Biffing It

First day of classes on BYU campus and I want to get the semester off to a good start. I wake up at 7:00, trot down the stairs of my apartment complex, unlock my bike from its post, swing my leg over its frame, and head off down the street. Brisk air, legs pumping, wheels turning fast. Freedom. Approaching the intersection at 800 N and University, I go to get on the sidewalk to avoid the confusion I always feel as a cyclist pretending to be a motorized vehicle. My bike hits the lip of pavement separating the sidewalk from the road, my bike starts to wobble, and . . .

I biff it. Biff it good. My bike slips, I try hopelessly to keep it upright, I think desperately, “I’m not even wearing a helmet,” and bam! I hit the pavement. A fellow cyclist riding by on the other side of the street sees my demise and shouts out, “Are you okay?” Having not fully assessed my situation myself, all I can do is shout back a shaky “Yes?” and the cyclist rides on. I stand up and examine myself. Left elbow: bleeding. Quite a bit. Right knee: scraped, but not bleeding yet. It could have been much worse.

I walk my bike back home, elbow dripping blood, handlebars twisted out of alignment with my front tire. I walk into my apartment and show my roommate my battle wound, expecting her to laugh with me at the irony of a college senior who rides her bike almost every day for the sheer joy of it and hasn’t crashed it in at least ten years losing control over something as small as a one-inch difference in surface level. How does that even happen?

But she didn’t laugh. She exclaimed: “Oh my goodness! Are you okay? Did you hit your head? Is your bike all right?” And I thought, “What the heck? That crash was so pathetic, I thought the world would laugh at it along with me.”

But they didn’t. No one did. My parents, my siblings, friends, roommates, ward members. They all responded with genuine concern that carried no trace of amusement.

Why? How could they not laugh at the irony of someone my age, as experienced with bike riding as I am, crashing so easily?

But it seemed instead that they grasped the tragedy of someone – no matter the age or experience level – slamming to the ground at such a speed when not wearing even a helmet as protective gear.

And as I pondered their reactions, and how they differed from mine, I thought of the Savior and how His response to when I mess up so often differs from mine.

Because sometimes even at my experienced age, there comes a day when I unexpectedly fall. Days when the same situation I’ve dealt with over and over again and gotten really good at handling in a Christlike/professional/confident/whatever-adjective-you-want way rears its angry head yet again, and I think, “I’ve got this,” but somehow . . . I biff it. I biff it good.

And I know I’m not the only one. We all have experiences where something small throws us completely off. We lose our temper, we say something rude, we say the wrong thing, we don’t say anything at all, we know what we should do and we don’t do it – whatever it is, we do it wrong, and we can’t believe that at our age, with our level of experience, we could mess up so bad.

I’ve been there. On the mission, standing at the doorstep and someone answers. It’s my turn to do the door approach, and I freeze and words stumble out in a random order that vaguely makes sense but also vaguely makes it sound like I’m completely terrified. Or while teaching, and I think, “How do I begin a lesson without it feeling awkward?” and then five minutes later I realize that I jumped straight into the lesson without giving How to Begin Teaching even a passing thought. Because even though I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for the past year of my life, sometimes my mind goes blank and . . . I biff it. Biff it good.

Or now, back to civilian life, and I think: How do I make friends? How do I make small talk? How do I motivate myself to do homework when I have no desire to do it? I thought I had this all figured out before the mission, but now things have changed – I’ve changed – and the things that worked for me before don’t always work for me now. And over and over again I wonder: How do I this without falling?

And while I’m slowly figuring it out, there are still those times when I hesitate and I stumble and . . . I biff it. Biff it good. Little things that I thought I had already figured out throw me off, and I feel my confidence in myself being slammed to the ground, feel it as it starts to bleed. And it’s not a comedy, and it’s not a tragedy, it’s pathetic and stupid and frustrating and I have no patience for it. Me, at my age, with my level of experience and hard work, acting like I’m still a college freshman? Please. Surely I can do better than that.

