Last Known Position

Last Known Position

Hide-and-seek, a game we have all played at some time or another: as a child, a parent, or a grandparent. Someone hides themselves and the child’s job is to find them. If the child never seeks, the game is over. The person stays hidden, the connection never happens, and the play simply ends. We remember it well. Even in our older years we are still children to God, and the game is still on.

I occasionally find myself in the same spot as the brother of Jared. I stop calling, or I fail to pick up when I do not recognize the spiritual area code. Time passes. When I finally notice the silence, I hesitate to pick the line back up because I know exactly who hung up the phone, and it was not the Lord.

That hesitation, I'm afear'd,  is common to many and mostly useless. We treat spiritual capacity the way we treat ownership of an object rather than the way we treat a skill that degrades without use. A concert pianist who has not practiced for a year still “knows” the piece. The notes are somewhere in the body and memory. But the coordination, the tone, and the ability to recover from a slip have all deteriorated. Sitting down and expecting the old standard to appear is not humility; it is catigorical error. The skill is not a possession that remains at the last level attained. It is a living capacity that requires ongoing maintenance. Most of us accept this without argument for the piano, for language, or for physical fitness. We do not accept it as readily for prayer, scripture, or the capacity to hear and respond to the Lord. Hide and Seek works the same way. The one who is hidden does not come out simply because the game once existed. The seeker has to keep looking.

Joseph Smith put the requirement in practical terms when he taught that you must study it out in your mind and then ask, rather than expecting the answer from merely asking without thought. Seeking is not a one-time request that leaves a permanent credit on the account. It is the present-tense work of bringing a concrete question, with real intent, and remaining available for the answer. Occasional prayer does not count as looking under the furniture. We confuse past evidence with present ability. A real experience, a clear answer, or a season of steady direction happened. Because it was real, we treat it as a fixed asset rather than as evidence that the conditions for that experience can be recreated. Degradation is mostly invisible at first. Small reductions in the habit of actually seeking can accumulate for a long time before the gap becomes obvious. By the time it is obvious, the distance from the last known position has already grown and may be large. We prefer the story that we are still roughly where we left off.

Navigation software that loses the signal does not keep guiding you out of loyalty to the last known position. It drifts. The same thing happens to people and to institutions. The Catholic Church can treat Peter’s keys as a permanent warrant, so later developments are presumed to still be on the original course. The Mormon Church can treat Joseph Smith’s authority the same way: the founding coordinate is still the coordinate, therefore later adjustments—to which scriptural limits still apply—are framed as refinements rather than departures. In both cases the logic is identical. What was once the case remains the case, and everything done since has been sanctioned by definition. Institutions reinforce the assumption. Once an organization treats its founding coordinate as permanently present, later participants are trained to treat their own earlier experiences the same way. “You already received a testimony” or “the keys are still in place” both function as claims that the last known position, the one where the origins were genuine, remains the current one. If you also claim a never-changing God, you end up requiring more flexibility from God than scripture supports. Last known position quietly becomes a blank check.

The same may be true of you. If your last known position is where you still think you are, you may already be in error unless you are continually looking—as sailors did after a storm—to fix your actual coordinate and proceed from there rather than assuming you have not moved. Trouble is, you often do not notice the drift. Small incremental shifts stay invisible until it is obvious the course has already been lost. The game ends not because the one who is hidden moved the rules, but because the seeker stopped seeking.

During their wilderness journey to the land of promise, the brother of Jared “built small ships, crossing many bodies of water while being continually guided by the Lord” (Ether 1:6 CE). Then, once they had reached the great sea that divides the lands and pitched their tents in Moriancumer, he apparently decided the conversation would continue on its own. Four years later the Lord showed up, called the silence an evil, and required repentance. Only after he came back with a concrete problem—lighting the newly constructed barges—and a concrete proposal—the sixteen stones—did the conversation jump levels. If you had been in his place, what of those stones? Would they have lit the barges, or would they have stayed dark rocks while you waited for the Lord to finish a conversation you had already ended?

Enos spent a day and a night actually wrestling. Alma the Younger went from being struck down to days of real seeking. Joseph Smith treated the verse in James as present tense, studied the question, and went and asked. None of them got the deeper answer while they were coasting on the last instruction. The people who recognized Jesus in mortality were already looking. The Magi followed a star instead of assuming Jerusalem’s religious experts would handle the announcement. Those who treated the existing system as sufficient largely walked past Him. Recognition tracked with prior seeking.

An inventor who stops testing after the first prototype that mostly works rarely gets the refined version. A detective who decides the case is solved because he has one solid lead and then stops interviewing witnesses tends to stay wrong. Last known position is not a destination. It is only the place you start drifting from—whether you are an individual or an institution that has decided its own subsequent course is still the original one. The practical difference is whether you treat the last known position as a current location or as a historical marker. One lets you assume you have not moved. The other requires you to take a fresh bearing.

If I had to be judged today by my closest friends, by God, and by my iPhone search history, what would they conclude I was actually looking for? The record of what I search, ask about, and return to is usually clearer than the story I tell myself about seeking. Most of us would prefer the question stayed theoretical.

The practical test stays uncomfortable. If you cannot point to a recent instance of direction, correction, or communication that arrived because you were actively seeking, the pattern has already broken down—regardless of how faithfully you still show up for routine prayers. The brother of Jared’s four-year gap shows that finishing the last assignment does not keep the line open. The line stays open for people who keep treating ask, seek, and knock as present-tense requirements rather than completed steps. The Lord is not the one who hung up. The stones stay dark until someone picks the phone back up and asks again. Otherwise you are simply navigating from your last known position, and the drift has already begun. The game of Hide and Seek is still on. The question is whether the child is still looking.

