Dot-to-Dot Discipleship

Dot-to-Dot Discipleship

When I was a kid the worst part of a rainy afternoon wasn’t the rain. It was the dot-to-dot page my mom handed me, copied on a church library mimeograph machine, with the numbers already half-rubbed off and the instruction “connect the dots and see the picture.” Maybe you too? Easy enough if you could still make out the 1, the 2, the 3. Absolute nonsense if the numbering system had vanished and all you had was a field of anonymous black spots. You’d draw a few lines in, decide the thing was probably a duck or a tractor, get bored, and wander off to do something more productive, like stare at the wall.

Scripture reading is that page, except the dots are scattered across centuries, the numbering system is mostly implied, and the picture is not a duck. It is the actual point of the whole exercise. And you are not allowed to see the finished drawing first.

That last part is the real problem. In the children’s version you at least know there "is" a picture and that the numbers will eventually produce it if you stay with them. With the scriptures you are frequently told, by people who have already finished their own drawing, that the picture is obvious and you are either spiritually lazy or willfully rebellious for not seeing it yet. Meanwhile the dots keep showing up out of order. A verse in Isaiah talks like it belongs next to something Nephi is about to say, except Nephi hasn’t said it yet and you are reading them in different books on different days. A covenant promise made to one people under one set of conditions reappears centuries later under completely different conditions, and you are supposed to decide whether the line still connects or whether someone has just drawn a convenient shortcut. Present-day application is worse. You can usually manage to link an ancient warning to its own historical moment. Linking it to last Tuesday’s news without forcing the geometry is harder, and the temptation to force it is strong.

So a lot of people do what I did with the faded dot-to-dot page. They connect a few obvious nearby points, announce that the picture is a duck (or a tractor, or “personal spiritual growth,” or “the Church is true and that’s the end of the matter”), and then stop. Or they decide the page is defective and walk away. Both responses are understandable. Neither one produces the picture the dots were actually laid out to form.

The numbering system, such as it is, is not printed in bold at the top of the page. It lives in the patterns the earlier writers themselves used when they quoted still-earlier writers. It lives in the repeated covenant language, the types that keep showing up, the warnings that keep being ignored in roughly the same sequence. It also lives, inconveniently, in the requirement that you keep drawing provisional lines long after you would rather be done. Some of those lines will have to be erased later. That is not a bug. That is how you avoid ending up with a confident drawing of a duck when the dots were always going to resolve into something else.

Most of us were not taught to treat the scriptures this way. We were taught to treat them as a collection of already-numbered, already-connected moral illustrations, or as a set of proof-texts for conclusions reached before we opened the book. Both approaches save time. Both also guarantee you will never see anything the official picture didn’t already include. The actual work is slower and less flattering. You sit with a lot of isolated dots. You notice that certain ones keep wanting to link across large gaps of time. You test the line. You ask whether it still holds when you try to run it all the way to the present without snapping it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The picture emerges anyway, usually later than you wanted and rarely in the shape you expected.

If that sounds like more trouble than it is worth, the rainy-afternoon version of you would agree. The alternative is to keep insisting the dots are random or that someone else has already finished the drawing for you. Either way you’ll end up staring at the wall. The other option is less tidy and takes longer: you pick up the pencil, accept that some lines will have to be redrawn, and keep connecting the dots until the picture actually starts to appear.

Signed

—John The-Not-So-Beloved

My Plan of Salvation 1.0

 