But then I had my experience with crashing my bike the first day of classes, and the reactions of my parents and siblings and friends surprised me. And maybe this is because I often compare my Father in Heaven’s love with the love I feel from all those Christlike souls around me, but suddenly I understood: Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ never view my falls as humorous or annoying. They view them as a tragedy. Not a tragedy, exactly, because there’s always the hope of a happy ending, and of course pain is an integral, needed part of life, but I know that when I don’t perform as well as I wish I had, they feel my pain. They feel my disappointment in myself – but they are not disappointed in me. They cry with me because they love me and they understand that, as a mortal being, I will fall. For reasons that I do not understand, I will crash that bike, and I will biff it. I will biff it good. And they are infinitely more concerned with how I am doing than with the crash. Am I okay? Is my heart all right? Did I hit any unprotected part of my soul? And I can just picture them hugging me, like a mother embracing her child who has just experienced her first scraped knee, and I know that they don’t judge me for not being perfect at something I thought I had perfected long ago.

And slowly I am learning to view my falls in the same way. Not as a comedy, not as an illustration of how pathetic I can be, but as something that hurts my soul of infinite worth, something deserving of a hug and a kiss to make it better, an incident when I have permission to feel the pain of crashing and still feel concern for myself and my well-being. Because more important than my circumstances is the way I respond to them, and only as I treat myself with love can I view those around me with the same depth of emotion. And isn't that what the gospel is all about? About seeing those around us as a whole being and being concerned, not with their weaknesses and imperfections, but with their emotions and their needs and how to help them know their worth and their potential and how they can work to achieve it? 

That involves loving them as they fall. Not judging them, not thinking less of them, not arrogantly wondering how in the world they could manage to fail at something so simple, but seeing them at their center and wanting them to find joy. And to feel that way towards others, we must first start with feeling that way towards ourselves. 

I See a Light! Part II

(To recap) If the light is the source of everything worthwhile, then why do we so often stray?

There are two categories of reasons that come readily to my mind: distractions and doubt. I will talk about each of them separately, although they do often tend to overlap.

A distraction can be anything that causes us to take our eyes off of the light that is the Savior of the world. These things can include: political ideologies that we have a different opinion on than do the prophets and apostles (or even just our fellow members at church), deep doctrine that doesn’t make sense to us, church history that we can’t reconcile with what the scriptures teach us, imperfect Priesthood leaders whom we don’t understand why they were put in positions of power and authority . . . I could go on. A lot goes on in the church, and sometimes people use things they don’t understand – or make no effort to understand – as a reason to leave. The thing is, though, none of these concerns that I mentioned are the light. They are merely specks on the horizon. Sometimes as we look towards the light, and especially as we’re looking from a far-off distance, it’s easy to see these distractions and hard to tell that they are not included in the light. But the closer we get to the light the more the light illuminates the things around it, and the easier it is to see and understand how these different issues fit into the context of an imperfect world and imperfect people made by a perfect God with a perfect plan. The important thing to remember is that these specks on the horizon are nowhere near as big or all-encompassing as the light, and ultimately they change nothing about the reality of a loving Savior. These issues do not define the Savior; rather, the light of the Savior helps us define them through the viewpoint of eternity. Who knows what the horizon that Sailor headed towards looked like? She could easily have been distracted by the sound of barking dogs coming from the direction she was headed, or by burnt-out trees or other ugly scenery on the way to her light – but it wasn’t the scenery she was headed for. It was the light that gave her hope, and she was not about to let anything keep her from reaching that source of healing she had chosen to believe lay at the end of her journey. The moment she reached the light, the harshness of the horizon faded in significance to the peace that came from knowing that she had found her source of healing.

The second category of reasons why we stray from the light is doubts. We doubt that we’ll ever be good enough, we doubt that Heavenly Father has enough love to forgive us, we doubt that the harshness of the journey will be worth it, we don’t understand why we’ve been given such a difficult trial to deal with. We doubt ourselves or we doubt our Savior (and I think those two doubts are one and the same). We doubt that peace, joy, love, healing can be ours – and so we don’t even try for it. 

But when we do this, we let spiritual (and sometimes physical) wounds keep us from our journey to the only one who has the power to heal our wounds. Other sources can patch us up, make us feel better – but they can’t replace scabs with perfect skin. Only the Savior can do that – and He does it with spiritual wounds as well. He replaces despair with hope, confusion with understanding, fear with faith and love, anger and bitterness with love and forgiveness. He helps us see us and the world around us the way that He sees them. It’s a higher perspective, and it is Truth and Beauty defined.

