Being Ourselves with the Lord

Last year I was at a dinner with some people I know and love, and I left early. I said goodbye, but rather than walk out immediately, I sat down in the hallway, out of sight, to put my shoes on. I could still hear the conversation around the table after I left. I won’t say what they talked about, but it was fairly obvious to me that my absence had changed the tenor of the conversation. They felt freer to discuss certain things in my absence. It hurt to know that these people I loved did not feel they could be themselves around me.

I wonder if Jesus feels the same way about our attitudes toward Him. How would our behavior change if He were to arrive? Perhaps we would sit up straighter, act more respectfully, speak more quietly, shove various magazines under the rug, change the channel on the t.v., and so on. Would we be frightened and tempted to flee? If we are happy and laughing and excited and joking and fascinated before Jesus walks in the room, and we shut down and clam up after He walks into the room, the nonverbal message is clear: Go away. (Of course none of us would SAY that, or even intentionally mean it, but how else can you interpret such behavior?) Even if we are grateful to the Lord for His blessings, many of us inadvertently project the attitude of, "I am more comfortable with You at a distance." When Jesus cast the legion of devils out of the man at Gadara, the entire village asked Jesus to go away. They preferred the company of a man possessed with devils to One who could heal him.

Little children don’t feel shame or embarrassment readily. They run into the living room without clothes, inform everyone about the condition of their toys, and excitedly share information about everything else going on inside them, from their emotions to their bowels. I wonder if this is part of the reason that Jesus preferred their company—they hid nothing from Him; they could just be themselves in His presence. Jesus shouted about this quality when He recognized it in an adult: "Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" (John 1:47). Is it that rare in adults? Do we usually lose our full compliment of openness after childhood ends?

We adults tend to hide our true selves behind a front. The Lord created Adam and Eve naked, but Satan tried to get them to hide from the Lord. This is an irony, since no one can hide anything from Him; He is omniscient. It is as though He is standing next to each one of us, watching our days unfold, second by second, hour by hour. "...when we undertake to cover our sins...the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man" (D&C 121:37). We even hide our sins from ourselves, sweeping them from our consciousness with raucous entertainment or anything else that can drown out the voice of the Spirit.

It is interesting that we run away from the Being who has our best interest at heart, and prefer the company of less benevolent people. We are frightened of the One who will save us. If He were to walk into the room with us, we would probably try to be perfect and dignified and respectable, to hide our flaws. But He knows them better than we do. It seems He would rather discuss those with us, to extricate them from us, rather than leave them festering in the dark. (Fungus and sin grow best in darkness.) If we come to Him, He will show us our weakness. It is difficult to discuss our flaws openly, but He gave them to us in the first place (see Ether 12:27). Toes that can be stubbed, brains that forget, organs gushing with heavy passions under which we stagger; He built everything. He sees and hears all our thoughts as though we were dictating them aloud, including all the anger, jealousy, rebellion, depression, and unrighteous desires. As President Eyring noted this General Conference, we can only hide the Lord from ourselves; we cannot hide ourselves from Him.

Jesus invited all sinners to come to Him, and He accepted their company on condition that they repented (“go and sin no more” to the woman taken in adultery; He also accepted the attention of the sinful woman who anointed His head and feet at dinner). But His most cutting condemnations were reserved for those whom He called “hypocrites,” literally “stage actors” in Greek. Isaiah foretold that Jesus would have “no beauty that we should desire him.” Externally, the Pharisees of His day were “whited sepulchers,” but internally they were “full of dead men’s bones.” They made an art of whitewashing their cracks and flaws. It is telling that not one man who brought the woman taken in adultery felt qualified to stone her after Jesus told them to do so if they had no sin. Jesus is completely qualified to condemn us for our sins because He is sinless, yet He is more patient and forgiving than anyone.

William Tyndale gives us Faith personified as a woman: “Faith, when she prayeth, setteth not her good deeds before her, saying, ‘Lord, for my good deeds do this or that;’ nor bargaineth with God, saying, ‘Lord, grant me this, or do this or that, and I will do this or that for thee;’...But she setteth her infirmities and her lack before her face, and God’s promises, saying, ‘Lord, for thy mercy and truth, which thou hast sworn, be merciful unto me, and pluck me out of this prison and out of this hell, and loose the bonds of Satan, and give me power to glorify thy name.’ Faith therefore justifieth in the heart, and before God; and the deeds justify outwardly before the world, that is, testify only before men, what we are inwardly before God.” I hope God laughs at our demanding petulance and willingness to bargain with Him, as though He did not already own the things we offer. I think the Lord wants us to come to him, privately, with our dirt showing (not to air our dirty laundry, but to come to Christ with it so He can clean us). No performance on our part can fool Him (the way we try to fool each other). We must be open, authentic, genuine, and sincere with the Lord.

Prayers offered in this blank and sincere way feel better, and I have discovered they are answered more readily. It is "counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such" (Moroni 7:9). On the other hand, Zenos says, "And thou didst hear me because of mine afflictions and my sincerity; and it is because of thy Son that thou hast been thus merciful unto me, therefore I will cry unto thee in all mine afflictions, for in thee is my joy; for thou hast turned thy judgments away from me, because of thy Son" (Alma 33:11).

My father once told me that God sees everything, all the horrible things that people are doing everywhere, and that He was certainly not surprised by anything I had ever done. Rather than thinking of getting perfect on our own, and then going to God, our repentance should involve Him intimately from the beginning. (We use the phrase "repentance process" as though all men everywhere had not been commanded to repent all the time, from the moment of accountability to death. There is no end to the process, unless we want to stop progressing.) We can discuss all the details with Him, and Jesus will succor us (literally "run to help" us) in our infirmities.

