This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Morning Session of the April 2004 Conference.
Such good talks this week! Many I have remembered for all these years. Julie B. Beck's "A Mother Heart" is so good. Dennis E. Simmons' "But if Not." President Packer's "Do Not Fear." But the quote that stuck out to me this time was from President Faust's talk about "messages from God." He talks about all the ways God might speak to us—through prophets, through our parents (interesting!), through revelation. And he talks about different ways of receiving revelation:
Some of us may need something startling like a burning bush experience to awaken our senses. In such an experience the essential nature of something—a person, a situation, an object—is suddenly perceived. We understand this to be inspiration. To be able to perceive by inspiration the common and ordinary things of life in their true meaning is a special gift. Many people fail to perceive inspiration because God’s “great power … looks small unto the understanding of men” or because they are “less and less astonished at a sign or a wonder from heaven.”
Something about the way he worded this caught my attention. I think it was the idea of "the essential nature of something" being what we are trying to discern. We can discern it in sudden flashes of inspiration (sudden strokes of ideas, like Joseph Smith said) but we can also discern it slowly in "the common and ordinary things of life." And if we don't see it there, it's because we aren't opening our eyes to it.
I interpret this to mean that "the essential nature" of the things we need to know will remain hidden to us unless we're willing to look for God everywhere—in the most common and the most ordinary places. As a mother, I'm intrigued by that. What do I learn about the "essential nature" of my children, or of families, or of myself, through doing laundry? Through planning and cooking and cleaning up meals three times a day? What do I learn about the essential nature of motherhood through cleaning up after a sick child? What do I learn about the essential nature of charity through heartache and disappointment? What do I learn about the essential nature of God through trying to get my children to obey?
It makes me wonder if I can learn about the "true meaning" of all of those types of "essential nature" through any of those "common and ordinary things of life"? It seems farfetched on the face of it, but I actually have already learned so many unexpected truths through just…the regular living of life—but only when I remember to reflect, to look for something more instead of just getting caught up in the drudgery of it all. This talk makes me want to look even harder.
Other posts in this series:
Do Not Fear—by Rozy
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