These promised blessings don’t come fully overnight. The sun comes up over several hours’ time, and the changing of a soul is an even more powerful miracle than that. It takes repetition, much like building muscle. It takes day after day after day of repeating the same basic things over and over and over again, and as we do so we feel our strength and joy increasing. Sailor had to put one foot in front of the other over and over and over again and never stop, no matter what. None of us will ever be completely done with our journey to the light until we are united with the light completely – and that won’t happen until resurrection and judgment and our assignment into the kingdom whose glory our own soul best reflects.

Offering Love and Freedom

This morning I read an article linked to on my Facebook page that really made me think. It was written by an ex-Mormon who described the way he was treated as he left the church, and how he has been treated since. It seemed to me that that main point of the article was to call out church members for not practicing what they preach, for shaming and judging and labeling those who choose to leave the church rather than showing them Christ-like love, understanding, compassion, room to make their own decisions, even if those decisions seem to us to be a mistake.

This writer has a point. Do we assume that we know what people who believe and act differently from us are feeling, are thinking, where their life is headed? Because we don’t. We barely even know what we’re feeling, what we’re thinking, where our life is headed. All of us are trying to live our lives to the best of our knowledge. And because knowledge comes from life experience and everybody’s experiences are unique, the knowledge that we gain in this live will always be different than the knowledge of those around us. And so we build our individual lives, brick of hard-earned knowledge upon brick of even harder-earned knowledge, and we look at the structures other people are building and we think, “What in the world are they thinking to be building something like that?” Well, maybe they’re thinking the same thing about the structure that we’re building, and as we mislabel each other’s structures and try to get everyone’s structure to look exactly like ours we’re overlooking one important point: None of us are even using the same bricks. Your structure will never look the same as mine, much as mine will never look the same as yours. You can try, but that kind of a structure will always fail. No matter how similar we may seem on the outside, there are always miniscule differences in our building bricks that become more and more apparent the more we get to know each other.

And maybe one reason we assume things about these people who see the world so differently than we do is because we’re scared. Differences in our makeup as compared to other people scare us. Not always, and not everyone, but often. Maybe especially in the Mormon world. If someone else believes strongly that what I believe with all my heart is false – what happens if they’re right? What does it say about how I’m living my life, about how I’ve always lived my life, about this foundation that I’ve spent years and countless years building deep into the ground to give myself something to be anchored to so that when hard times come I won’t be knocked down with the wind of uncertainty? What happens if they’re right. . . and I’m wrong?

Psychologically speaking, this is a valid concern. Other beliefs threaten ours. We can’t both be right. Either they’re wrong, or the whole basis for how I pattern my life is. That’s a scary thought. So we get defensive. We have to be right because if we’re not, there goes everything that validates our existence. So the obvious conclusion is that we are right – and they’re wrong. Completely, 100% wrong. Anything in what they have to say that sparks of truth threatens everything we’ve always believed – and that’s a terrifying feeling.

We don’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be this way. Because maybe both of you are right. Maybe their experiences are valid. Maybe if you had had the same experiences, you’d feel the same way. And maybe not. There’s no way of knowing. All you do know is the experiences you have had. The experiences where God has answered your prayers with a feeling of intense comfort, or reassurance, or peace, or maybe even a though that you know was not your own. The experiences where you’re reading the scriptures, and suddenly you know that your Savior is right there with you, telling you the same things He’s telling the people in the scriptures. And on and on and on. Those experiences are real. Someone else not understanding them will never make them invalid. All it means is that that person is not you, and therefore can never fully understand what you have gone through in your life. The only person who can ever do that is the Savior Himself. And that person standing there, presenting a differing viewpoint of life and religion, threatening your beliefs? That person is not Jesus – which also mean that he/she does not, by definition cannot, understand the universe in its entirety. Why not? Because they did not create it in its entirety under the direction of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

This also implies something else interesting: with all the things that have been revealed through the Restoration of the Gospel, we still don’t know everything there is to know. Why not? Mainly from a lack of personal experience. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay. I don’t know what it’s like to be a male member of the Mormon church who, for whatever reason, is not able to serve a full-time mission. I don’t know what it’s like to have cancer or to come from a rough family background. So how can I understand people like them unless I take the time to listen to them, to really understand who they are, and why? And without understanding them, how can I possibly begin to understand why they do the things they do?