Those who come to Jesus, with great faith, great love for Him, great submission and humility before Him, and do the things He asks, will be blessed with a clean record in heaven, strength to do the impossible, and a clean heart filled with righteous desires on earth. Rather than hide God from ourselves with denial and pretense and tinsel cosmetics, let's come to Him as we are.

Backdoor Blessings

We are commanded to "seek," "ask," and "knock;" to cry over our fields and families; to ask the Lord that we may receive the desires of our hearts. I agree with and practice all of that. But a different paradigm of receiving blessings has recently opened to my mind, and I would like to talk about it.

Our final reward will come to us "without compulsory means" (D&C 121:46). So many blessings come to us while we are otherwise engaged, not seeking them. The Midrash tells a story of Abraham, who was still denied children through his beloved Sarah. He was old and feeling ill at the time, but it was a hot day, and so he sent his faithful servant out into the inferno of the desert to look for wanderers who might be in peril. His servant found no one. He sent him out again, and went himself to look for anyone who might be in danger. He found no one, but when he got back to his tent, three heavenly visitors were there. One of the messengers then promised Abraham that he and Sarah would have a son, Isaac. Abraham's greatest desire was granted to him while he was otherwise engaged, not concerning himself with his own desires. While this account is not in the scriptures, it is true to life. Many blessings come when they are least expected.

Zachariah was performing his priestly duty in the Temple when the angel Gabriel appeared and declared that he and Elizabeth would be healed of their infertility and have a son, who grew up to be John the Baptist.

Rebekah probably was not looking for a husband when she began hauling hundreds of gallons of water to refresh the camels of Abraham's servant, but that act was a sign to him that she was meant for Isaac. Rachel was herding sheep the day Jacob saw her coming to the well—not exactly walking the red carpet, but she still attracted a suitor.

This kind of surprise blessing is common in life. Yet many of the things we pine for most fervently fail to materialize. I wonder if we can become so preoccupied and frantic with what we want that we stumble over our own feet in the attempt to get it. "The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear" (C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed). Can we drive off longed-for blessings by grasping at them too frantically?

Agency is the medium in which the plan of salvation is played out. It governs all interactions between intelligent entities. Compulsion is reviled by the plan, only applied when people choose their way into damnation. If we could be compelled to be loyal, our loyalty would be empty. One preacher expressed concern that Latter-day Saint preoccupation with agency, freedom to choose, might engender pride. I respond that without freedom to choose, there is no authentic humility. If we could not choose to rebel, our choice to be obedient would be as meaningless as a valentine from a robot. Yes, we can be compelled to be humble, but the willing humility is clearly preferred (see Alma 32).

We are commanded to love God first and foremost. I wonder if clutching frantically at a particular wish can make it a false god in our hearts. Our love of the thing surpasses our love for God; why should He provide us an idol? Abraham's encounter is instructive; he was deeply concerned with the well-being of his fellow man—a hypothetical fellow man, someone who might be lost in the burning wasteland, and he went seeking to rescue anyone who might be in danger. In the process of turning his heart outward, away from his own desires, the Lord saw fit to bless him with his greatest desire of all, when he was not even concerned about it. It was apparent that his hopes were not impairing his ability or willingness to serve; what harm could granting him his hopes do? On the other hand, my experience has been that setting up an idol in the heart prompts the Lord to slate it for destruction.

Perhaps griping or complaining about the absence of a particular blessing from God puts a crimp in our relationship with Him so that we cannot appropriately receive it. Our anxious clamoring might be tantamount to an unbridled passion. Would the Lord be guilty of promoting our bad attitudes and selfishness to grant such a wish? "Thy will, not mine," is the attitude we are supposed to be fostering. And saying those words without the heart behind them is not going to fool the Lord into giving us what we really want. There is no way to fake pure motives. (1Ne. 3:7 gets a lot of airtime; how often do we quote the verse before: "Therefore go, my son, and thou shalt be favored of the Lord, because thou hast not murmured.")

Consider Alma's people in captivity. They wanted deliverance as their greatest desire: "And Alma and his people...did pour out their hearts to him; and he did know the thoughts of their hearts."

But God does not deliver them immediately:

"And it came to pass that the voice of the Lord came to them in their afflictions, saying: Lift up your heads and be of good comfort, for I know of the covenant which ye have made unto me; and I will covenant with my people and deliver them out of bondage. And I will also ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that even you cannot feel them upon your backs, even while you are in bondage; and this will I do that ye may stand as witnesses for me hereafter, and that ye may know of a surety that I, the Lord God, do visit my people in their afflictions."

The next verses are valuable in teaching us why the Lord puts us through trials, and why He lets us out of them:

"And now it came to pass that the burdens which were laid upon Alma and his brethren were made light; yea, the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord. And it came to pass that so great was their faith and their patience that the voice of the Lord came unto them again, saying: Be of good comfort, for on the morrow I will deliver you out of bondage" (Mosiah 24:12-16).

They were cheerful, patient, submissive, and had great faith, even though they were in bondage, the opposite of the thing they desired. The Lord did not deliver them to make them happy; He delivered them after they learned to be happy without the thing they wanted most. Or, after they showed that His promise of deliverance was sufficient to make them happy, regardless of their circumstances.

This paradox may be at the heart of why we do not receive some blessings. Grateful kids are easy to bless—who wants to be generous to jealous, impatient, whiny kids? "Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye are little children, and ye have not as yet understood how great blessings the Father hath in his own hands and prepared for you; And ye cannot bear all things now; nevertheless, be of good cheer, for I will lead you along. The kingdom is yours and the blessings thereof are yours, and the riches of eternity are yours. And he who receiveth all things with thankfulness shall be made glorious; and the things of this earth shall be added unto him, even an hundred fold, yea, more" (D&C 78:17-19).