insights/applications/likenings out of just one verse of scripture is a little "over the top," but then that's how I find God to be--over the top!  I used to think that reading the scriptures (or even having anything to do with spiritual thoughts spoken or written) was just one more thing to DO and check off my "I'm-Trying-SOOO-Hard-to-be-a-GOOD-Person" list.

But, then, my weaknesses and the weaknesses of others broke me in two.  No, better put, mortality shattered me into pieces--a million pieces.  Putting my life, my sanity even, back together would have been like trying to reconstruct the body of one of the astronauts that died in one of the space shuttle disasters.  That was what it was like for me when I began this in-depth search of the Book of Mormon in the mid-1980s.

That's when I either had to find God on a gut-deep, heart-deep, walking-talking-counseling, personal revelation basis, or I was going to spin right off the planet, much less right out of the Church.  Everyone and everything I had believed in and participated in as part of the outward structure and appearances of the Mormon way of life had not been able to keep the holocaust that was my life from happening.

That was when I stopped reading the Book of Mormon just to check it off a list or raise my hand at church to show I was reading it.   That's when I heard Joseph Smith's testimony that this book would get me closer to God than any other book in the world.  Any other.  That's when I began slowing down and peering into the depths of each verse, like you would sit and stare into a pool of water and begin to see what lies under the surface.  I began to sit still long enough and BE still and wait upon the "words of Christ" to open the verses up to my mind.  And under the tutelage of His Spirit--starved for and hungered and prayed for with all my heart, like a drowning person grasping for air--HE began to show me the correlations with the 12 Steps and the applications to my life as a totally lost and devastated mortal.

I hope these bits of sharing will encourage you to read the scriptures slowly--taking time to let the Spirit of the Lord open insights and applications to your own life.