Brain Hurricane: A Swarm of Thoughts on the Light of Christ

This was the "NASA Image of the Day" a few days ago. NASA's caption for it was: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph from the International Space Station on Oct. 7, 2015. Sharing with his social media followers, Kelly wrote, "The daily morning dose of #aurora to help wake you up. #GoodMorning from @Space_Station! #YearInSpace"

Due to my weekly Mormon Tabernacle Choir "work schedule" every Sunday, circumstances demand that I attend my regular church services on Sunday afternoons. I heard about a midsingles ward that sounded really good to me. Several of my best single MoTab friends attend it and say they love it, and so I decided I should check it out.

(I think "midsingles" is possibly a pretty-much exclusively LDS/Mormon term. What a midsingles ward is, is a church congregation whose population is unmarried people who are between the ages of 31 and 45. Psst...am I right on that? The max age is 45, yeah?)

I'm not 31 yet; I still have a little while to go till I get there. However, I am relatively close to getting there, and so when I visited the midsingles ward today, I felt at home, especially when I already seemed to know like 40 people there. I'll most likely be attending that ward more often from now on, since it meets at a perfect time for me each Sunday, and that's where oodles of mis amigos are.

Typically once a month, an LDS congregation has this thing called a testimony meeting. What happens is -- there's a significant amount of set-aside time for members of the congregation to come to the pulpit or take the microphone and share their sincere testimonies and heartfelt feelings about the Savior Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father.

As I said before, I know a lot of people who attend that ward. One gal I know and love walked up to the pulpit and started sweetly talking about what was in her heart. Halfway into listening to her, *BOOM!* a thought hit me (not a painful *boom*, for it felt kind of nice). Something whispered to my brain, Alison, you'd better write this down. And so I did:

Why is it, when another person reaches out to you, lifts you up, helps you feel better, that you feel like Deity loves you? It is because the Light of Deity is inside each person, glowing particularly brightly in the person who lovingly reaches out.

I'm pretty darn sure this wasn't the specific topic my friend was presently touching on at the pulpit. Sometimes when you're listening to a person's motivational or inspired message, it opens the mental or spiritual door for something  else totally different to speak its message to you. It's kind of like you've stopped hearing the words coming out of your friend-at-the-pulpit's mouth; however, hearing the words coming out of their mouth seems to be the just-right thing to do the trick of enabling you to experience what turns out to be a fabulous thought-explosion.

One thought about what I jotted down as the "Light of Deity" led to another thought, which led to another, then to another, so on and so forth. I found myself flipping through the pages of the Doctrine & Covenants. I searched for a plethora of particular verses that I knew were there. I found them. Read them. They were in different spots throughout the book. To me they seemed to be all related to each other. I connected dots.

Like delicious pulled pork for sandwiches, I will pull apart the note that jotted down in my phone's Notes app:

...the Light of Deity is inside each person...

I thought of this line to write because of scriptural lines that I think about all the time:

D&C 84:46 ~ And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world...

D&C 93:2 ~ And that I am the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world...

Pretty much my absolute favorite thing to read is the Bible Dictionary. Holy cow that reference tool is cool. I think any person of any Christian denomination would love to explore the Bible Dictionary. Seriously so interesting. For real. 

Anyway, I love the Bible Dictionary's entry for "Light of Christ." Here's an extract from the entry that I wish to touch upon:

The light of Christ is just what the words imply: enlightenment, knowledge, and an uplifting, ennobling, persevering influence that comes upon mankind because of Jesus Christ. For instance, Christ is “the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world”...

Two particular lines from this extraction that I want to talk about for a minute.

1) ...an uplifting, ennobling, persevering influence...

2) Christ is “the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (D&C 93:2; John 1:9)

So I guess I'll talk about the second one first. One of my snowball-effect thoughts today was What reason may be behind the fact that Christ's light is in all of us? Well, it may be a lot of reasons. But I think one biggie could be the fact that Jesus Christ is, in fact, our Brother. Our literal brother, but with a capital B: "Brother." Brother Jesus is our sibling ("Sibling" with a capital S? Hehe :) He and we share the same Father (and Mother, certainly). Heavenly Father. We are family. Actual, literal family.

