I bore my testimony yesterday. The night before, actually, it came to me that I ought to. Call it a spiritual hunch. Here’s how it went:
My name is Travis and I’m scared to death of being in front of large crowds [which is true, but I found out later that some people didn’t believe me]. I live in 308 with five guys who are all the man, and you ought to stop by and get to know them.
So I was talking to Annie earlier today, and I realized I have a thing or two to learn about delegation, which is why I’ve been the main guy in charge of sacrament for the last several weeks. But it turned out to be a blessing too, because it got me thinking about how important that ordinance is.
The other day I had a friend tell me that he had left the church. We had been friends for a long time, and this came as quite a shock. When he told me, he kind of had this smile on his face, and for a moment I thought it might just be a really bad joke. But he was serious. And it was a heavy thing to have to hear, and then to bear. That’s still be weighing on me, and I’ve thought a lot about how that sort of thing happens and how it can be avoided. I think the key might be in this ordinance we partake of every week at this altar right here [and I held my left arm straight to the side and gestured with an open palm toward the white cloths covering the sacrament].
I’ve been trying to think of the perfect metaphor for all of this—I’m an English major and I care about that sort of thing, and if you think of a better one I want you to come shake my hand and tell me about it. The first metaphor I came up with is this: You know when you’re out on the beach and it’s a little too chilly to get in but you just can’t resist touching the water so you take your shoes off and wade out to where the waves wash up past your ankles? You’ve all done this—I know you have—you dig your toes down into the sand and scoop out a little divot, and as the first wave washes up the divot fades into a subtle dent, and the second wave turns it into just a shadow of a circle, and by the third wave it’s gone. We mortals are just like this: we’re constantly crumbling, constantly fading back into what we used to be, regressing into the natural man. If you want to keep that hole in the sand, you have to keep digging it out, constantly, because the waves of mortality are washing over it, trying to erase it. But that’s why I don’t like this metaphor, because a divot doesn’t well represent the noble thing I’m talking about.
The next metaphor I thought of was food, and we’re reminded of this today because we’re fasting. You can’t just eat a ton of food on Sunday and then get by for a week. In fact, it’s hard to even get by for 24 hours—just a single day without food is extremely difficult. No, our bodies need constant maintenance. We feed them three times a day, give them plenty of water, and then we lay them down to shut off for 8 hours so they can regenerate.
Our spiritual livelihood is the same way. If we leave it alone, for even a day, it starts to die. It requires constant maintenance in order to remain living. A testimony has to be constantly fed, rejuvenated, and regenerated. If we leave it alone, it will die. The sacrament is a weekly rejuvenation—it helps to defend against this process—but in it is the promise to take Christ’s name and always remember him. That means constancy. It means more than just a covenant at the sacramental altar once a week. It means we remember him always—that’s a very high percentage of our time. It means we’re fighting spiritual atrophy—we’re praying to him, and we’re reading our scriptures, and we’re reaching out to our neighbors as true Christians do, and our thoughts are turned toward him constantly. And if we do this, then we reap the rewards—he promises to send his spirit, which is the thing that sanctifies us and protects us from that mortal crumbling. I know he’ll send his spirit if we honor this promise we just made, and it will keep us in the right way. And I say this in the name of Jesus Christ.
