Seeking the True Shepherd

I served my mission for the LDS church from 95 to 97 and it was the first time I had kept a consistent journal. It felt important to capture the experiences of that time. I often felt guilty that so much of my journals during that time was spent on self-reflection rather than people we were finding or teaching. But, I’m grateful I did record those internal happenings.

When I finished my mission, I was left feeling as though I had largely failed. Sure, I was in one of those so-called “difficult” missions and we rarely made it beyond the 1st or 2nd discussion, but I couldn’t help feeling that if I had been less focused on home and myself and more on the people I was teaching, that there would have been more “success”. So, I left my mission feeling like I would need to spend the rest of my life to make up for the shortfalls of my mission.

I also lamented, after my mission, that I would never be as close to the Lord as I was on my mission. I feel like this is what I had been told in so many words from various people in the church. This was crushing to me, because I wanted to always feel what I had felt on my mission. Indeed, up to that point, I had never felt so close to the Lord. So, in the wake of my mission, it was hard for me to go back to mission journals and think over the experiences I’d had – partly because I had actually been quite hard on myself as a missionary, but also because I felt like I had lost something I couldn’t fully get back.

Within a few months after my mission, I was back into the grind of school and I reveled in it. Whereas I had been a mediocre student before my mission, there was awakened in me an immense drive to learn, grow, and succeed in academic pursuits. During the years that followed, I changed majors multiple times, jockeying into something I felt I could do passionately for the rest of my working life. I ended up in graduate school at the University of Washington, utterly enthralled with the new experiences, exposures, and learning that came with being in liberal Seattle after years inside the bubble of Provo.

However, I still longed for something I felt I’d lost since my mission. In April of 2005, I was engrossed in a 5-week qualifying exam in my program where I had to write a mock research proposal. In the midst of this, I found myself writing pages and pages of ideas related to the research topic. But, mingled within this, I found myself having other impressions of a more spiritual nature. This culminated on April 19 with me writing out something that felt like impressions from the Lord addressed to me personally. It felt as though he was saying: “yes, I will show you these things, but there are things of far greater importance I wish to show you… this is how I have reached you or gotten your attention…. I have called you out of the wilderness and you have heard my voice.”

As precious as the experience felt to me, it cast everything into doubt and question concerning my academic pursuits. By April 30, 2005, still during the qualifying exam, I found myself struggling to know how to proceed on the exam. I wrote: “Why has my mind gone blank? Why when I have been shown so much am I suddenly struggling to receive more. Time grows short and still nothing seems to be coming to my mind anymore…. Now at this critical time, it seems as though the heavens have shut and I am left to wonder why…. The heavens are shut. What will cause them to open?“

In some personal reflections in 2016 about the turmoil of my mind during this qualifying exam experience of 2005, I wrote:

“If the Lord had been seeking to communicate with me, that was only a mirror of my own desire to draw closer to Him and regain some of what I felt I had lost since the end of my mission. Notwithstanding this, however, I still had to get this qualifying exam done and I needed help. Was He still going to help me with this? Or was this exam, my graduate program, all of this, expendable in His higher purposes? This tension between the temporal and practical matters of making my way in this world, professionally, and the higher, spiritual matters of coming to know God and do His will became a prominent theme of my graduate school experience.”

While the Lord delivered me at this time and helped me to pass my exam, this sentiment would return many times over the next few years as I struggled and languished in my program. I was filled with lofty, soaring ideas about the research I was doing only for it to be repeatedly cast into doubt as I wondered what were the Lord’s intentions and what were only my own vain ambitions. By the Spring of 2008, having spent so much time in graduate school at my family’s expense, I could sense the writing on the wall. I expressed it as follows in an email to a close friend:

“…I remember only about a month ago, walking out of the Phys-Astr library to go to upper campus. I had this very distinct sentimental feeling about the UW and the time I’ve spent here. To be honest, at the time I had the feeling that I would be leaving the UW in about a year whether it was with a degree or without. Time is growing dim for me like the end of a day and I feel like I need to take my family and move onto a new phase in our life. Whether the Lord is going to show me the finer points of a PhD dissertation that can be accomplished within a year, or I have to settle for a MS or no degree at all, it’s time to close this phase and move on to the next part. I’ve definitely been feeling sentimental too. Right now, I don’t feel any concern or regret about school. My mind has been more preoccupied lately with my family.“

Four months later, on August 1, 2008, my advisor announced he was leaving the University of Washington. My wife and I had just had our third child a month before. I hurried to finish up a masters thesis and defended in February 2009. Around this time, I had applied for a 1-year leave of absence from my program, still with the insane hope that I might be able to jump back in and finish what I had originally set out for. On March 23, 2009, I received notice that this petition had not been granted. This sealed it for me. My program was done.