And so what I'm trying to say is... We've got the light of Christ -- the "Light of Deity" -- because it's in our genes. I think it's hereditary. Just as our mortal bodies consist of hereditary traits that our parents and ancestors have/had, today I realize that it makes a whole lot of sense to me that divine light, purely and simply, is part of our makeup. It constitutes us. Just like our bones, muscles, nerves, cells, all of that.

I'll talk about the first one second. An uplifting, ennobling, persevering influence... That's one way the Bible Dictionary defines the light the Christ, and I totally believe it. I know it. I know that's how the light of Christ is. Because why? Well, because... think about it. What was recorded in the scriptures about Christ's life? In what way did He live? What did He do? How did He treat people?

He uplifted. He lifted people up. He lifted hands that hung down. He healed people -- not just their physical maladies, but their spirits as well. Their souls. He comforted.

He ennobled in the sense that He helped people feel like they were worth something great. He helped people come to understand their infinite individual worth. He helped people realize that they belong to a loving Heavenly Father and Heavenly Family. He helped people feel hope -- hope for a better world; and hope that repentance can be done, and that they can always have a heavenly helping hand each step of the way to improvement.

He Himself was an amazing example of perseverance. The best example, actually. A humongous part of what His Atonement means is that, while He is exalted to a throne majestically high above, He also has descended below all things, meaning He has a completely perfect understanding and empathy towards the person -- the child of God -- who is acquainted with the absolute lowest of lows. Most definitely He knows what "rock bottom" feels like. He knows what everybody's "rock bottom" feels like.

He knows what everything in between feels like, too. Every possible level of struggling He is all too familiar with. He knows how to help every single person, who has ever lived, to persevere through trial, for He too persevered. He persevered through all of it.

And so this is what the light of Christ is. This is its essence. Since the light of Christ is in all of us, too, as well as in Christ, what does this say about us? About what we can do?

In the LDS Church's Young Women program, young women are given a number of different "values" to ponder and develop on a continual basis. One of the values is called "Divine Nature." The program has an assigned beautiful color to accompany each value, and Divine Nature's color is blue... And blue is on my Top Two list of favorite colors ever, and D and N are two of my most favorite letters of the alphabet (I never said I wasn't a nerd), and sooo... Divine Nature was possibly my most favorite Young Women value, and when I was a young girl I would think about Divine Nature allllll the time. I still think about it all the time, even though my Young Women era of youth was more than ten years ago.

What I'm thinkin' about our divine nature right now is... Our "divine nature" is the light of Christ that's in each of us. And it's not an abstract idea, but it's also not just a thing that we happen have that is just sitting there inside of us not doing anything. It's got a purposeful function, just like most everything else that comprises our bodies. Like blood, like skeletons, like our anatomies and physiologies, the light of Christ -- which is also very much a part of us -- actually does stuff. Really cool stuff, actually, that benefits not only the person whose light it is, but other people as well, because the light can be used to serve mankind.

Why is it, I asked, when another person reaches out to you, lifts you up, helps you feel better, that you feel like Deity loves you?

When another person reaches out to you, lifts you up, and helps you feel better, the tool they are actually using is the light of Christ that's inside of them. They're using it. They're applying it. The light can be used to do stuff.

I know that I've used it to bless the lives of others. Most of the time I have no notion that I'm using it. Most of the time I don't realize what I'm doing. Most of the time I bet the fruits don't even get seen. I think that, most of the time, the acts of uplifting, ennobling, and encouraging -- from soul to soul -- are so incredibly subtle, that they go sort of undetected.

But every once in a while, you get the lucky chance of being able to share a wonderfully sweet moment with a friend whom you've helped, or who's helped you, and earnest thanks and you're-welcomes are exchanged, and you'll always remember the experience, and you'll carry the good memory with you in your pocket everywhere you go.

But I take back what I said about those types of experiences being "lucky chances." I think it's not luck. I think it's what God wants you experience and remember. It's one of His numberless various types of blessings that He bestows upon you.

There. Was that enough blah-blah-blah for you? That was about 1,773 words. If you read all that, good job. :)