When Stones Glow

The Brother of Jared (known only by this epithet in scripture, because apparently his name was Mahonri Moriancumer, and that’s not a fun name to carve into metal plates) was on his way to the promised land. He’d built boats that were “tight like unto a dish” so that its residents could live entirely below deck for those times that water will cover them, but it occurred to him that it was going to be very dark in there, which, in addition to creating what must have been a horrendous vitamin D deficiency, would make it hard to steer.

The Brother of Jared went to God and posed this problem, to which the Lord answered, “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” (Ether 2:23). No windows, he specified, and no fire. But other than that—what can I do for you? (This always reminds me of my dad, whose favorite mantra while I was growing up was, “You’re smart, you can figure it out.”)

The Brother of Jared reflected on this for a while and then went to work making sixteen shiny stones of glass. He took them to God, saying, “Look, I know this might be a stupid idea, and don’t be mad at me, but here’s my pitch: what if you touch them, and fill them with your light, and we’ll use that to cross the sea” (Ether 3:4). The Lord, invisible behind a cloud during this whole conversation, reached out and touched the stones, and they were filled with light.

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Slice of Sky God

During my last year at BYU, I went to study and work in UK. My cohort of classmates was an odd one—a ton of freshmen English and drama major girls and six business bros recently back from their missions who just felt like going to London. “I’m so glad you’re going,” my professor said when I accepted the job. “I feel like you’ll be a stabilizing influence.”

A few weeks into the program, we were all crowding into a tiny town’s tiny church, the floor stone, the ceiling creaking wood. I was in love with it. There’s something about old churches, for me.

The boy next to me took a deep breath and said, “Ah! The smell of apostasy in the morning!” and rarely have I been so close to slapping someone. It seemed to me a mockery of the hundreds of years of people who had worn out their life in the pursuit of God, who had done their best in that little church. It seemed to dismiss their faith as less than his for the simple reason that it wasn’t his.

There’s a thing that can happen in my church—can happen in most churches—where we get to thinking we’re the chosen ones. We have all the answers, and everyone else is just wandering around in the dark, the poor misguided souls. At its worst, this attitude reminds me a little of the story about Rameumptom in the Book of Mormon, where a group of people gather weekly to thank God for loving them and saving them—just them. Because they were the best. This is an extreme example of course, but sometimes I hear echoes of it. Sometimes, unfortunately, I feel it.

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Kill Your Darlings

I’ve noticed the people often talk about God as the master of whatever it is they do. My parents say God is the master teacher. As teachers, they stand in awe of his pedagogy. But I’ve heard him called the master gardener, artist, and scientist—whatever we are, whenever we really come to love something, we see how good God is at it. It’s probably unsurprising, then, that I think of God as the master storyteller. And by master, I do mean master of His craft, but I also mean master in terms of a master and apprentice. God isn’t just a brilliant storyteller—He teaches us how to write our stories.

I’ve had a lot of writing teachers, and they’ve taught me a lot of things, like how to write topic sentences and where the commas go. The thing they teach most consistently though, is what to cut. Over and over again, I’ve sat in offices while my professors read through my work, drawing lines through paragraphs or scribbling in the margins. I’ve read the titles of their books until they look up and give the diagnosis. Once, Steve pointed to an underlined bit and said, “I think this sentence would be better not existing.” When Peter gave back the first draft of my thesis, he said, “I liked some of this, I just didn’t mark those things.” “Unnecessarily flippant” is what one of my favorite professors said about several of my favorite bits of one paper, probably because I was getting a bit impatient with historians being so sexist.

Sometimes my writing masters have been more gentle, but they all say things like that. What every writer really needs is a good editor to read through their stuff and say, “Nope. Not that.”

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