A Child of Light

A day when I felt like a child of light 

I've been thinking about my shadow self. The natural woman who is weak and liable to stray from love. The girl who slinks into my head to convince me that I'm 

ugly,

unlikable

and unremarkable.

She tells my heart that I am nothing to be taken seriously and that I have nothing to offer others. She critiques my posture and my appearance in general. She laughs at my attempts to create, at all my projects and plans. She holds my dreams for ransom over my head. She takes every opportunity to tell me I'm wrong or pious or small. She guilt trips me for decisions made or for choosing to have faith. Under her gaze I feel so completely ill at ease, awkward, anxious, and easily angered. 

Lately, I've let her reign. I've literally felt her hot anger boiling under my chest for the dumbest things. I've felt her sense of comparison rotting my interior gardens; seen her unbelief clouding my spiritual vision; heard her barking demand for fairness, for "justice," for recognition. I've believed some of her smoothest arguments. I've held on to her judgements. 

Doing so always has a sickening effect. 

But happily I find, as I did this week, that light casts her out. In sincere prayer I feel the Holy Spirit's comforting presence. I have to ask myself--if I really am so ugly, unlovable, and unremarkable, then why would such a beautiful, loving, exceptional, heavenly visitation happen to me and so often, and just at the moment of need or humble appeal? 

The answer comes and with the light. It vibrates over me in a joyous outpouring of loving kindness that I can feel on a cellular level. It tells me:

You are a child of light. 

You are loved and worth loving. 

You are endowed with divine gifts and you have something to contribute. 

Trust me. 

And it takes away all worry in its wake. I'm left in the warmth of its golden splendor, the comfort of pure truth, truths that feel like peace and hope.

So advice to me: when the shadow self comes, pray. The light will cast her out. And simultaneously, it will change you into a kindred spirit, giving you divine deposits of beauty, strength and talent. You need never fear. 

For Thy Good

A joyful hello to you!

Parenting taught me a lesson this week on the price of growth and the nature of love.

It happened when my little James woke up with a fever in the thick of the night. Marc and I scrambled about in the dark for medicine and then I sat James on my knees, fighting the urge to hug his hot little body. Shivering, he cried "I hold you! I hold you!" He felt freezing, but I knew that what he wanted was not what he needed to get better. As Marc rubbed a cold wet wash cloth across his burning back, and James arched away crying for warmth, I thought about how I act in the face of healing or growth of any kind.  Do I resist the medicine of the soul? Do I beg for convenience when outreach and service are the real answers to my aches and pains?

Sometimes I feel like motherhood is too demanding. I'm all dry and drained. In that moment of trying to care for a sick child at night, God reminded me that this is His work and that His love can sometimes ask us to feel a whole range of emotions that call out the best in us and tutor us to become noble and wise and selfless. I've wondered why, when I'm cold, God would give me a cold wash cloth instead of a warm blanket. The answer is that he loves His children and knows a bigger, fuller story for our futures than we do. He wants to give us something better than what we can imagine for ourselves, and sometimes the price of learning is discomfort, even pain.

I'll leave you with his wisdom regarding given by the Lord to Joseph Smith about the purpose of adversity:

 "And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." ~ D&C 122:7