As the Bible has come down to us—in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions—the book of Isaiah serves as the gateway to the reading of the prophets. We’re intended, it seems, to make sense of this prophetic book before feeling fully prepared to make sense of the other prophetic books. And that can seem a daunting task! The book of Isaiah is long, its historical setting is complex, and its language and imagery are foreign to modern readers. Add to that the fact that scholarship on the book of Isaiah has raised more questions than provided answers for Latter-day Saints, and one might feel especially at sea here. What can be done?

My approach to reading scripture—not in hopes of taming it, but with the aim of making it possible to begin exploring its depths—is always to ask about its shape and structure. If we know how what we’re reading is organized, we might begin to find our way. And this proves to be a good way to get started with the book of Isaiah. Of course, there’s much to say about the shape of the whole, and of all the various parts, of Isaiah. But what I’ll offer here is just a few short reflections on the shape of just the first part of the book: Isaiah 1–12.

Perhaps the very first thing to reflect on in these twelve opening chapters is that Isaiah’s commission to prophesy—his famous encounter with the Lord and the seraphim in the temple—appears some six chapters into the book. It’s perfectly apparent that the prophecies and oracles that believers attributed to Isaiah were assembled into a book only after his death. Why didn’t those editors and scribes put Isaiah’s story of his commission first in the book? What effect does this belated introduction to the prophet’s call have on a careful reader?

For my part, I’d suggest at least this: that the delay in introducing Isaiah’s commission forces readers to reflect on the problems in Judah and Israel in Isaiah’s day before learning anything about how the Lord plans to intervene. Isaiah 2–5, in particular, paints a bleak picture of Israel and Judah’s worldly aspirations, the suffering of the poor among the Lord’s people, and the corruption of justice that prevails among the covenant people. Thus, when readers come to Isaiah 6 and learn of Isaiah’s vision in the temple, they’re better prepared to learn with the newly commissioned prophet that, although he must preach, his divinely appointed words will largely fall on deaf ears, with devastating consequences.

As for Isaiah 2–5, the preliminary picture of how bad things are in Judah and Israel, they might be best read as a single block of text. This is something the early editions of the Book of Mormon suggest to us. Beginning with the very first edition in 1830 and continuing for half a century, the Book of Mormon presented these four biblical chapters as just one chapter in 2 Nephi (the original Chapter VIII, today’s 2 Nephi 11–15). And when we see the scathing portrait of oppressions in Judah and Israel as one total picture, we’re less inclined to fret over whether we’ve understood any one image and more inclined to receive the full assessment. Things were bad, and something had to be done.

Further, when we read Isaiah 2–5 as a single unit, we might notice an alternating pattern in it. The long tirades against wickedness in Judah and Israel are regularly punctuated by brief words of promise (as in Isaiah 2:2–4 and Isaiah 4:2–6) about a time to come when the covenant people will be cleansed and prepared to fulfill their responsibilities. Although goings-on among the Lord’s people are clearly problematic at the time of Isaiah’s call and commission, and although destruction and exile loom on the horizon, there’s always the promise of God’s graceful purposes. Consequently, when readers come to Isaiah 6, they’re meant to be aware not only of the problem the prophet is sent to address, but also of the promise that such problems can ultimately be solved by a faithful, covenant-keeping God.

By the way, exactly this double message appears with stark clarity in Isaiah 1, which serves as a straightforward introduction to the larger book of Isaiah. It was apparently written after Isaiah’s death and assumes the perspective of someone who has witnessed all the events prophesied of in the book. It explains that although things have indeed gone as badly as Isaiah said they would, God has also fulfilled Isaiah’s words of promise and retained a remnant of the covenant people. There’s always healing and possibility, despite human sinfulness.

At any rate, the question readers are provoked into having, by the time they come to the story of Isaiah’s commission in the temple in Isaiah 6, is just how God might go about fulfilling his promises when things in Israel are so obviously off track. The answer to that question appears in Isaiah 6–12, which can also be read as a single unit. Here again, the Book of Mormon is an excellent guide. For the first fifty years of its circulation, it also presented these seven biblical chapters as one (the original Chapter IX, today’s 2 Nephi 16–22). And they really do tell a single, coherent story. If read as a unit, Isaiah 6–12 clearly moves from the point when Isaiah receives his commission from the Lord (Isaiah 6) through a series of challenges and disasters shot through with glimpses of hope and promise (Isaiah 7–9) to the final redemption of Israel despite everything (Isaiah 10–11), all of this capped off by a hymn of praise for the God who has seen his promises through to fulfillment (Isaiah 12). What begins with a prophet’s call concludes eventually with gathering, peace, and redemption.

Of course, making one’s way through the story of Isaiah 6–12 is difficult for many readers. It’s thick with historical and geographical references, characterized by twists and turns, loaded down with challenging imagery, and interlaced with passages that have been overinterpreted by the larger Christian tradition. Getting the basic shape of the text—seeing that it’s a continuous story from God’s first intervention among a rebellious people to his final recovery of his covenant servants—is only a first step, and I lack the space here to provide a detailed guide to what each part of the story contributes.

