One lower light shining

I am very impressed with the church’s youtube channel, Mormon Messages. I watched this short video clip recently and was blown away. This is exactly how I feel about Jesus Christ and His gospel. The words shared here express my testimony exactly.

I think that sometimes, in the church, we tend to compartmentalize our religion. Sacrament meeting is one thing, but Sunday school and Priesthood / Relief Society are something else. When we’re working on our food storage or our family history, we aren’t thinking about our scripture study or our prayers, and when we’re worshiping in the Temple, we aren’t thinking about our home teaching or our missionary work (unless we come to the temple with a specific related question).

When we compartmentalize our religion so much, we run the risk of losing sight of the center of it all–the thread that ties everything together. That thread is the gospel of Jesus Christ–the good news that He suffered and died for our sins that He might become our Savior and Redeemer. The church is true only because Jesus is the Christ, and every doctrine or practice, no matter how obscure, relates back to this supremely important point.

It reminds me of an excellent BYU devotional talk given my freshman year. The speaker was Thomas B. Griffith, a US federal judge, and the talk was entitled “The very root of Christian doctrine.” He told how, when he was a bishop, he and his counselors decided that every talk, lesson, and church activity would have to be explicitly and directly related to Jesus Christ. Without departing from the standard curriculum, they accomplished this–and saw a huge spiritual outpouring in their ward and stake. Truly, Christ is at the center of everything we do.

Jesus is the Christ–he is the root of everything in this church. Without him, we can do nothing–literally. He is my Savior and knows me personally. When I look beyond the daily workaday struggles of my life, I am blown away by how much He blesses me. No matter what I do–or what you may do or have already done–His arm is stretched out still (Isaiah 9:12, 17, 21).

Hey, I just saw that this blog got a mention on MormonTimes.com‘s Today in the Bloggernacle column!  Thanks!

Back when I was following the bloggernacle more avidly, I used to keep up with that column.  Emily Jensen does a good job distilling some of the more interesting Mormon content from the blogosphere–something that can be quite time consuming if you try to keep up with all those blogs yourself!  Back when I was a sophomore, I tried that…but not anymore.  Oh, how life gets in the way of things (like blogging, for example).

But if you’re interested, I just finished writing one of my novels (revising it, actually).  I wrote a post about it on my writing blog, One Thousand and One Parsecs. It doesn’t have too much to do with the gospel, except in the fact that my personal values and beliefs undoubtedly had an influence.  It’s like Orson Scott Card says–your Mormon-ness inevitably shines through whatever you write.  When I get published, I suppose I’ll add to the ever growing ranks of LDS science fiction and fantasy authors.

Which reminds me of an interesting tweet by @MosheMF (Brandon Sanderson‘s editor at TOR):

Doorbell just rung by 2 pretty LDS missionaries in rain. Told them I’d stick with Judaism, but would welcome more LDS bestselling authors!

Yeah, we Mormons definitely have a strong representation in the science fiction and fantasy community.  At World Fantasy convention this year, there were almost thirty or forty Utahans present, most of them authors and aspiring writers.  The Utah writing scene is extremely vibrant; even though I’ll be in Washington DC this next winter, I’m seriously considering buying plane tickets to Utah just to attend BYU’s Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium.

Enough about all that, though.  Thanks to MormonTimes for mentioning my last post!  And if you haven’t checked them out already, go and do it!  I’m definitely going to resubscribe–I don’t have time to keep up with all the bloggernacle, but at least I can keep up with their excellent daily summaries.

Bishop Burton spoke at BYU today.  I was working with Dr. Bowen on the final for PL SC 474 (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), so I didn’t catch the whole thing.  I did catch the first part, though, where he mentioned the twitter posts in response to his conference talk.

Of course, this prompted me to check my barely active twitter account, just to see what people were saying about his BYU devotional address.  As soon as I opened the search page, about a dozen tweets went up that all basically said “OMG! Bishop Burton mentioned twitter!” Afterwards, though, there were a few more thoughtful responses, and I posted a few myself.

