Of Rest and Relaxation

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

The Lord has a distinctive idea of “rest.”  We may see rest as a pause, a respite, a separation from work and activity.  Rest and relaxation are often closely associated.  In music, a rest is when the musician is not making sound—but as my musician wife likes to remind those whom she conducts, when you are not playing or singing, you are still performing.  The rest is part of the music, often a vital, important part.

That brings me closer to my point.  Rest is part of the music of God.  He is not casual about the importance of rest.  God rested.

It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever:  for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. (Exodus 31:17)

God commands us to rest.

Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest:  that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed. (Exodus 23:12)

He also offers rest as a reward.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)

Rest may be an eternal principle.  As Enos said, approaching the end of his life,

And I soon go to the place of my rest, which is with my Redeemer; for I know that in him I shall rest. (Enos 1:27)

What does the Lord identify as rest?  It can seem very busy.  For example, referring to those who follow Him, the Lord said, “If they live here let them live unto me; and if they die let them die unto me; for they shall rest from all their labors here, and shall continue their works.” (Doctrine and Covenants 124:86, emphasis added)  Brigham Young taught that after people who have been laboring in Christ’s work die they “are just as busy in the spirit world as you and I are here.” (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 3, p.370)

The Sabbath day is so closely identified with rest that it is often called the day of rest.  In the Sabbath the Lord has hallowed the way that He views rest.  Consider how He asks us to keep the Sabbath day holy.  In April 2015, one of the Apostles of Jesus Christ, and today the Lord’s Prophet to the world, Russell M. Nelson, spoke of the Sabbath as a delight, and discussed how we can make it so.  Focusing on the principles involved, he offered broad categories of activity, including worshiping God, serving His children, teaching our own children, studying the scriptures and inspired instructions of the prophets, working to gather and share family history, visiting the lonely, caring for the sick and afflicted.  That sounds like a lot of doing.  I recall that when I was a missionary, my Sabbath days were more filled with activity than any other day, working for the Savior.  There was a lot of doing, and there still is, and it still delivers rest to the soul.

Notice the words that the Lord employed, through the prophet Isaiah, to describe rest:

And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall give thee rest, from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou was made to serve. (2 Nephi 24:3)

The Lord offers us real rest, deep, profound rest.  It is more than the shallow substitutes and (too frequently) even counterfeits that the world calls rest—substitutes that can leave us worn out, stressed, and still seeking for something deeper.  The rest that God offers is surcease from anxiety, from mental conflict, from routine and activities that provide little lasting meaning, from all that places us in bondage, replacing all of these with peace, with accomplishment that lasts and stays with us now and through the eternities.  It is a gathering of and tending to the riches of relationships built with God, with our families, with our friends that are all intended to last forever.  It is rising above the trials and turbulence of the world, and ending any turbulence within our own hearts.  This is the rest that Christ offers to us.

On the night before His crucifixion, Christ said to His Apostles,

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace.  In the world ye shall have tribulation:  but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)

And then Christ took upon Him our sins and sorrows and troubles that we might know and have true rest, in this life and forever in the life to come.  This is all very real—and refreshing.

Of Jesus Christ and Life

Life.  Jesus said, “I am the life” (Doctrine & Covenants 11:28).

Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:32)

Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God:  and they that hear shall live.  For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:25, 26).

I will tell you the story of a German woman, whom for this relation I will name Hertha Lux Bullerman.  Hertha was the mother of 5 children, three boys and two girls.  She lived in far eastern Germany.

Her first child was a daughter, Ursula.  Her second was her first son.  He was named Fritz.  Ursula and Fritz were close, as first and second born children can be.

 

Next was born another son, named Hubertus.  Hubertus died a day short of four weeks after he was born.  Hertha’s next child was a third son, to whom was given a name similar to his brother’s, perhaps in memory of his brother who lived such a short time.  This third son was named Hubert.  Hubert died from typhus, a few days short of his third birthday.  Last born of the children was Hertha’s second daughter, named Christa.