Perhaps, however, even a simple table of contents might be useful. Here’s an attempt:

6:1–13 – Isaiah’s Commission: A Call to Preach to People Who Won’t Receive the Message

7:1–25 – A First Illustration of the People’s Failure to Receive, with Consequences

8:1–15 – A Second Illustration of the People’s Failure to Receive, with Consequences

8:16–22 – Looking Past His Wicked Day, Isaiah Seals His Prophecies for a Remnant to Come

9:1–7 – A Twist in the Story: A New King in Judah Makes for Deliverance for a Remnant

9:8–10:5 – In the Meanwhile, Northern Israel Falls Because of Its Continued Wickedness

10:6–34 – Assyria, Having Conquered and Scattered Israel, Can’t Conquer Judah

11:1–16 – On the Other Side of Disaster, Then, the Remnant of Judah Is Redeemed

12:1–6 – A Concluding Hymn of Praise for the God who Keeps Covenant

This table of contents might serve as a starting point for readers hoping to find a coherent story in Isaiah’s prophecies. The prophet’s compilers and editors gave his stories and oracles a theologically significant shape as they put them together, one clearly glimpsed by at least Nephi in the Book of Mormon. With a sense for the shape, we might begin to explore how the book of Isaiah guides us through the pattern of God’s handling of a wayward people to whom he has bound himself by covenant. And we might come to see better that all the glory, in the end, is God’s.

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Joseph Spencer​ is Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University​ whose academic profile can be found here.

Art by Samuel Bak.

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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Scene: A middle-aged couple are driving in their ever-so-practical, midsize SUV to a weekend getaway from their kids. WHITNEY is driving. She’s on edge. HUGH is not sure how he ended up sitting in the passenger seat while his wife white-knuckles her way through what is otherwise a serene country road. The mood in the car is . . . uncomfortable. (WHITNEY’s driving may have something to do with that.)

HUGH

. . . So . . . Notice how the engine runs smoother now . . .? I got the oil changed before we left . . . so it would run smooth for you. . . . Remind me why you’re so eager to drive, again?

WHITNEY

(tightly wound) If you drive you’ll pick the music and I’ll fall asleep. Which I’m usually grateful for. But not today.

HUGH

. . . We’re not listening to any music now . . . 

WHITNEY

I don’t want music.

HUGH

. . .

WHITNEY

. . .

HUGH

. . . It’s going to be a long drive, isn’t—

WHITNEY

We need to talk.

HUGH

—it. . . Should have known this weekend was a set-up.

WHITNEY

Excuse me?

HUGH

In our fourteen years of marriage every romantic getaway has been my idea. The first time you recommend one . . . should have known: set-up.

WHITNEY

And what, exactly, is this supposed to be a set-up for?

HUGH

Not romance . . .

WHITNEY

You don’t know that.

HUGH

Your hackles are raised.

WHITNEY

I don’t have hackles. (HUGH reaches for her hackles—which are definitely raised) Hugh!

HUGH

See? Hackles. (WHITNEY swats his hand away) Forgive me for trying to touch my wife . . . 

WHITNEY

Hugh, this is important.

HUGH

Yeah. I’m listening. (but not really)

WHITNEY

I think we should have another baby.

HUGH

Not this again!

WHITNEY

Yes, this again.

HUGH

. . . Set up! —Did you just lock the doors?

WHITNEY

We’re having this conversation whether you want it or not.

HUGH

(a tense beat) Three kids, Whitney. That’s the plan. That’s what we agreed to. Three. Three kids, three years apart, after graduate school. We’ve done that. We’ve multiplied, we’ve replenished. Mission Accomplished. Bring on the aircraft carrier, roll out the banner, fly the fighter jets. We’re done. You’re done. You said so yourself. “I’m so glad I don’t have to do that again.” Your exact words after Bradley was born.

WHITNEY

I lied.

HUGH

You were in earnest. I have the video on my phone if you’d like to see it.

WHITNEY

I didn’t know I was lying at the time.

HUGH

That’s just your hormones making you forget.

WHITNEY

This isn’t hormones.

HUGH

Everything’s hormones for you lately. You have a most egalitarian endocrine system: equal-opportunity misery for all.

WHITNEY

Hugh!

HUGH

The beautiful thing is, it’s the twenty-first century outside; we have ways of controlling these things.

WHITNEY

I had the doctor take my IUD out this morning.

HUGH

(a pregnant pause) Set up!

WHITNEY

If you’d just engage in a reasonable conversation with me, I wouldn’t have to—

HUGH

I am the only one being reasonable here.

WHITNEY

I think God’s trying to tell us something.

HUGH

Did he tell you to sabotage your birth control?

WHITNEY

It’s not sabotage if I tell you about it.

HUGH

After the fact.

WHITNEY

But before the act. Eh? Eh . . . ? (the joke doesn’t land, also HUGH’s hackles might be raised) . . . I brought back-up methods, just in case.

HUGH

Oh goody . . .

WHITNEY

I tried talking to you before we left, but you haven’t exactly been in the listening mood.

WHITNEY

Everything’s stress for you lately.

