The Lord's Mysterious Ways

First of all I want to say that it is really uncomfortable to me to share some of these things on my blog, but I feel inspired to do so. The reason for the discomfort is not so much that I don't want to share my thoughts, but perhaps a little worry about what others might think of them, and experience with getting completely flamed on the web for having the audacity to have statements influenced by religious beliefs enter the public discourse.

Inspiration and Revelation

I just love the way the Lord hands out inspiration in little bits here and there. Over the past several weeks I have had so many wonderful things occur to me and they are all seeming to be on a related theme. Right now I'm not really sure where they are leading me, but I am curious and enjoying the journey. My theory is that one function of the Holy Ghost on the mortal is to build a literally more spiritual brain through constant exercise of the neural pathways related to spiritual thinking and experience. Putting that theory into practice has been an interesting experiment. I'm starting to try to link these many events together so I guess I'll cover them in several entries:

Temple and Family History Work
My current calling in my ward is Family History Consultant, which means I am called to help people do their family history and temple work. It is a challenge because of my natural shyness to try to reach out to people to convince them to let me come over and help them do something they are already feeling reluctant and guilty about. However, I am excited about this calling. I have been working on my own family tree as well as doing Family Search Indexing. Family Search Indexing is the process of viewing an old document and typing the information into a form that makes the document searchable. What I find is that each person becomes so real to me as I type their information. It drives home to me how much our Heavenly Father loves each individual person. For example, I typed in a death certificate of an unidentified military airman who died when his plane crashed in LA during WW2. I wondered if his family ever found out what happened to him in this accident. But the Lord knows who this man was and has a plan for him. In Alma 40: 10, Alma states, "God knoweth all the times which are appointed unto man."

Family history and temple work gives you a whole new sensitivity to the joy and love God has for each of his children. I find myself grateful for a sense of wonder that I experience when I walk down the street and see each individual person as a beloved child of God-- my own sister or brother. And mind you, I am walking down the street at the Gateway mall where the people have some serious issues. In one course down the mall you can see several homeless people, folks who have tanned, colored, surgically altered, and fashioned themselves to the point of being unrecognizable, as well as the gothic gender-benders with multiple tattoos. Yet, I echo Louis Armstrong and "think to myself, 'What a wonderful world.'" (Okay, I have a running soundtrack in my mind sometimes, especially when walking down the street.)

Another thing about family history work is it allows me to see a life in its whole context from beginning to end, and to a degree, in its eternal perspective. When I learn about an ancestor, it is wonderful to learn about how they became the people they were, how they overcame obstacles, and one thing that always stands out to me is that they take nothing with them but who they become. Ultimately all the temporal things that they have worked for fall away and become not meaningless, but history. So the value of temporal pursuits really gets placed in a different perspective. Temporal pursuits create value in the way that they force you to serve, to grow, to learn. Realizing that the word temporal is an adjective meaning related to time, and reflecting back on Alma 40 (verse 8), "all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men."

I find myself changing my thinking (perhaps this is due to reaching a more mature phase of life- I am after all hitting middle age full-stride) and making more measured decisions about the things I choose to do and say and think with this new, more spiritually-influenced perspective.