Hertha Lux Bullerman outlived all of her children except her oldest, Ursula.  She also outlived her husband, Alfred, who died in 1938 of an incurable disease, just a few short years before that disease, tuberculosis, became very curable.

The family was religious.  Alfred was a Lutheran minister, and they all lived in the parsonage, along with Hertha’s father for a time, who was an organist for the church.  It was Ursula’s job to work the pump that gave the air that gave the sound to the pipes of the organ.  For Ursula, as a child, that was hard work.  You could get tired long before the music was through.

 

Ursula’s grandfather, Theodor Bruno Waldemar, was proud of her.  They would often walk in the town, old grandfather and young granddaughter.  When other children saw them walking together, they would sometimes call out, “There comes the old musician, with his daughter, the clarinet.”  Grandfather would beam with pride, while Ursula thought altogether differently about the peer recognition.

I speak of these things and these people, because this is life, and they lived it.  And they are all children of God, the God of the living.

Yet so much of it happened before my mortal life, before I arrived on earth and my mortal reality began.  Did it really happen?  How could it be real?  Are the people of the past, of long ago and not so long ago, real?  I am quite sure that it was and that they are.

One year and a month after the death of Hertha’s husband, Alfred, Germany was at war with nearly all of its neighbors.

Hertha’s remaining son, Fritz, was 16 when the war began.  Before the war was over he would serve in a tank on the Russian front.  Fritz never returned home.  He died, in late autumn of 1943, in Ukraine, not far from where there is war again today.

A year later, in November 1944, the old musician, Hertha’s father, died.  Of Hertha’s family, she and her two daughters remained.  In not many weeks all three would flee for their lives from the Red Army.

The three women, barely fitting on the overcrowded refugee train, could take very little with them.  Why did Hertha bring with her the folder containing her family history?  With her world crashing down around her, with so many of her family and friends gone, with her homeland behind her and a merciless enemy at her back, why would those records of the dead have any value?  Were these people who had gone, children, husband, father, family, real anymore?

Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Jesus said, “I am the life”.

Hertha and her daughters, Ursula and Christa, found refuge in southern Germany.  Though her new home would soon be occupied by another enemy, it was a more merciful one than the communists.

Hertha and both daughters survived the war.  The younger one, Christa, married and had children of her own, though she died from an illness in the mid-1960s.  The older sister, Ursula, married an American soldier and came to the United States.  She brought with her that treasured folder of family history, preserved by Hertha through fire and flame, through tragedy and chaos.

Ursula herself died just 10 years ago, from Alzheimer’s disease.  She had forgotten much of what I have remembered for you today.  While my mother’s memory of these people faded away the people did not.  She regained them and her memory of them all just as she joined them in the world of spirits.

We all have such stories.  I am glad for those that I have saved.  I wish that I had saved more.  That folder of family history mattered very much.  Why did my grandmother entrust that folder to my mother?  My grandmother rescued more than her daughters in the cold winter of 1945.

Because the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ extend life to all, I have confidence in the day when we shall be united.  

Of What I Believed and What I Found

Until the day that I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ I had not affirmatively adhered to any of the various creeds of the denominations of Christendom, none of them in particular, but I have always had faith in God and Christ.  My parents, acting upon the best knowledge and light that they possessed at the time, had me baptized when but a few days old into the Lutheran church (I think that it was the Missouri Synod, but I am not sure of that).  I was quite short of sin at the time of my infant baptism, a claim that I confess I could not make when I approached the waters of baptism on my own volition later in my youth. 

Also upon the initiative of my parents, and without any resistance on my part, I was a regular and active attendee at the protestant churches my parents attended.  I sang in youth choirs, and I tried to pay attention to the weekly sermons.  Often I would sit by myself on the front row, right in front of the minister’s podium, and watch him go page by page through his text.  I regularly attended Sunday School and was involved in the lessons.  It was at one such Sunday School where as a little lad I was taught by the Sunday School teacher, my mother, to build my house upon a rock.

