Voices of MWEG

As I contemplated what I could write that would sufficiently meet the moment we are in, my mind returned to a Sabbath devotional I wrote almost three years ago. I reread it and felt it was relevant. “. . . and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” (Isaiah 58:12) The word “breach” means a hole or gap in a fortress, usually caused by an attacking army. The stakes of Zion are “for a defense, and for a refuge from the storm” (D&C 115:6). In other words, Zion is a fortress. Our wards and stakes should be refuges and defenses against that…

I was talking with a friend who observed that it is coded into the generic structuring of LDS talks to speak after the resolution. It goes like this: there’s some sort of tension/conflict/struggle/adversity which leads our questing speaker to a journey for answers/insight/victory, then the epiphany and a resolution. It’s a nice arc, a complete emotional experience, so it makes sense as a structure for a talk or story. But it isn’t actually very reflective of reality. Because in reality, most of us are sitting in the middle of things most of the time. We don’t know how the game will end, which ball will drop, what shape this journey…

In early October, I found myself driving my family through the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Georgia. We live in Alabama, and our stake had been tasked with running a “command center” for hurricane relief in Valdosta. As we drove towards the church building, I wove through massive piles of downed trees that had been cut and moved off the roads. I drove over dozens of downed power lines. Seeing the devastation firsthand, knowing it was exponentially worse in other areas, and having just heard that another deadly hurricane was forming, I thought about the account in the Book of Mormon of the destruction at Christ’s death, and the prophecies…

I have been reading the book “My Bright Abyss” by Christian Wiman. Wiman is a contemporary poet and through this volume of essays he explores his faith and belief and how these have ebbed and flowed during his life. He writes and describes faith as a living and changing thing and this has really resonated with me. Wiman writes “[E]very single expression of faith is provisional — because life carries us always forward to a place where the faith we’d fought so hard to articulate to ourselves must now be reformulated, and because faith in God is, finally, faith in change.” As a reader, I have always taken to heart…