Spinning

Trigger Warning: This post is going to make an analogy using calculus. Mathophobes beware! The good news is that I don't really understand the calculus very well myself, which may allow the reader to feel smug about his or her superior grasp of the subject matter. Either way, read at your own risk!

A few weeks ago I was lying in bed thinking about the day. It had been a typical day, full of annoyances and impatience and dashing from here to there, but there had been a little window in the middle of it all where everyone—actually everyone, Sam and Abe and Seb and all the other children—happened to be home while the younger kids and I were doing a little school activity at the kitchen table. One by one, every person gathered to do it with us. We sat there together for maybe half an hour, talking with each other and tasting different kinds of chocolate and writing down what we observed. For those moments, there was happiness and learning and peace. I looked at the whole family sitting around the table, together and briefly at rest amid the thousand other demands on our time and attention, and the thought that kept coming to my mind was: "those moments make these moments possible."

Then the day's schedule moved on and the family scattered again, and the constant work of daily life resumed, and I didn't have time to think about anything at all. But at night when it was quiet, my thoughts kept going back to the contrast of those midday peaceful moments with the commotion of the rest of the day, and the idea that somehow one enabled the other. Then another thought came: "Heavenly Father needs a vessel to pour blessings into. Mortality, with all its necessities and demands, is that vessel."

I've been thinking about it ever since. Of course there's nothing new about the idea that we learn through contrast. We have to taste the bitter to know the sweet, and so forth. But this idea feels different to me. It's not just "We have to endure a lot of stuff that's hard and tiring and boring and frustrating and sorrowful and painful and infuriating and terrible—so that someday we can say, 'Wow, I'm so happy, and I know I'm happy it because I'm not experiencing all that bad stuff anymore!'"

Instead, this thought felt more like: all that hard and bad stuff is part of the happiness. Or—it is the way we get the happiness. Or maybe—it is the vehicle through which the happiness comes. ? It's hard to describe exactly the feelings I've been having about it. It's not that I think a celestial life won't be better than a mortal life. I certainly hope it will! And I hope it will be free of many of the heartaches and frustrations of mortality. But I've just been feeling this little glimpse of a different perspective, where mundane and spiritual, trial and blessing, are far less separate than I think…and where I may not even be seeing accurately which one is which!

As my mind has been casting about for further illustration of this, I started thinking about how, in calculus, you learn how to calculate a volume for a two-dimensional shape. That seems pretty impossible at first glance, but it is done by taking the 2-D shape and rotating it around an axis. Here my understanding of the actual math is iffy (though I could do the calculations, years ago), but for the sake of this description, if the shape rotates infinitely fast and is therefore in some sense occupying every slice of the three-dimensional space at once, it begins to have volume rather than just area. And furthermore, theoretically, you could pour something into that "solid of revolution" (or "volume of revolution," it's sometimes called) and have it not drip out.

You see where I'm going with this, of course. The 2-D shape is me. The "revolution"—an active and persistent spinning, you could call it—is the unceasing effort required to live the gospel in a mortal world. The axis is Jesus Christ. And if I fix myself upon him and keep up that unceasing motion—then He is able to pour blessings into my life, "good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over."

In this view, it's not so much that the demands of mortality contrast with the blessings of God as that they create a dimensional space for them to occupy! It's strange to think of it, but how would Heavenly Father have possibly given me that precious gift of those specific moments with my family—a gift I felt and valued and recognized—without all the things undergirding it? The years of building relationships through time, discipline, and sacrifice. The meals made, the rooms cleaned, the clothes washed, the scriptures read, the lessons taught. The schedules and routines. The habits and rules. Even the mistakes, the arguments, and the apologies. Without the constant spinning of mortal life with these people—the way it keeps going and never stops, the way it forces me to choose and balance and stretch and grow—there truly would be nowhere for the blessing to go! No vessel to hold it! Even if God poured out the blessing, where would it stay? It would drain out, useless, though our holes and cracks. To be put at a kitchen table—even if we were to taste the finest of chocolate together!—with eleven strangers with whom I had none of that history nor any of those experiences—is not only not the same, it borders on unpleasant!

Or what about any number of other beautiful, miraculous moments that have given me hope and brought me joy recently? For example, watching Sebastian love and connect with Clementine this past year—would those moments have brought the same balm to my soul without the frustrations and tears he and I have experienced as we've spun through his adolescence together, and as we've started to navigate his adulthood? If I could have brought a halt to the spinning, what blessings would I have lost?

Or what about any of the evenings I looked up from making dinner and saw gold clouds out the window and went running up the hill to watch the sunset, wiping my chickeny hands on my apron as I ran: what comparable stillness and peace could those few contemplative moments have held, without so many mundane tasks in motion to surround them?

I don't mean that busyness=holiness or anything like that. Of course we need stillness in our lives. The moments of stillness and peace are still part of the spinning I'm talking about—part of the effort to keep climbing, keep following Christ. I guess we could also call it living the Doctrine of Christ in a never-ending cycle like Elder Renlund talked about. But I don't think just existing in mortality generates the "volume of revolution" needed to hold the blessings God wants to pour out. It's the intentional motion, the moving forward (through both stillness and chaos), that's needed, because that effort fixes our eyes on Jesus Christ. It's saying, "I keep moving because I have to, but I do it trusting God because I want to." And I think it's the mundane routines and the repetitive sacrifices, the things of God we do daily, which move us about our axis the fastest and allow us to hold more of the constant stream of blessings from God. 

I just think about so many tender mercies I've seen in my life the past few years, and nearly all of them have come through, or come as part of, the everyday things. A dreaded task made easier. A routine conversation given wings by the Spirit. A comforting thought initiated by a happy experience and then deepened by a difficult experience. A truth driven home by a verse of scripture. A spiritual realization driven by a mortal annoyance. A desire borne of weakness. A love deepened by sorrow. A gratitude awakened by want.

I don't know how many of the tiring, plodding, difficult parts of mortality are unnecessary in the long run. Maybe we'll be entirely free of those things in the Celestial Kingdom. Or maybe we will be so good that we won't feel the weight of them as we do now! But either way, I want to trust the promise of all things for our good. 

And goodness knows I feel weary with the spinning from time to time, and blessings or not, I'm tempted to stop and rest. But because I have to, and because I want to, I keep moving. Then as the blessings come, I can glimpse that it's all God's plan and all God's work; the interrupted naps, the distracted scripture studies, the imperfect sacrifices; the repetition and the mundanity as well as the great soaring moments. And because of that plan, the dull daily efforts that feel like they could never mean anything, do mean something—they are the empty vessel into which God pours his endless, merciful love.