In my childhood I grew up in suburban communities, richly endowed with a wide variety of Christian churches and sects, and when as a youth we moved to western New York I became acquainted with still others.  My experience was that people chose their protestant church in accordance with what suited them as to location, music, oratorical powers of the minister, the fellowship of the members, the physical facilities of the local building, worship customs and practices, meeting hours, and a variety of other factors.  Whether one denomination was “true” in comparison with another was not a question that I recall ever being raised.  The general attitude that I could discern was that each and all of the denominations were recognized as possessing no more or less truth of consequence as any other.

I do not remember a beginning to my faith in Christ or my assurance of the presence of God.  I recall them as much as I can recall anything from my earliest memories of my earliest thoughts.  What I was taught in my childhood reinforced that faith.  Indeed, if the churches taught anything, it was to have faith in God and in Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, I thought of more.  More than occasionally I pondered why the churches of the day were so different from the Church of Christ as described in the New Testament.  None of them was even close in resemblance.  I imagined that it would have been marvelous to live in the days when Apostles of Jesus Christ walked among men and when the gifts of the Spirit were abundant.  I also pondered, even as a child, the situation of people in China and elsewhere who had little knowledge of Christ and no access to His saving ordinances.  The churches offered no solution to the problem of these people other than to try to reach them by missionaries as much as possible.  But what was the fate of those who missed out in the meantime?  I never heard the question asked or an answer offered.

I was also taught by my mother to pray.  Prayer was a part of my daily routine.  I had a deep reverence for the Holy Bible, a copy being one of the first books I ever “bought” (by redeeming a book of green stamps).  The churches I attended taught from the Bible, particularly recounting the stories.  As I got older, I sensed, however, a hint of embarrassment on the part of minister and teacher about relying upon the Bible too literally.  We were not encouraged to bring a copy with us to church or class.

All of that changed after my mother invited the Latter-day Saint missionaries to come by and tell us something about their church.  She really had my brother in mind, since at the time he was wrestling with all of the distractions of young manhood.  She felt that they might do him some good.  When the missionaries arrived, I was home and he was not.  I listened and learned.

What the Latter-day Saint missionaries unfolded to me was the ancient Church of Christ in its fullness, all restored on earth today.  Once more living Apostles walked among men, with all the same gifts and powers of the Spirit manifested as they were nearly 2,000 years before.  The scriptures came alive, the Holy Bible resumed its place as a standard reference for daily living and communion with God, its messages and miracles embraced into real life rather than mere moral tales of antique lore.  As they did anciently, the living prophets and Apostles were revealing more from God, guidance directly relevant to our current and modern conditions, all fully in harmony with what God had always said.

One example I learned and had until then never been taught was news of the work to spread the message and redemption of Christ to all people, wherever and whenever they lived.  As the Bible taught and as modern prophets taught, those who left this life without access to the gospel of Christ would hear that message in the world of spirits, where they lived and waited for the day of resurrection to come when the Savior returned to the earth, as He promised.  None were to be left out, all to have as full a chance to receive God and Christ as would any other.

Echoing what I had always believed, the Latter-day Saints proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the Savior of all the world and of all mankind, His religion not just a faith for a segment of the population in one part of the world.  Together with the Holy Bible of the ancient east The Book of Mormon was a testimony from the ancient west that salvation is in Jesus Christ and in Him alone, proclaimed by two societies of antiquity separated by an ocean but united in the same witness from God of the divinity of His Son.

To these ancient testimonies of Christ were added the modern testimonies of men and women who knew.  The Latter-day Saints gained through their faith personal knowledge born of personal revelation of the Savior Jesus Christ.  Through prayer and many personal unimpeachable experiences their faith had grown to solid assurance.