If you don’t know what twitter is, it’s this new social networking thing.  I won’t go into depth explaining what it is, but you can check it out yourself.  I tried it out over the summer, but lost interest in it when school started, mainly because I didn’t have time to read all of my friends’ tweets, and most of my “friends” were just random writer people I’d met through twitter.  Honestly, I don’t really care enough to read their every tweet.  Add to that the proliferation of spam (honestly!  Half the “people” who wanted to follow me are either spambots or trying to sell me something), and twitter dropped off my radar.

One of the strengths of twitter, though, is the way it can set up a real-time conversation on a current event.  That’s what Bishop Burton was talking about with the twitter posts.  At a conference, for example, people in the “twittersphere” can respond to an address in real-time as the speaker is presenting.  I’ve even heard of conferences setting up a special room with a screen at the front displaying the tweets as they are posted.

This got me to thinking: maybe twitter does have its uses.  Bishop Burton said that his conference address alone generated twenty five pages of tweets.  Most of those tweets are probably frivolous and overly opinionated, but the idea of engaging in a conversation about the talk as it’s happening fascinates me.  At the very least, it would help me to stay awake; I have to admit, I tend to drift off after a straight hour of church talks (unless Elder Holland is speaking, that is ).

In general, though, I was very impressed that Bishop Burton is on top of the new developments in social networking.  The church has made some tremendous leaps in this area in the last five years; we’ve come a long way since filmstrips and AncestralQuest.  I think it’s great.

By the way, if you want to follow me on twitter, my username is @onelowerlight.

Yesterday, work was slow at the BYU writing lab where I work, so my coworker and I spent most of the time chatting.  She just got back from a mission and is graduating in August, and I’m probably going to graduate sometime next year.  We talked about life, dating, marriage, post-graduation plans, and how we’re both at this really transitional period in our lives, with our undergraduate education mostly behind us.  It’s an exciting and scary time of life for both of us.

I walked through the Wilkinson Center on my way back; one of my roommates was coming to pick me up at the pick-up drop-off place on the first floor.  As I walked through, I noticed the paintings of Jesus Christ on east side of the building.

I can vaguely remember the first time I saw those paintings.  I was a young high school student, visiting BYU to tour the campus with a group of other prospective students.  I had arrived early in order to go to a concert in the east ballroom.  I didn’t know anybody here, and I felt a little bit anxious and out of place.  However, at the same time, I was blown away by the way religion and the gospel mixed with the BYU college culture, especially since I grew up in a place where I was the only Mormon in my high school.  The paintings in particular really stood out to me.

Things have changed a lot since then; I was accepted to BYU, served a mission, came back and studied for the last three years, made lots of friends, learned a new language, wrote two novels, grew tremendously, and experienced countless other changes.  In some ways, you could say that I’m a completely different person than I was back then.

And yet, in all that time, those paintings of Jesus Christ have been right there, in the same place they were when I first saw them.  Over the years, the novelty has worn off and I’ve gotten used to the way the gospel shapes and influences the community here, but every now and then I’ll be walking around and notice the little things again.  They’re still there, still reminding us of Jesus Christ, just like when I first came to this university.

I think that the gospel is a lot like these paintings.  People change, people grow, life changes in unexpected ways, but no matter where you find yourself, some things are always there, always constant.  Jesus Christ is always constant; no matter how we change, how much we come to take Him for granted, He will always be there, and His love and grace will always be constant.  Our relationship with Him may change, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but whether we recognize it or not, His hand will always be in our lives, eager to bring us good things.

Where am I going to be ten years from now?  Five years?  I may experience more changes in the next five years than I have the last five years.  Graduate school, marriage and family, work and career–who knows what’s going to happen?  But even though all these changes can be exciting and scary at the same time, it is comforting to know that Jesus Christ and the gospel is a constant.