Posted by:
JoD3:360
(
)
Date: November 29, 2010 09:20PM
Recently I was cleaning out my old emails and came across the last email my Bishop wrote to me. In it he says that his purpose was to remind me of my duty and to warn of the peril I face for becoming enmeshed in these doubts.
Years ago, my aunts and uncles all got together and decided to write out their testimonies. My dad tells of a time as a kid when he decided to do something else other than what he was supposed to do and ended up having something unpleasant (though unrelated) happen. His test monkey was that if you don't do your duty and obey, then you'll get dumped on.
The other test monkeys were about how sticking to their responsibilities were the key to happiness and truth is made known in the faithful performance of those duties.
Duty Duty Duty.
I have no problem with sticking to my duties and obligations.
What strikes me, is that I had been thinking about what my dad had written over the Thanksgiving weekend, and today, rereading that email it occured to me why I felt such emptiness even when anxiously engaged (striving while filled with anxiety) in church life. It was just duty.
And that seems to explain a constant underlying dissatisfaction that I had often felt- the talks and lessons were almost always about duty, reponsibility to spread the word and Jesus showing the way to be perfectly obedient. But not about real faith. The faith we had was based on faithful execution of callings and duties.
There is no real call to the faith of the heart or the inward conviction of the power of Christ or the spirit, but an appeal to put your shoulder to the wheel move along, do your duty with a heart full of song.
This is the gospel of any corporation- worker bees making everything run smoothly and profitably with a singular goal- to please their masters.
And maybe I'll be labelled as rebellious, but that has always subconsciously run counter to my experiences with and expectations of the spirit, or at the least left those expectations unfulfilled.