To their witness I add my own, gained in the same way.  Building upon my own faith in Christ, exercising the familiarity with personal prayer taught me by my mother, I acquired just as the saints of old days and modern times a deep personal knowledge and assurance that God is real, that Jesus Christ is resurrected and the Savior of all, and that His Church is on the earth again possessing and manifesting all that it had anciently.

I found the true and living Church of the true and living God.  The interaction has made my life richer and better, deeper and full of value.  Since and from that discovery I have been gaining every good thing.

Of Dead Family Members and Getting to Know Them

Some years ago a radio commentator expressed revulsion toward the popular fascination with genealogy.  To make his argument short, he did not see the point.  In his view all of those people are dead and gone. What do they matter?

Inasmuch as the comment was made before recent notable advances in research on gene-based hereditary diseases, we can excuse the radioman’s ignorance of how important genealogy can be to tracing the roots of many things that make us ill.  At the time, however, I would have liked to relieve his ignorance of other points perhaps even more relevant and important.

In all fairness, I agree with a narrow part of his argument, his objection to the democratization of the old aristocratic practice of using genealogy to prove yourself better than someone else.  Such a pitiful exercise in arrogance and pride is pointless.  Given how family trees intertwine in just a few generations, there is probably nary a person of western European background who is not a descendent of Charlemagne.  The story is similar for people from other parts of the world.  And we are all descendants of Noah and Adam, so where are the bragging rights? 

It is on his central point where the radioman’s rejection of genealogy falls to the ground.  What a woeful and lonely view of man’s condition is embodied in the view that once someone dies he is forever gone!  Genealogy, or more broadly speaking, family history, is founded on the belief that the dead in profound respects live on, that they do matter to us.  Let me suggest three ways among many, ranked in a generally progressing order of importance.

·         The members of our family who have passed on are in many aspects part of us, beyond the shared DNA.  Much in our habits, practices, language, beliefs, and our culture in general has deep roots in those who raised and taught those who raised and taught us.  Most of that is probably worth retaining and cherishing, some of it in need of overcoming, but there is a rich heritage there to be discovered.  Significant personal meaning can be found in the recognition that the current generation is only the leading edge of something very big that has been going on a long time.

·         As I mentioned, you do not have to do much family history research to discover that we are linked together, more connected than separate.  Few genealogists can avoid the powerful realization of being part of the family of man.  Our respect for humanity and for each other deepens.

·         Most important, the dead are not gone.  They have merely passed from this brief state of mortality, brief for all of us, to the next state on the journey that makes up eternity.  Each of us will soon be joining those who once walked where we walk.  Family history is the effort to get to know them now, whom we have the privilege of knowing better for a much longer time than mortality has to offer.

Explaining the resurrection to the Sadducees, Jesus Christ reminded them that our Father is God of the living, not of the dead (Mark 12:26, 27).  The mission of Jesus Christ is to provide life to all, to carry out the “work and the glory” of God, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)

Jesus Christ speaks more than symbolically and beyond His own relationship when He refers to God the Father.  The family relationships and ties, so precious to us now, are eternal.  That means that they not only are intended to last forever, but they reach across the generations, beyond death—to generations past and future.  They can be among those few precious things we take with us to the grave and beyond.  That is not a vain wish of every loving husband and wife and father and mother.  It is an inheritance from our Divine Father. 

We can begin to build and extend and preserve those relationships here and now.  Why wait?

Of Freedom and Despair

Every man and woman who walks the earth is a union of three natures:  intelligence, spirit, and physical body.  The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that only in this union can there be found a fullness of joy.  Our intelligence is eternal; our spirit an inheritance from God, the Father of spirits; our bodies, mortal vehicles of trial and testing to be placed in the grave and then raised in the resurrection to immortality through the redeeming power of Jesus Christ.

