"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