temple road

But 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.

—1 Peter 3:15

       I'm not always quite sure of how I feel about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm an ordinary person, so there are lots of mundane things that I wonder and struggle with sometimes. However, when it comes down to it, my spirituality is the fulness of all things that I doubt and know. It doesn't just occupy a single aspect of my life, and it does affect the mundane too.
       Tonight, as I drove along the temple road alone, I thought about lots of things like my family and the other people around me. I am so glad I have people in my life like these, let me tell you. I can't shout from the rooftops loud enough how much I love them.

       But anyway, I was thinking about my testimony. Here's how that usually tends to track:
       "Hmm. So. Can I really say I know the church is true? Do I have a testimony of the Book of Mormon? I don't read it every night. I gain so much comfort from it, though. I dunno about the restoration either. I love Joseph Smith. And I love the restoration story, what a wonderful concept. Man. Oh man, I'm so glad I get to be with my family forever. That's the plan of a god who loves." And so on.
(About that last part—one thing I have become consistently sure of is our loving Father. I know with personal confidence that Heavenly Father loves me just as much as anybody else, and that he loves everybody else just as much as He loves me. I can tell you till I'm blue in the face, but you have to find out for yourself. I encourage you to seek signs of His love in your life. I promise you that in His time, you will come to learn for yourself that Heavenly Father loves and knows you.)

       I follow this line of thinking and end up deciding that for me, love is enough. I have decided to trust my feelings. Over time I have spent much time with the scriptures, and I simply cannot deny how much better they help me to feel. Likewise, I simply cannot deny the way prayer brings me comfort. This summer especially, with all its moments of crisis, the best help for me was always—though not always applied—a full dive into humble prayer and humble scripture searching. I can't deny the impact of the sacrament. I can't offer reasoning for the way the whole value of these things becomes so much greater than a sum of their parts.

       In the way I interact with and analyze the world, there are certain rules and policies that I function by almost without knowing it. We all have these; as humans, we hunger to package things up neatly and make them easy for us to apply—this is why we are always making concepts into things like Truths and Principles. One thing I believe strongly in is a world that follows a pattern of natural consequence—with certain actions will always come certain reactions (and with practically everything else we just don't know what the heck's gonna happen so you've just gotta be careful. haha.) An extension of that concept is the following Truth: good trees produce good fruit, and unwholesome trees produce fruit that is likewise, and so by a thing's fruit ye shall always be able to determine the value and truth of the thing.

       Tonight, as I drove along the temple road alone, I decided that love is just another way of knowing something. In fact, I will tell you why love might be the truest way to know truth: it's because God is the root of all love, and likewise knows all truth.
       So, maybe my confidence in things like the Book of Mormon and the veracity of the Restoration are a little behind the curve sometimes. But that confidence can always increase through developing love for things like the Book of Mormon, the prophet Joseph Smith, personal prayer, and our living prophet Thomas S. Monson.
       It all starts with your personal relationship with the Lord. In whatever small or big way works for you, today start finding that relationship and that love. You can get on your knees and pray. You can start to feel an inkling of how much He loves you. Your love for Him, too, will start to grow. And however many times we fail to reach out, He's there right next to us ready for whenever we begin again to expand our learning of that love, which is infinite and eternal—that is, neverending in both magnitude and time. How cool is that? Man.
       Truly, I do love this gospel. I don't have all the answers I need, I don't understand everything I want to, I get hung up on discrepancies sometimes, but in the end it just boils down to love—and that the gospel brings in abundance when we work for it. That's a promise from God, not just me.
       Love, Grace