Before we were born and earth’s history began we all lived as spirits in the presence of God, where the whole plan for this earth and its purpose were presented to us.  In a great act of courage, greater than I believe that we can imagine, we each agreed with that plan and volunteered to be born into this world of trial and sorrow, but also of potential achievement and triumph.  The exercise of our free will centered on voluntary obedience to Jesus Christ would make all of the ultimate difference.  As the scriptures  relate, many there were who shied away from the risk and in rebellion sought another way where freedom would be denied us while all of our needs and comforts would be provided for without any exercise of our will or moral effort.

Those who rejected the plan of the Father and rebelled against Him before His face were cast from His presence directly to earth, without birth, without any future or hope.  The plan of moral trial in physical bodies being rejected by them, they could not participate in it.  For those there would be no bodies, no progression, no returning to the presence of God.  Having lost all hope, damned, or stopped in their eternal progression these became devils seeking forever the sorrow of those who chose a better way.  As if to reach for a blistering balm in other’s suffering, they tempt us to rebel against God here on earth and misuse all that a loving Father has provided to His children.

One day near Hallowe’en, more than thirty years ago, I thought to capture in verse something of the attitude of these unembodied spirits towards us, who chose before our birth to follow the plan of the Father as fulfilled by Jesus Christ, His Son.  These devils wish us no good thing, but evil and destruction continually, envying every good thing with which God has blessed us, not the least of which are all of the sensations and experiences that a physical existence in a physical world can provide.  They can see, but they cannot touch.  But they can speak to our spirits, and they each day encourage us to follow them, which is what sin is.

Dance of the Damned

’Round and ’round and sing around,

Swirl the spinning sky with sound.

Twirling, grinning, spinning down

Franticly upon them.

Fill the earth and spread around,

Make the awful beauty frown,

Rip it down, infest the ground,

Though you cannot touch it.

Curse the bodies never known

’Till they’re thrown into a mound.

Bring them blind and blinder still,

Swing the chain ’til you fill

All the world with sorrow;

For if we end tomorrow

They must die tonight.

Twist their sweet virginity.

Drain their new infinity.

Waste their pure divinity.

’Round and ’round, let song abound,

Swirl the human soup around.

Stir them floating, bloating, drowned,

Crowned with our iniquity.

Of Baptisms for the Dead and the Feast of the Lord

I am not troubled by increased attention of the public to the doctrines of Jesus Christ.  I welcome it as an opportunity to invite them to partake of the riches of eternity that the Savior has placed upon the table of mankind for His brothers and sisters to delight in.  I am eager that all should pull up a chair:  the supply is unlimited and the table will never be too small nor the number of chairs inadequate.

I am reluctant, however, to allow the enemies of Christ to pollute the table or to corrupt what the Lord has given to us.  To humanity at large, many of the gifts of the Savior will seem new and powerfully at odds with the fare offered on the impoverished tables of the world.  It has always been so.  If they are to be of value to the disciples of Jesus Christ and those who would join them, they must be preserved in their purity. 

One of the great offerings from the Savior to the world through the church of Jesus Christ is the privilege of being baptized for release from our sins.  Through that marvelous ordinance we are able to make a promise to God to turn away from a life of sinning to a life of goodness and good will to all and eternal perfection of ourselves, leaving the former ways of dissipation in degrees small and great behind us.  In return, we are washed of our sins, and our days and ways of death are left buried underneath the wave as we arise from the water in newness of life.  We escape the consequences of our past sins by completely accepting the Savior Jesus Christ and receiving His suffering in place of our deserved punishment.  As Christ explained through modern prophets,

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent. . . (Doctrine and Covenants 19:16)

That is a wonderful doctrine of change and peace of mind, by which the evils of the world can be overcome and peace prevail—today for any individual who chooses to embrace it, and for any society made up of such individuals.  It is all the more powerful because it is real, having been tested and demonstrated in millions of lives over the course of human history.

As a young teenager I could see the value of these doctrines, and I welcomed them.  I was particularly moved by the doctrine of extending these blessings of repentance and baptism to all, even to people who had little or no opportunity to hear or receive them during their mortal lives. 