Over the next 3 years, we picked up the pieces of this failure and the Lord was good to us in providing for our needs as we added one more child to our family in 2011 and then moved out east of Seattle where I had found a job. The Lord had brought me down low, but in his love and mercy and regard for my family, he took care of us.

During the 14 years or so since the end of my mission, while I had kept research notebooks and recorded spiritual impressions in those, I hadn’t actually kept a real journal, per se. It wasn’t until March 2012 that I began to keep a consistent journal and I’ve done so ever since. I think this was providential, because much would change within a month of resuming my journal writing. In an entry dated “2012 April 19-20 (Thurs-Fri)“, I wrote:

“…Need some rest, mentally. Very grateful for the last couple of days. Much on my mind. Seeking the quiet voice of the Lord to know what he thinks of what I’ve done w/my life. I want to receive from Him an evaluation of my life. I want to have a review. I want him to tell me concerning my life…. much on my mind. I want to help heal the suffering soul. I want to feel the pain of the suffering soul. I want to heal.”

In the very next entry, dated “2012 April 21-22 (Sat-Sun)“, I wrote:

“I feel like I’ve over-extended myself, my mind and soul. Too much reading this weekend…. This weekend was wonderful, but it was also intense mentally. I read so much. But I discovered the most intriguing person…. He has written some very insightful and profound stuff. But he’s also potentially dangerous. I emailed my parents about him Sat. night and emailed [a friend] about him last night. It’s time for me to withdraw from my reading for a time, to reground myself. I need the Lord to exercise his influence over me by the Holy Ghost to restore peace and balance to my soul. I’ve done too much (mentally) this weekend and over-extended my soul….”

Starting in August 2005, when President Hinckley issued his Book of Mormon “challenge” (to complete the Book of Mormon before the end of the year), I had renewed my dedication to studying the Book of Mormon. With this experience as a launch point, the Book of Mormon became integrated into every aspect of how I see the world and God’s hand in our lives. In time, I became preoccupied with portions of the Book of Mormon that I felt were only superficially discussed in our church curriculum. This included, among other chapters, 1 Nephi 11-15, Jacob 5, 2 Nephi 25-30 and 3 Nephi 16, 20-21.

I remember growing frustrated that I couldn’t find anything in the church curriculum that did justice to what I believed was a profound and all-encompassing chapter (Jacob 5) as it concerns the Lord’s doings among the people of the earth. So, I took to the internet in April 2012 to find commentaries on Jacob 5. That’s when I came across a blog with dozens of posts where the writer included verse-by-verse commentaries on several chapters of the Book of Mormon that he had accumulated over many years as a gospel doctrine teacher. I was blown away by this treasure trove, which covered not only the very chapters I had been so interested in, but also Alma 13, 2 Nephi 31-33, and 3 Nephi 11-18.

Before this, I had reasoned that perhaps our leaders did not expound on these chapters with the depth I felt they merited because we as a church were not prepared for this deeper understanding. The discovery of these blog posts on the Book of Mormon completely changed this for me. Another thing that completely changed my perspective was my discovery of a book called Passing the Heavenly Gift. Suddenly everything began to make sense to me. It wasn’t that our leaders had withheld from us their deeper understanding of the scriptures. It’s that they likely did not possess the deeper understanding that Joseph Smith possessed and which the world lost direct access to when the two prophets of this dispensation, Hyrum and Joseph, were martyred in June 1844.

Having just celebrated Easter, I want to pay the above tribute to the Lord who has been my light in the wilderness. Lehi, in his dream, followed a man enrobed in white for several hours but only remained in a “dark and dreary waste.” When he finally knelt in the darkness and began to pray to the Lord that He would have mercy on him, only then did the darkness disperse and Lehi beheld the tree of life.

As Peter wrote: “…sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear…” This is the purpose of this post and this blog.