We’re on our way... TO NAU-VOO!

Imagine that you’re in the middle of a desert.

You have not eaten or drunk from several days. Your stomach has shrunken and your tongue is swollen. You are burned and battered. Your hand was scorched recently when you placed it on a bit of hot metal protruding from the sand. You do not know where you are, you are completely disoriented, and your fighting spirit has surrendered to one of apathy. Still, you continue forward, albeit slowly. Crawling.

You suddenly find yourself in shade.

Your body begins to cool, and you are more satisfied and more encouraged. You are receiving respite from your long journey. You look around, and see trees; beautiful, tall trees, protecting you from the heat. You can stand now. You can walk instead of crawl. Your spirit is soothed and awakened. As you progress, you find yourself at an oasis.

Water.

You have reached water. The sustainer of human life. That thing which you have not had at its clearest in several days. You dip your hands into the water, and feel its coolness, its wetness, its purity, on your dirty, dry, hot hands. It soothes the wound on your one hand. You bring it to your lips, and you drink. It cools your innards, and it permeates throughout your entire body. You want to jump right into it, but you are, at the same time, satisfied with drinking. You know that drinking it, taking it in, and letting it flow through you will be best. You will benefit the most that way. When you have drunken your fill, you are pushed to move on by... something. Something urges you to move forward. Like a schedule. You will be late if you do not go on.

So you move on. You move through the shady forest. You see a table. Somehow, you know you are to sit there. You sit at the head of the table. After an initial period of pause, food begins to appear on the table; in great varieties and massive quantities. You find yourself reaching for anything and everything you can, putting it on your plate, but you cannot take a dish before another, or two more, appear where it was. You find it hard to focus on any one dish; you are trying to get them all. The feast goes on for an hour and your shrunken stomach cannot fit all the food you want it to inside. You cease consumption, even though you know how much you want to continue. A small respite follows, and you move to another place on the table. You find your place, and sit again. Your stomach seems to have grown a little, and emptied. Food appears again, and you consume. You notice that there are others around you eating, and you watch as they produce dishes themselves, seemingly from nowhere, for the benefit of other partakers at the table. You see an opportunity before you, medleys of ingredients, and you try to concoct something which is true to form, and which belongs on the table. As you pass it down, people take the dish, but you do not see if it is eaten. You continue to try and try to produce dishes which will be helpful to the starving on the table, using your knowledge to produce something which others will benefit from, but, seemingly, to no avail. You feel that you must leave. You must go on, out of the forest, and you will never know if the dishes will be eaten, or were eaten, or if they filled the bellies of the other eaters at the table. You exit the forest.

And you move on.

You have a journey to take. There will be more forests along the way.

Did you have fun? This was something like my experience going to a ward (group of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for those of you unfamiliar with our lingo) in St. Louis.

Perhaps an explanation is warranted.

My family and I are on the way to Nauvoo, Illinois, where we will (hopefully) participate in a pageant put on by members of our church. And by, ‘Pageant,’ we mean, ‘Play.’ We are not members of the cast this year, as we have been in other years, but we hope to be some assistance to those in the cast. We left Rexburg yesterday to take a flight from Idaho Falls, ID to Salt Lake City, UT, and then to Cincinnati, OH, and on to St. Louis, Missouri. We flew into St. Louis last night, checked into a hotel, and went to a great place called La Pizza for dinner and collected a few things we needed at Target, returning then to the hotel to watch Sahara playing on TBS, and hit the hay. The next morning, today, we attended church at a ward in St. Louis, and, metaphorically, everything above happened to me. I was rejuvenated. I do not know every reason that I was parched, burned, and exhausted (at least, I don’t know the reasons for my spiritual state, in that sense), but I know that to attend church helped immensely. So how did we navigate our way to a church in the middle of St. Louis? Well, to give even more credit to the church, the website mormon.org has a feature which allows anyone to find out where the closest church is, AND when each ward that attends that church has services. So we were able to find a church that met our scheduling needs and attend it. As I was looking for the church on that website, I kept having these mildly nightmarish ideas about the ward we were about to go to. I’m not sure why, but I just thought that it would be a negative experience.

I was wrong.

We went to the ward, made it just in time for the sacrament, and stayed for all three meetings. Though we were tempted to stay only for sacrament meeting and get back on the road, we felt like we could make it in time to Nauvoo even if we stayed for all three, and so we did. And I’m very glad that we did. The Gospel Principles class I attended was about the last day of Christ’s mortal life. The teacher put two columns on the chalkboard: “What happened to him [Jesus]?” and “What he did.” The distinctions were profound. The premise, as I understood it, was that Christ went through the worst trials that anyone could ever go through, so that he could understand us when we went through our own. And the second column just showed us that the Lord was the greatest example of endurance through those trials. Despite being scourged, mocked, and even deserted by his closest friends, despite being spat on and despite being without the companionship of his Father, even if only for a moment, Christ healed, and forgave, and accomplished his mission. It was a good lesson.

The last meeting I attended, Elder’s Quorum, the lesson was on desires. I think the greatest point was that desire, though righteous, can separate us from God if left out of control. The teacher related the concept that sometimes we use God and his will as a tool for reaching those things that we desire. You members of the church can understand: Sometimes we only keep the commandments and meet the requirements so we can enter the temple and be married to a spouse; so we can have our family be proud of us. Sometimes we keep the commandments so we can be worthy of a mission, so that we can earn the approval of our fellow members. What that Elder taught in the quorum meeting was the need for those positions to be reversed. We should be using our desires to come closer to the Lord. That’s what I got out of it, anyway.

I just want to testify of this principle: However initially uncomfortable I was being at a church meeting outside of my ward, as I stayed and searched for comfort, the spirit came. The same spirit I feel at my own church. The church is true everywhere. That is the principle I want to relay. The church is still true wherever you go, and you can find solace in a church meeting, whether it is in Rexburg, St. Louis, England, or Africa. The same spirit will still reside and preside. Don’t be afraid to go to church when in an unfamiliar setting.

Good luck out there!