My Plan of Salvation 1.0

For most of my life, my plan for salvation was essentially this: I hoped what I’d been taught was right. I hoped the people who taught it were trustworthy. I hoped the tradition I inherited was the correct one. I hoped that when the day came, the account would balance out somehow. It wasn’t until I actually recognized the condition I was in—an incurable natural man who was going to stand in front of Jesus—that hoping stopped feeling like a plan. It started feeling like a way of not deciding. Everyone has a version of this. The details change. The authority changes. The vocabulary changes. The underlying move does not. Most people outsource the hardest question of their existence to parents, a church, a pastor, a prophet, a denomination, a culture, or simply the momentum of never having seriously examined it. Then they call the resulting comfort “faith.” The problem is that you do not get to bring your parents, your pastor, your prophet, or your denomination with you when you stand before Christ. You bring yourself. And if the natural man condition is real—if the heart is deceitful, if the will is bent, if the debt is not something you can settle by better behavior or sincere intentions—then the question of whether the teaching you received is actually from Him becomes the only question that matters. Everything else is decoration. That realization does not feel like a warm spiritual experience. It feels like discovering, mid-flight, that you never personally checked the parachute. The people who packed it seemed competent. Lots of other people were jumping with the same model. Some of them looked confident. None of that changes the physics of the ground. 'This is why the demand to choose is not an inconvenience. It is the point. You are supposed to have to decide whether a man who claimed to stand in the presence of God and describe what he saw, heard, and felt is more reliable than a committee that later disagreed with him. You are supposed to have to decide whether the voice offering you something “in the name of Jesus Christ” is actually offering you something from Him, or whether it is offering you a comfortable way to stay lost while sounding faithful. Your eternal condition is supposed to hang on how you handle that choice.(1)' That is not a bug in the system. It is the system refusing to let you remain a child forever. Fear of God is the only fear that consistently produces this kind of seriousness. Fear of man produces the opposite. Fear of man makes you protect the reputation of the institution, the feelings of the family, the cohesion of the group, or your own status inside it. Fear of God makes you willing to look foolish, to lose approval, to be called disloyal, or to discover that some of what you believed was simply wrong—because the alternative is to discover it later, in front of the only Person whose opinion will still matter. The natural man does not want this burden. He wants a plan that lets him remain mostly the same while still claiming the outcome. He wants the benefits of certainty without the cost of investigation. He wants someone else to have done the hard part of finding out, so that he can simply assent. When that desire is left unexamined, people can spend decades in religious activity while never once treating their own salvation as something that might actually be at risk based on whether they got the central facts right. You will face Jesus with whatever you actually are and whatever you actually trusted. The people who taught you will not be standing in for you. The sincerity of your hope will not substitute for whether the thing you hoped in was true. The fact that many other people made the same choice will not function as evidence. At that point the only remaining question is whether you ever cared enough to find out while you still could. That is not a complicated idea. It is an uncomfortable one. Most people prefer complicated ideas that let them stay comfortable. The natural man is an expert at generating those. The alternative is simpler and harder: grow up, accept that the stakes are real, and find out for yourself whether the claims you have been living inside are actually true. Or do not. But do not pretend the decision was ever really optional.

Signed

John The-Not-So-Beloved

(1) Lecture 2: Faith Denver C. Snuffer, Jr. 28 September, 2013 Idaho Falls - pg. 21

Denver’s April 26, 2010 blog post titled "AWAKE AND ARISE”

It ends with these words: "Neglect and indifference seem to be such prevailing impediments to the salvation of the souls of men that Satan must rejoice, look up at heaven with a great chain in his hands, and declare that he has bound all mankind!   How little the world has changed since the time of Enoch.    

Awake.  

Arise.  

Your soul is in jeopardy.”

From - “God in Our Day, Part 1, ”It is time for those involved to awaken to their awful situation and admit their mother is a whore. ...Now is time to awaken, arise, and shake off the dust.

From Alma

Alma 3:2-3 CE

Now I ask all you who belong to this congregation: Have you remembered your fathers’ captivity? Have you also remembered God’s mercy and long-suffering toward them? Have you also carefully considered how He rescued their souls from hell? He changed their hearts; He woke them from a deep sleep and they woke up to God. They were surrounded by darkness; but their souls emerged into the light of God’s everlasting word. They were bound by the chains of death and hell, and faced everlasting destruction. So I ask: Were they destroyed? I answer: No, they were not. I also ask: Were the chains of death broken? Were the chains of hell surrounding them removed? I say: Yes, they were removed. And their souls grew in understanding and they sang of redeeming love. I testify they’re saved. Now I ask: What are the conditions for their salvation? On what basis did they hope for salvation? How were they freed from the chains of death and hell? I’ll tell you the answer: Didn’t my father Alma believe in the words taught by Abinadi? And wasn’t he a holy prophet? Didn’t he speak God’s words and my father Alma believed them? Because of his faith, a powerful change happened in his heart. I testify this is all true. He preached the word to your parents, and changed their hearts as well, and they humbled themselves and trusted the true and living God. Then they were faithful until the end; so they were saved.

Now I ask you, my brothers and sisters of the congregation: Have you spiritually been born of God? Have you received His image in your own countenances? Have you experienced this powerful change to your hearts? Do you rely on faith in the redemption of the Lord who created you? Do you faithfully anticipate rising from the grave to immortality, freed from degeneration, illness, and corruption, to stand before God and be judged based on what you’ve done in the mortal body? I ask: Can you expect to hear the Lord’s voice then saying to you: Come to Me, blessed one; your works have been righteous on the earth? Or do you imagine being able to lie to the Lord and claim: Lord, our works on earth have been righteous (even when they were not), and He’ll save you? Or can you instead foresee standing before God’s judgment seat filled with guilt and remorse, remembering clearly all your guilt and wickedness, knowing you’ve defied God’s commandments? I ask: Can you look up to God on that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I ask: Can you look up, having the image of God engraved on your countenances? I ask: Can you think of being saved when you’ve allowed yourselves to obey the accuser? I say: You will then know you can’t be saved; because no one can be saved unless their clothes are clean, purified, and every trace of sin and iniquity removed through the blood of Him our fathers testified was appointed to come to redeem His people from their sins.