Sabbath Devotional :: Unprecedented

For the last week or so, I have woken up every morning feeling depleted. I am able to go about my work and accomplish methodical and thoughtless tasks, but those that require deep thinking seem overwhelming. It is almost as if my brain has decided to put itself to neutral and is just going to stay there. One day I was moving through the world reasonably well, and the next day everything just felt like too much.

That is probably because everything really is Too Much.

I don’t think that feeling is in my imagination, (it really is too much, isn’t it?) or that it represents a failure of character on my part. Instead, as I try to respond in real time to a world that has increasingly become unpredictable and chaotic, perhaps my heart and my soul are telling me that I have reached the end of my natural and human capacity. As I have worried about this, my immediate thoughts were to increase that capacity through worldly and physical solutions. But increasingly this feels like a wound in my soul, and I sense a need to find spiritual respite and healing.

We each have our well worn patterns of accessing the Spirit, and one of mine is to think deeply about the words and meaning of scripture. The wisdom and intricacies of thought I find in our sacred books enliven my mind and help me to feel intellectually and spiritually connected to God. So this week I have felt drawn to read more intensely, and have tried to find meaning and direction in holy writ – hoping that the Lord would find a way to replenish the emptiness in my mind with the fullness of his word.

But it turns out that this wasn’t maybe the moment for intricacies of thought, because I could not make it work. As I was reading and feeling increasingly more troubled, I felt a strong impression to stop wrestling. Stop thinking and working and trying to solve and to fight. To instead approach the Lord in deep humility and just allow myself to feel my way through the scriptures with pure emotional engagement. And as I read in the early chapters of Mosiah I finally found some comfort and peace.

I read in Mosiah 3 as King Benjamin lays out the redemptive power of the Savior and his role in our personal lives and the lives of his people. And I began to feel, in my heart, the power of eternal justice and mercy, hope, and for a brief moment – even great joy. I didn’t leave that session with the scriptures with any strong interpretive thoughts or clever ways to manage the problematic world we currently live in. But I had a sense that, despite all the grief and horrors and deep sadness in this fallen world — the “too much” — there was something that was also “enough.”

That feeling lingered with me as I moved through my day, much in the same way that the vague memory of a pleasant dream does. It didn’t alter my reality or my waking circumstances, but it tethered me to something beyond myself and the troubles of the moment. And while I didn’t feel replenished, it has been sufficient to encourage me to move ahead with hope.

As we all face unusually difficult times and navigate uncertainty, we may need to seek out new spiritual patterns and rhythms, and we may need to accept that the Lord will communicate with us in unfamiliar ways. The last year feels “unprecedented” because everything we have had to assimilate has been – at least in our lifetimes.

But, in the April 2020 conference, President Russell M Nelson promised that: “The Church will have an unprecedented, unparalleled future’ and we must assume by association that this will also be true of the saints that sit in its pews. Surviving and thriving in this environment will require new resources and patterns, and our quest for spiritual understanding must be unprecedented as well.”

The Lord knows it is all “too much” and has prepared a way forward for each of us to find the respite we need in the midst of it all. In my moments of emotional clarity, like the one I found while reading Mosiah, I believe that beyond respite we will also have the opportunity to access glory.

How are you all accessing the Savior and his redemptive power in this period of deep difficulty and anxiousness? Are you finding it to be difficult? Have you found new points of connection that you would be willing to share?