Fast and Testimony meeting
Day 3 back at ward
This was my third Sunday back in the ward. Fast Sunday. No assigned talks. The pulpit stays open and whoever feels moved gets up. Nothing is scripted, and that is the point.
A sister stood. She told us about her twin sister. A brain aneurysm. The first surgery was successful and the family let out its breath. The second surgery was not. She told us what her family went through.
The whole time she spoke I wanted to walk up to that pulpit and put my arms around her. I wanted her to know she is loved.
And when she sat down I found tears running down my face. I had not planned on them. Something about watching another human being suffer that much. I do not know why it moved me the way it did. It just did.
Underneath the tears I kept thinking one thing.
This is when a testimony becomes real.
Not in the good years. Not when the bills are paid and the children are healthy and the calling is going well.
A testimony becomes real when the floor falls out from underneath you. That is when a true faith reveals itself, because that is the only time it has to. Everything before that is theory. What she gave us was not theory.
And what got her through it, what got her whole family through it, was not an argument. It was Jesus Christ and His healing presence. She said it plainly. He was there. He held them. It was the Church.
Maybe that is the essence of a testimony. Not the words. The tears. That in our tears, in our darkest nights, He said He would always be with us. Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. He said it once and He has never taken it back. And I think many of us sitting in that ward had already been through nights like hers.
Let me say this to anyone who doubts the truth of the Church of Jesus Christ, and to anyone who has left. Look at these Saints. How often can you walk into a church service and be undone to this extent? It has not happened to me anywhere else. I am not trying to take away the validity of other faiths. I am not. But there is something to be said about finding truth in tears.
Lastly, she used the word ‘healing’.
Much of Christianity has come to believe the atonement is a courtroom. A penalty owed. A substitute punished. A sentence transferred from the guilty to the innocent. Penal substitution.
I will be honest about this. I have never been able to make logical sense of an atonement that rests solely on that. I am not saying it is wrong. I am not saying the courtroom is empty. I am saying that if that is all the atonement is, it misses the mark, because it has almost nothing to say to a woman sitting in a hospital hallway waiting to hear whether her twin will wake up.
A verdict does not sit with you in that hallway. A presence does.
I think the atonement is this. In the midst of your horrendous suffering, He was in the suffering with you. Not watching it from the bench. In it. He descended below all of it so that nothing you could ever fall into would be beneath Him. Isaiah called Him a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
The Book of Mormon says He took upon Himself our pains and our sicknesses, and not only our sins, so that He would know in the flesh how to succor His people. That is not legal language. That is the language of a physician.
That is the language of a brother who climbs down into the pit because He will not let you be down there alone.
Hear what He says inside it. I am in the suffering with you. I will heal your suffering. I will heal your sin. Hold on to me. I have you. I have your back.
That is what I think the true essence of the atonement is, because the true essence of the atonement is love.
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