Signed

John -- The-Not-So-Beloved

"Him Whose I Am"

"Him whose I am"

If you come upon a drinking fountain with a sign that says “out of order,” you know that somewhere in the process of getting water from its origins to you the order has been disrupted. It will remain in that state until proper order has been returned. You’re not that much different. We should all be walking around with a visible disclaimer—something like a t-shirt or bold forehead tattoo that simply reads “Out of Order”—so no one mistakes the work in progress for a finished product. The lived sequence of our own mortality is disordered, sometimes void, sometimes without form. We start inside a chaotic inversion and keep rediscovering it. That is the honest beginning.

Christ opens a revelation to Joseph Smith - JSH part 17 (Teaching and Commandments 1) - by saying he has already “accomplished and finished the will of him whose I am, even the Father, concerning me,” and that he did so in order to “subdue all things unto myself—retaining all power,” including the power to destroy Satan’s works and judge at the end. The subordination is finished. The power is retained. The full unsheathing of that sword/power waits for the appointed day. That is the pattern: capacity is not the question. Order is. He finished the Father’s assignment concerning himself first; the retained power and the later exercise of it follows from that. The sword/power is real. It stays sheathed until the will he had already submitted to calls it forth.

Yet even the perfectly ordered One entered our disorder. In Gethsemane the account turns from finished order to the experience of chaos itself. Luke records the agony in which his sweat became as it were great drops of blood. In the same revelation that opens with the finished will, Christ describes the cost: he, God, the greatest of all, trembled because of pain, bled at every pore, suffered both body and spirit, and would that he might not drink the bitter cup and shrink—yet he partook and finished his preparations unto the children of men. What the later accounts make plain is that this was not a single uninterrupted descent but successive waves of torment: the pains of sin and the infirmities of the Fall, the regrets of those who injure and the resentments of those who are injured, each wave greater than the last, each one draining strength and peace, each one requiring an act of will, hope, and charity to overcome before peace with the Father and with all mankind could return. He was stricken, healed, drained of virtue, and left with nothing, only to emerge again by hope in the Father and charity toward all. The perfectly ordered Son learned, in the flesh, what it is to be out of order as mortal man is, and he worked his way back to peace each time the disorder overcame him.

We carry versions of the same sword—tongues, appetites, money, competence, the ability to win, influence, and secure what we want. Most of us draw it first for our own benefit and then, once we are stable, offer what is left. The usual justification is that you cannot take care of others until you take care of yourself. It sounds prudent. It is also the reverse of the order that actually produces retained power. Our lives are out of order. We do not begin where Christ finished. We begin inside the inversion—self first, God later—and we keep rediscovering it. That does not mean we should starve our families, abandon ordinary work, or refuse to use skill and strength in the world we actually inhabit. It means the honest starting point is that the sequence is already disordered, and the work is to reorder it rather than to pretend the disorder is not there.

The parallel is both the beginning and the garden. In the beginning, God does not find an already-ordered world and merely approve it. He takes what is without form and void and speaks order into it. In Gethsemane the same movement is shown from the inside: wave after wave of chaos is taken up, overcome, and returned to peace. The same movement is available, on a smaller and slower scale, with our own will. We start with chaos—competing appetites, legitimate needs, self-protective habits, and the constant temptation to draw the sword for ourselves first. The aim is not instant perfection. The aim is to keep taking what is out of order and placing the Father’s claim on the will ahead of the self-claim, one decision at a time, returning to peace as often as the disorder returns.

That reordering looks ordinary. It is praying before the day’s plans harden rather than after they are already fixed. It is asking, before the money is spent or the argument is won or the appetite is fed, whether this particular use still belongs inside the will that was handed over this morning. It is noticing when “I need this so I can serve later” is simply the latest way of serving the self now. It is, when the next wave of disorder hits—resentment, appetite, fear, the sudden sense that the sequence has inverted again—doing what the garden shows: an act of will and hope that returns to the Father rather than remaining inside the chaos. None of this cancels the need to provide, to work, or to use strength. It changes the ownership of the strength. The sword stays available for ordinary life; it is no longer automatically drawn for the self-project first.

When the order remains reversed, the power stays provisional. We can be effective and even generous, yet we still have to renegotiate with ourselves whenever something actually costs the platform we built for our own security. When the reordering continues—when the first motion is submission rather than self-protection, and when each wave of disorder is met by a return to the Father—the power begins to be retained rather than merely borrowed. The tongue is used less for winning and more for what was asked. The appetite is fed inside limits set before the craving arrived. Competence is aimed at work that does not require constant self-justification. Peace returns, not because the waves have ended, but because the way back has been practiced.

We will not finish the assignment the way Christ did. We will keep finding pieces that are still out of order, and we will keep meeting waves that feel as though they have drained what little order we had. The claim in the text is simply that the one who finishes the prior will is the one who retains the power, and the garden shows that even the finished will was proved by repeatedly returning from disorder to the Father. For the rest of us the available work is the repeated, imperfect act of taking the disordered sequence in our lives and reordering it: hand the will over first, then draw the sword for what that will actually requires, and when the next wave comes, work back to peace the same way. Everything else is another way of keeping the blade out for ourselves and calling the delay responsible. The disclaimer stays in place. The reordering continues and as it does, the Water returns to the fountain.

Signed  

John - The-Not-So-Beloved