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Sabbath Devotional :: Let Him In
When I was baptized I was given a generic copy of the Bible in Primary. It had a frontispiece featuring a glorious color image of Christ standing before a door and raising His hand to knock. I loved the image and looked at it often. It references a scripture in Revelations which says: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. (Revelations 3:20) This comforting promise communicates the essence of the Savior’s relationship with us. It is a scripture filled with active love — Christ is…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Bridging to Christ
Recently I was talking with a group of young people who are struggling to find any personal relevance in religion. All of them grew up in homes where their parents were believers and active members of the Church, and almost all of them have continued to be engaged with religious activities. For now, they are still showing up, but they just aren’t feeling connected, inspired or engaged. These are such good people, thinking deeply about what it looks like to live a life of meaning, and yet they are wrestling and weary. At the moment I mostly listened, but ever since, that conversation has been taking up a fair amount…
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Sabbath Devotional :: A Christmas Parable
Shortly after we moved to Boston, I learned the story behind the Christmas tree on the city’s Common. Every year it is given by the people of Nova Scotia as an expression of gratitude for Massachusetts’ response to a devastating disaster. A few weeks before Christmas in 1917, a munitions ship exploded in the Halifax harbor, setting the city ablaze. Thousands were killed and thousands more were wounded. Almost immediately the Governor of Massachusetts reached out with a telegram offering assistance: “Massachusetts stands ready to go to the limit in rendering every assistance you may be in need of.” That telegram went unanswered — the telegraph system had been destroyed.…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Protection in Christ
Lately it feels like everything in my life is on fire. Simultaneously. Not a small brush fire here or there that needs a bit of quick attention and management, but frightening conflagrations that threaten to consume and destroy. There is a lot of fight and flight and not enough peace and quiet. And for me it means that feeling tired and unsettled is the default. In my more objective moments, I realize that some of this is just a feature of my personal phase of life, but there is also something else at play. So many others seem to feel the same, as if we are all being pushed to…
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Sabbath Devotional :: A National Sabbath
This year it feels like a tender mercy that the Fourth of July falls on the sabbath. Given our recent national struggles, a self-congratulatory and raucous celebration might not hit the right note. But perhaps a sabbath is exactly what we need right now – the chance to rest from our labors, reflect on where we have gone wrong, and recommit to creating a better future where we live more harmoniously with our fellow citizens. Today, instead of centering our celebration on parades and fireworks, we could use the stillness of a Sunday to sit with the powerful and holy truths that motivated the first Americans as they created a…
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Sabbath Devotional :: The Choice Between Outside or Clean
A few weeks ago I started feeling some familiar feelings of regret. It is probably because we are approaching the anniversary of a global pandemic and since this time was so remarkable, I feel that I should have done something remarkable with it. Those feelings are familiar to me. Regret is a powerful, universal emotion that burns its way into our thoughts. We sometimes talk about regret in the context of sin, because regret can propel us positively to repent and change. The emotion can also protect us from making and repeating mistakes, so it certainly isn’t all bad. But the kind of regret that makes me feel ashamed that…
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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…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Light on the Path
Everybody has a superpower. Mine is pretty straightforward, and it can best be described as an ability to see around corners. So the last few months have been incredibly disorienting for me, because not only am I unable to see around corners, I cannot even seem to see five feet in front of me. And frankly, I’ve been struggling with this. During those same months, I, like many of you, have also been experiencing a very unusual degree of isolation. Some of that isolation is straightforward — my abundant and complex life narrowed overnight. But there is another layer. I am discovering that many more people than I had previously…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Embracing the Period of Great Humbling
Many years ago, in the mythical days just before the internet sped up communication, I was a student studying abroad in London. General Conference had happened somewhere, but it hadn’t happened yet for us, and just as we left to head out on a month-long trip in Europe, a friend got a package containing homemade conference cassette tapes. Because of this, a few days later I found myself on a train, struggling to get discernible words out of a small portable cassette player. Suddenly, a voice came through clearly. Gordon B. Hinkley was reading a talk that President Benson felt too unwell to give himself, and for some reason it…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Navigating the Now — and Planning for the After
Has anyone figured this out yet? How to make Now work? We all knew what to do in the Before. Even if there were lots of days when I didn’t like Before, I understood it. I could walk its well-worn paths without needing to pay much attention to the obstacles, vistas, or valleys. But Before is gone, and given how solid and permanent it seemed at the time, it went away surprisingly quickly! So I am figuring out Now along with the rest of you, and while we need to understand Now and make it work, it is still both weird and temporary, because though it feels interminable it isn’t.…