While those who once walked where we walk now live in the world of spirits, awaiting the great resurrection of all, they continue to learn and associate with one another.  There they have the opportunity of learning of Jesus Christ and accepting His sacrifice for them, or rejecting it, as many have and do in mortality.  Those who accept the Savior’s vicarious sacrifice can make the same promise and commitment to newness of life by accepting vicarious baptisms performed by the living on their behalf in Christ’s Temples.  Thereby they obtain all of baptism’s changing and redemptive power.  Similarly, just as Christ and His vicarious suffering can be rejected in the world of spirits so can those vicarious baptisms by which the Savior is otherwise received.  As in mortality, free will is preserved and indeed enhanced by having the opportunity to accept or reject what otherwise would be beyond reach.  Even to a thirteen year old the fairness and justness of this doctrine was apparent.

What is not apparent to me several decades later is the logic of those who would object to this doctrine.  If you do not believe that it is a true doctrine of God, then at worst Christ’s disciples are wasting their time being baptized here on behalf of those who have died.  If the doctrine is false and the church of Jesus Christ is mistaken, then nothing that it does can reach beyond the grave and the dead remain out of touch from any in this life.  If, however, Jesus Christ is the Savior and indeed did suffer vicariously for the sins of any who would receive Him so that they might not suffer for themselves, and if the work offered in Christ’s Temples does reach beyond the grave, then this doctrine is a cause for rejoicing and partaking, among the many other rich things prepared for us and available on the Lord’s table of fat things.

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.  (Isaiah 25:6)

Y’all come and pull up a chair. 

Of Life Before Life and the Offspring of God

One of the most ennobling and liberating teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ, restored in these latter days, is the knowledge that each of us lived before we were born. We lived in the presence of God as individuals who thought, learned, moved, spoke, and otherwise interacted with each other. We all lived as literal children of our Heavenly Father, members of the same eternal family. We did not yet have the physical bodies that we possess here in mortality, but we did have spirit bodies that are very much like physical bodies. These spirit bodies are currently united with our physical bodies and are an important part of what makes us “alive.” When our mortal bodies die, the spirit leaves the physical body and lives on, while our existence as thinking individuals continues.

This means many wonderful and beautiful things, among which is that the brotherhood of man is more than metaphorical. We actually are brothers and sisters in a very literal sense. It means that creation was not accidental but rather designed and carried out for our benefit. Even further, it means that our mortal life on this creation has a purpose related to our continued growing and becoming more than we have been.

On first encounter, the knowledge of our existence before this mortal life can seem incredible. It is generally rejected by many churches, even though it is plainly taught in the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments. The Lord said to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5). Paul wrote to the Ephesians that the Lord “hath chosen us in him”, meaning in Christ, “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4).

This teaching is echoed by modern prophets. In 1918, the prophet Joseph F. Smith recorded that the children of God, “Even before they were born . . . received their first lessons in the world of spirits and were prepared to come forth in the own due time of the Lord” (Doctrine and Covenants 138:56).

This important truth upon reflection resonates with our hearts. There is an immortal spirit in man, which leaves the body at death and continues on. Where did that spirit come from? Did it suddenly come into being at our birth or somewhere between birth and conception? If so, how so? Were our mortal parents, who were the creators of our mortal bodies, somehow also the creators of our immortal spirits? There is no reason to believe that they have any such power. That which our mortal parents gave us is born of frailty and imperfection and has its end in the grave. If the spirit lives on beyond the grave—and scripture and personal revelation testify that it does—then its source must be from Him who is eternal. The eternal must find its source in the eternal.

Paul taught the Hebrews that God is the Father of our spirits just as in our flesh we are the offspring of our mortal parents (Hebrews 12:9). So if our spirits came from God, is it hard to believe that we spent some time with Him before we were sent to earth? It is pleasing to think that we did, and it serves to raise the nature of man and validate how different we are in nature from all other creatures under the sun. The love of God for us becomes less abstract and takes on the intensity of a family relationship, beginning from even before the beginning of the world.