So maybe people who leave the church really are happier outside it than in. Maybe it’s because the people around them misunderstand the Atonement and the purpose for the organization of the church to the point that it makes it difficult for these individuals to understand it. Maybe they’re sick of being judged. Maybe they don’t understand everything they’ve discovered about church history. Maybe they’ve read too many anti-Mormon articles. Whatever it is, how do we know that if we were in their shoes, we wouldn’t also see the appeal of leaving? All that telling them that they need to repent does is further alienate them. That is not love. Love is making sure they are 100% certain that they can spend time with you without you thinking you’re better than them because you’ve made choices that are more righteous. Everyone needs a place where they feel safe from judgment. That is the only way anyone will ever trust. They can know your beliefs without feeling judged because they don’t share them, just as we want to spend time with people whose beliefs are different than ours without feeling judged because we don’t share their (possibly more “politically correct”) beliefs.

All I’m asking for is understanding and freedom. Love and agency. Two central principles of the gospel. So many times I’ve wanted to go back to my mission and genuinely get to know the people who weren’t interested in what I had to teach. They were good people, and I was curious about their points of view and why they saw life that way – what did they have to add to they way I view the gospel? I couldn’t have done that while on the mission – but I can do it now. My point of view is not always correct. I am not God, I did not create this universe, this world, the people in it, and, like everyone else, my experience on this earth is limited. I’m still learning. Other experiences from other people’s backgrounds help me gain a more God-like perspective. Even if those people are not entirely correct in their viewpoint, something they say will help me gain a better understanding of humanity, of actions and consequences, of the part each of us has to play in this world. There is always something to learn from the people around us, whether or not they share our beliefs, and we can only learn it we stop judging them for long enough to listen.

Why Write About My Experiences

My laptop may be dying, but still I cannot suppress the urge to write. The Spirit and my own emotions have been on my case every day since I walked off that plane bringing me home from my mission and back to my family, and I can no longer keep the words inside from spilling out.

I need to write about my experiences on the mission. Why, I’m not so sure. For my sake, for the sake of others, for my own attempt to make sense of a year-and-a-half packed full of events, people, emotions, life.

Missions are hard. Mine was unique. Here on BYU campus, being a recently returned sister missionary makes me a stereotype, and I am finding it difficult to find my own voice in the Mormon Bubble, especially at this university, and even in my own ward. I often feel like I blend in, like I’m background, like there’s nothing to make me stand out, and if there is, it’s probably apostate. For the record, here is how I feel about my mission: I’m relieved to be home and beyond grateful that I went. It was stressful, it was emotionally draining, and through the whole thing God was shaping my experience to meet my specific needs, to fulfill certain promises made to me years and years ago, to help me become someone I have been trying to become all along. I learned hope, I learned peace, I learned to rely on my Savior and the Plan of Salvation in a way I had never learned to before. I learned to trust others to love me even when I’m weak – and not just love me, but to respect me as a strong individual as well, as paradoxical as that sounds (it still seems like a paradox to me). I learned to be miserable day after day after day – and to still keep on going anyway. I learned to work when there seemed no point. I learned to recognize when people were lying, or undiagnosed schizophrenics, or had just been on drugs for way too many years. I learned, through how others treated us (both good and bad), how to graciously turn down an invitation to learn more about someone else’s religion.

I’m not entirely sure what this next string of posts will bring. I write what flows and hope that it’s enough. I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of topics, a lot of stories that I may share or may in the end label as “too personal” and merely allude to. Whatever comes out, know that it was my mission, this is my life, and God knows we’re all unique. I write because God told me to, and in the hope that the Spirit will translate whatever I have to say into whatever you need to hear. Overall, I guess my posts can be summed up with what one of my English professors recently said, “It’s not a brag. I’m just telling you what God has helped me to accomplish.”