As Little Children

In Matthew 18:3, Jesus tells us to “be as little children.”

As someone who has recently acquired a little child, I sometimes find this request puzzling. Like last week when Molly threw a fit because I wouldn’t let her wear her flamingo socks for the third day in a row. After twenty minutes of negotiating, I managed to distract her from the socks with a tutu.

But the other day, I was reading something else Jesus said, about coming to him when we are heavy laden, and the Psalm that asks us to go to Him with a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And I remember the time Molly was hurt after she shut her fingers in her drawer, and all the times she’s sad after her dad leaves for work, or when her mouth hurts from teething—every time, she turned straight to me. She comes up and grabs my legs or reaches up, and I hold her while she cries.

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Talk: Women in the New Testament

This is a talk I gave in church a few weeks ago, so you might notice that there are some genre elements that are different than usual:

Today, I’m going to talk about how the women in the New Testament are different than in any other type of scripture because they are not introduced or usually primarily characterized by their relationship to men. I am pretty convinced that that’s because Jesus was there, because you can’t tell Jesus’s story without telling at least some of theirs. He cared about them too much, talked to them too much, interacted with them too much for them to disappear in scriptures about him. 

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And Jesus Said, "Mind Your Business"

One day in Jerusalem the disciples forgot to wash their hands before they ate, and the Pharisees took this personally. (Always interesting, isn’t it, what thingswe decide to take personally?) They said to Jesus, “If you’re a prophet, why don’t your disciples follow our elders’ traditions?”

And Jesus said, “Mind your own business.”

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Be Ready Always

Once, on a bad day, in a bad month, in a bad year, Tal got a flat tire out at the Payson temple. For a variety of health reasons, he couldn’t take care of it himself. He called Sarah (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called me (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called our roommate Kaylie (who did know how to change a tire, but did not feel entirely confident that she’d be able to do so on her own). We wandered over to an apartment of boys, where one of them was sick and one of them was already dressed to do an endowment in the temple. But both felt bad telling us no, so all of us went.

As I mentioned, it had been a bad day in a bad month in a bad year, and I didn’t know how to change a tire. I was along for the drive and the people with no personal feeling of responsibility towards either Tal or the tire. So when it turned out that that, out of all five us, none of us knew how to change Tal’s specific tire, it was a welcome relief to sit down on a curb and laugh for a while.

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Consecration and the Miracle of Multiplication

The day Jesus learned that his cousin John the Baptist died, he went away into the desert, as he often did when He wanted to talk to God. And, as they often did when they wanted to talk to God, everyone followed him. He was tired and sad, and maybe he was thinking fondly of the days when no one knew who he was, but he didn’t tell them to go, not even when his disciples came up and said, “They should head back. It’s late, and they’ll want to buy food somewhere” (Matthew 14:15).

“No,” Jesus said. “They can stay. We’ll feed them” (Matthew 14:16).

“We only have five loaves of bread and two fish,” the disciples say (Matthew 14:17).

I wonder if they said and did not record or just thought what they really meant: that amount of food is not only not sufficient to feed this crowd, it’s not even enough for us.

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Did Not Our Hearts Burn Within Us?

I’ve been wondering, recently, why no one recognized Jesus when He came back from the dead. Why did no one, upon simply seeing Jesus, shout or faint or otherwise realize that he was flesh and bone among them again.

We can give Mary some room. Mary went to finish Jesus’s burial only to find his body missing, two angels chilling exactly where it should have been. Mary turned and saw Jesus but, through her tears and confusion, didn’t recognize him until he said her name. But she was crying, she’d just encountered angels, she’d though He was dead, and it had been a really, really rough week. We can give Mary some room.

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I Think You Can Do This

In Ether 2, the Brother of Jared approaches God after building boats according to the Lord’s exacting instructions, but he has noticed two problems: Problem 1: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time breathing. Problem 2: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time seeing.

