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 ocassionally 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 earlier 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