Living far away. Still very close.

As a single woman I lived, for a time, in a predominantly Muslim country where the nearest temple was 1000 miles away, and the nearest organized believers with whom I might worship were 800 miles away and, due to geography and politics, would require me to fly there if I wished to attend.

My experience required that I live my religious life without fellow believers or ordinances: without temple worship and without weekly sacrament.

I appreciate regular temple worship and I am grateful for the ordinance of weekly sacramental renewal of covenants.  I am also grateful, in hindsight, for what I subconsciously learned during that period of time years ago...that participation in those ordinances is a blessing, and when they are not possible due to circumstances in the world where I am,  I am still fully able to find peace, revelation, connection, recommitment, and communication with God.  The memory of the covenants made with ordinances was enough.

At the time, I wasn’t surprised by that.

Certainly ordinances have, at times, assisted the levels of peace, revelation, recommitment, and divine connection in my life, and my participation in those ordinances is often a powerful assist. But when they are not available, the sense of loss is not acute, because that peace, revelation and divine connection and communication continues to be available.

The outward symbolism and reminders that those ordinances carry are blessed symbols and reminders of an inward commitment and connection.  And, for me, that inward commitment and connection does not change when the outward symbols are not possible.

I am deeply grateful for those ordinances and the reminders they offer.  And I am acutely aware of what I quietly regularly re-experienced far away, years ago: the reality of God’s loving sustenance being fully available for me, solo, as I reach out to Him


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Mosiah 12, in more current English

Two years later a man arrived in the city … and began to broadcast and publish among them, saying: “God has commanded me, saying—, ‘Go and prophesy unto this my people, for they have hardened their hearts against my words; they have not repented of their evil doings; therefore, I will visit them in my anger as they continue in their iniquities and abominations. They are headed for deeply tragic consequences.’”

“He told me”, said the man, “that we, as a people are headed to extremely difficult times! And the Lord said to me: ‘Get the word out and prophecy. Tell them that God has told you that this generation, because of their iniquities, shall be conquered by another nation, and be oppressed; yea, and the people will have to flee from their homes to find safety, and shall be killed; and the vultures of the air, and the dogs, yea, and the wild beasts, shall devour their corpses. And the life of the president shall be valued as much as a t-shirt in a housefire; for the President shall know that I am the Lord.

‘Tell them that I will smite this, my people, with sore afflictions, yea, with famine and with deadly epidemic or virulent disease which will cause that they shall be miserable all the day long.

‘And furthermore, I will cause that they shall have burdens lashed upon their backs; and they shall be forced into hard labor.

‘And I will send destructive hailstorms among them; and they shall also be smitten with drought; and destructive insects shall pester their land also, and also devour their grain.

“And they shall be hit with a great epidemic—and all this will I do because of their sins and abominations.

“And if they do not repent, I will utterly destroy them from off the face of the earth.  But I will make sure that they leave a record of their history behind them, and I will preserve those records for other nations which shall possess the land so that I can show the abominations of this people to those other nations and they can learn from your experiences.’” 

This man predicted many other awful things that would happen as well.

And the response he received was this: the people were angry with him, and they arrested him and carried him bound before the president, and said, “Mr. President, we have brought a man before you who has been broadcasting horrible predictions and warnings concerning us all, and who says that God will destroy us all. And he also has predicted horrible things about you and says that your life shall considered of no more value than a t-shirt in a house fire. 

“And, not only that, he tells everyone that you will be like a dried weed which is run over by the beasts and walked on, and that you are like the fluff on a dandelion, easy for him to blow away into pieces.  

“And he tries to make people believe him by declaring that God has revealed this to him.  And he claims that unless you repent of what he calls your sins, and change what you are doing and your vision for this nation, what he says will happen to you will be unavoidable.

“And now, Mr. President, that’s ridiculous. What great evil have you done, or what great sins have your people committed, that we should be condemned by God and what right has this man to judge us or spread such inciting-to-riot kind of misinformation?

“Mr. President, we have done nothing wrong and you, Mr. President, have certainly not sinned; therefore, this man is spreading lies about you, and his ‘prophesies’ are libel and detrimental to you and to us and to our nation.

“We are an unparalleled military power, we shall not be conquered, or be conquered by our enemies; look at the power and wealth you have amassed, and that you will clearly continue to enjoy and increase.  This man is undermining the psychological stability of our nation

“We have arranged things so that we can destroy him in whatever way is most effective. The power is yours to arrange whatever you wish to happen to him.   And we will support you in doing anything you wish with him.”

So the president made arrangements that the man should be        (fill in the blank here)       and he commanded that those he had appointed to high positions in his government should gather themselves together and hold a council with him to discuss what he should do to put a stop to that man’s voice and influence in their nation.