God meets him at the top of the mountain tells him to go ahead and cut holes in the top and bottom of the boat that can be very tightly stoppered when the sea is calm, and that way they can get fresh air. (This solution terrifies me, but the Brother of Jared seems to have been chill with it.) Jesus didn’t tell him what to do about the light, though, so after making the tightly stoppered holes, the Brother of Jared hikes back up the mountain to say, “And about the light?”

“What do you think?” God says.

I think, had I been the Brother of Jared, I may have been annoyed by this. I might have thought, “I don’t want to have to keep climbing this mountain when you can just tell me the answer already.”

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I Can Fix That, And Other Lies I've Loved

The first time I got my heartbroken, I was an absolute mess. It was almost comical. It would have been, in a chickflick. It would have been like that part in Legally Blonde where she’s eating ice cream and yelling at the TV. My version involved a lot of crying in stairwells, only eating Clif bars, writing pages and pages of burn letters, and getting very little sleep. After two months of this, a guy in an elevator said to me, “You should probably take a nap.”

As always, my approach to this new problem was research. I listened to podcasts and read blogs and scientific articles. (Did you know that heartbreak is a physical phenomena wherein, deprived of the dopamine and oxytocin the relationship provided you, your body freaks out? Tylenol helps.) In addition to online resources, I pursued more traditional modes of research: people. I asked advice from everyone, all the time. Someone would say, “Hey, how are you?” And I’d say, “Not great. How do you deal with heartbreak?” My favorite response was Bentley’s. He said, “Reread Harry Potter. You’ll feel better by the end.”

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If You Can't Say Something Nice

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad actions movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

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The Elder Prodigal: Sons and Slaves

In the story of the Prodigals the younger son runs away with his inheritance and spends it all, only to come back to his father, humbled. His father throws a big party for him, which irks the responsible elder brother, because dad never threw him a party. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” he says, “and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15).

We’ve heard a lot about this story and what it means in Sunday school over the years: in the extended metaphor, we are both the brothers, and the father is God. We are the obvious and the secretive sinners, and God runs to welcome us back no matter what kind of sinner we are on any particular day. It is the secretive sinner, of course, that is more interesting to me.

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Power and Control

Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”

This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.

Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.

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Hunger, Bread and Stone

In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7).

I read this a few weeks ago and thought, that is so not my experience with God. My experience is more appropriately summarized in a slightly altered John Green quote: “[God] is not a wish granting factory” (The Fault in Our Stars).

Lots of things I’ve prayed for did happen. My sister was safe on her mission. I got into grad school. My friends received some measure of healing. I received comfort. People were safe traveling, and I found friends. But these notebooks are also things I prayed for and didn’t get, including grad schools I didn’t get into and nights I didn’t feel comfort and friends I lost.

It’s worth noting that Jesus does not seem to promise that we will get what we will ask for, find what we look for, or that the door we’re knocking on will be the one that opens. Although Jesus does say “it” shall be given and “it” shall be opened, these pronouns don’t have an antecedent, at least in the English (Matthew 7:7). Verbs, not nouns, come before the pronouns, making it grammatically unclear whether or not the things that are asked for are the things that are given.

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Easter: Presence and Absence

There is scriptural precedent for people feeling left behind by God. Job is, I think, the most famous, but Martha felt abandoned when Jesus did not come in time to save her brother. She went out to meet Him when he finally came, three days late, and said, “Lord, had you been here my brother would not have died.” In jail, Joseph Smith wrote, “How long shall thy hand be stayed?” On the cross, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

What I think is interesting about all of these moments of rebuke by the servant to the master is that, while they are cried out in agony of soul, in hurt and anger, perhaps in feelings of betrayal, they are also always expressions of faith. Martha is hurt that Jesus did not come to rescue her brother—because she knows that if he had, he could have stopped death. This was Martha’s faith, that the Lord she worshipped had power over death. Joseph Smith wrote in the pain of his own suffering and the suffering of those who followed him. He had witnessed death and illness and imprisonment and rape, and he knew that His God had power over all of those things and all who perpetuated them. And, on the cross, Jesus knew that His Father could save Him, could be with Him, could preserve Him. All of these people would have done anything to feel God with them, and what God seemed to require that they do was, for a time, feel alone.

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