Evie loves Jesus. When she says His name she pronounces it "Jee-see" and every time she does, even when she is being prompted along word-by-word in a prayer, she points up at His picture on the wall. I am thankful for Christ and His role in our family.
I just read the following excerpt from Chieko Okazaki's book Lighten Up for what seems like the millioneth time. I am making spaghetti sauce today and was reminded of an analogy she makes here, included in a chapter called "Opening the Door to Christ." I'm not posting the whole chapter here, but I just wanted to share this part with you. She helps me see and feel how real the Savior is and how much He wants to take a part in our lives and help us and strengthen us along our way.
Happy Sunday to you.
(Here's what she says:)
"...The
daily activities of mixing orange juice, making telephone calls, supervising
homework, and scrubbing the bathtub are not distractions from our spiritual
lives. They are the vehicles through which we live our spiritual lives.
The
Savior does not call us to abandon the world; he calls us to come unto him so
that he can heal us and make us whole. But to do that, we have to bring him our
hearts—all of the pieces we have given elsewhere. We have to care about him
more than we care about the orange juice, the telephone, the homework, the
dirty bathtub. He asks us to take care of our daily activities with a heart
centered on him. With whole hearts we can worship him through all those quite
ordinary activities of our mortality.
I
think we sometimes have the mistaken notion that religion is like a special
room in our house. We go into this room when we need to "do"
religion. After all, we cook in the kitchen, we entertain in the living room,
we wash in the bathroom, we sleep in the bedroom, and we "do"
religion in this spiritual room. The fallacy of this view of religious life is
obvious. It means that we can walk out of that room and close the door behind
us. It means that we have compartmentalized our lives so that religious
experience is just one cubbyhole out of many. It also means that we spend most
of our time in other rooms. Yet we feel guilty because we're taught repeatedly
that this should be the most important room in the house and we should spend
most of our time there. Does this sound even a tiny bit familiar?
Rather
than think of spiritual life as a separate room, let's think of it as paint on
the walls of all the rooms, or maybe a scent in the air that drifts through the
whole house—the way the fragrance of spaghetti sauce or baking bread has a way
of drifting through all the rooms of the house, becoming part of the air we
breathe. Our spiritual lives should be our lives, not just a
separate part of our lives.
Suppose
the Savior were to come to visit you. You've rushed around and vacuumed the
guest room, put the best sheets on the bed, even placed some tulips in a vase
on the dresser. Jesus looks around the room and says, "Oh, thank you for
inviting me into your home. Please tell me about your life."
You
say, "I will in just a minute, but something's boiling over on the stove,
and I also need to let the cat outside."
Jesus
says, "I know a lot about cats and stoves. I'll come with you."
"Oh,
no," you say. "I couldn't let you do that." And you rush out,
carefully closing the door behind you.
While
you're turning down the stove, the phone rings, and then Jason comes in with a
scrape on his elbow, and the visiting teaching supervisor calls for your
report, and then it's suppertime, and you couldn't possibly have Jesus see that
you don't even have placemats on the table, and someone forgot to turn on the
dishwasher so you're eating off paper plates, and then you have to drive Lynne
to her basketball game. By the time you get back to the room where Jesus is
waiting patiently, you're so tired that you can barely keep your eyes open, let
alone sit worshipfully at his feet waiting for words of profound wisdom and
spiritual power to wash over you, to make you different, to make everything
else different, and you fall asleep whispering, "I'm sorry. I'll try to do
better. I'm so sorry."
How
we pour guilt over ourselves!
This
isn't the gospel. We know that on some level Jesus experienced the totality of
mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced
everything—absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications
of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind,
about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in
generalities. We experience it individually. That means Jesus knows what it
felt like when your mother died of cancer—how it was for your mother, how it
still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student-body election.
He knows that moment when the brakes locked, and the car started to skid. He
experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced
the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced napalm in Vietnam. He knows about
drug addiction and alcoholism.
There
is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also
know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands about pregnancy and
giving birth. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about
rape and infertility and abortion.
His
last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always
even unto the end of the world." (Matthew
28:20.)
What does that mean? It means he understands your mother-pain when your
five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader,
when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down's syndrome. He knows
your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old,
when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your
seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a
quiet apartment where the only children who ever come are visitors, when you
hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last
week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has
been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower
than all that.
So
do you really think you're shielding him by keeping the door closed while
you're throwing paper plates on the table and sending Chrissie off to wash her
hands for the second time? Do you really think he doesn't know? doesn't
understand? wouldn't laugh and help?
But
he'll stay in that room if you put him there. The door to him is always open,
but the door to you can be closed and stay closed—if you choose to close it. If
one great constant in the universe is the unfailing love of the Savior, the
other great constant is his unfailing respect for human agency. He will not
override your will, even for your own good. He will not compel you to accept
his help. He will not force you to accept his companionship. He leaves you free
to choose.
I
beg you to open the door and let him out of that room. Give him your whole
heart, all the pieces, and let him heal you. He promises, "And ye shall
seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." (Jeremiah
29:13.) With all our hearts. That means we don't
have pieces of our hearts that he doesn't touch or that aren't relevant to him.
That means we must live our lives as Savior-focused individuals. Jesus doesn't
call you to abandon Jason's scraped elbow when you come unto him. He calls you
to bandage Jason's scraped elbow as a Savior-focused mother. Let him be with
you as you bandage Jason's scrape. Let him join in the conversation over those
soggy paper plates. Let him carpool with you, fill out the quarterly budget
with you, attend that sales seminar with you, talk over that Young Women's
lesson with your daughter, try out for the wrestling team with your son, be
with your mother when the doctor tells her the diagnosis.
He's
not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came
to save us in our imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living
make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us
in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief.
You
know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience long winter
nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies
requires whole-spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our
spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our
physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this
world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people
who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in
darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and he is ready to come to
us, if we'll open the door and let him." (pp. 104-106)