HUGH

Including our stress-free, get-away weekend, apparently. (a pause) So, what is God trying to tell you? Because he’s made our family plenty clear to me.

WHITNEY

Ah yes. Your vision.

HUGH

I saw our children before they were born. All three of them, playing in the creek at the cabin. They looked just like the picture you took last summer.

WHITNEY

I know. It was a beautiful vision . . . It still is. Three gap-toothed kids, alternating boys and girls, alternating hair color . . . I didn’t come into our marriage with a pre-planned family courtesy of some Young Women’s lesson, so when you woke me up that night on our honeymoon, I was happy to share your vision. Happy to be assured there would be a family in our future. That we didn’t have to worry about it at that moment because God would take care of it . . . And then you started planning . . . We didn’t have to figure everything out by the end of our honeymoon you know.

HUGH

We were laying the foundation for our marriage; setting our house in order so we could enjoy our future together.

WHITNEY

We could have enjoyed that moment together. (a pause) And four years later—as per the plan—out the children came, just as you’d foreseen. Boy, girl, boy. Dark, light, dark . . . You want to know something? With each pregnancy, I secretly hoped our children would come out different.

HUGH

. . . Wh . . . why?

WHITNEY

I don’t know. Maybe subconsciously I knew I’d want more children . . . eventually. Maybe I just . . . didn’t want to be limited by your vision.

HUGH

You should have said something. A long time ago.

WHITNEY

I didn’t know that’s what those feelings meant at the time.

HUGH

Then how do you know what your feelings mean now?! Have you prayed about this?

WHITNEY

Of course!

HUGH

And . . . ? What’s the answer?

WHITNEY

. . . No answer . . . Just the same ever-present emptiness in my heart, followed by the same boiler-plate message: “God loves you, and you need to work this out for yourself.”

HUGH

So, God’s not telling us to have another baby.

WHITNEY

Well wouldn’t it be easier if he did!

HUGH

I’m very content with our family the way it is.

WHITNEY

I’m not.

HUGH

Whatever your discontent, a baby isn’t going to fix it. Babies don’t solve . . . marital problems . . . You want to know why your heart is empty? Because our marriage is empty. When’s the last time you reached for me? Or at least, didn’t flinch when I touched you?

WHITNEY

. . . Hugh, I—

HUGH

I know I haven’t been in the listening mood lately, but I’m listening now. And I want to ask you, humbly . . . what it is—really—that you want from me . . . that you’re not getting . . .

WHITNEY

. . . A baby . . . !

HUGH

You’re not thinking clearly!

WHITNEY

Why is it so hard for you to believe me?! Because God hasn’t shown you in advance what another child will look like for our family? Well, he hasn’t shown me either. It’s called faith, Hugh.

HUGH

Faith in what, Whitney? God, or yourself?

WHITNEY

I’m sorry, God doesn’t come right out and talk to me—or show me visions—so the only thing I have to work with is myself. Maybe that’s the real test. What you do when the only judgement you have to rely on is your own.

HUGH

I trust my contentment.

WHITNEY

Maybe it’s not good for Man to be content.

HUGH

Is that the secret Relief Society motto? “Comfort the weary, strengthen the weak, and never let the men be content.”

WHITNEY

You act like I have a personal vendetta against your happiness.

HUGH

Don’t you? (a frustrated pause) You’re not being rational.

WHITNEY

Well maybe a baby shouldn’t be a rational decision!

HUGH

Is that what God is trying to tell us?

WHITNEY

I think, maybe, yes.

HUGH

This isn’t something you can maybe.

WHITNEY

Maybe it is! Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need more maybe in our lives. (a pause) I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a beauty to living together normally and letting the children come.

HUGH

We dismissed that notion fourteen years ago.

WHITNEY

After fourteen years of emptiness, maybe we should reconsider it. Haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like to make love, I mean actually—make—love, and not know the outcome in advance? To just be in the passion of that moment and give it over to God?

A pause. —Maybe—HUGH is reconsidering. . .

HUGH

. . . How many children you planning to let come?

WHITNEY

At our age? (shrugs)

HUGH

No. No. No, no, no. This is a stupid plan. This is . . . stupid.

WHITNEY

This isn’t a plan at all. Were you even listening?!

HUGH

—Yes!— That’s how I know it’s a stupid plan. Because I was listening!

WHITNEY screeches the car to a halt.

WHITNEY

Get out!

HUGH

—No.—

WHITNEY

I said, get out!

HUGH

Make me.

WHITNEY

Get. Out.

HUGH

No.

WHITNEY

Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!

HUGH

(amused, but trying not to show it) I can’t, the doors are locked.

WHITNEY

(unamused, unlocks the doors) There. Now go.

HUGH

Hmmm, no.

Infuriated, WHITNEY exits the car, opens the passenger door, and tries to pull HUGH out. It’s a losing proposition for WHITNEY, which only further amuses and infuriates the respective parties. At the height of this amusing and infuriating display, a semi-truck blares its horn, rattling the car as it narrowly passes by. HUGH pulls WHITNEY to safety just in time.

HUGH

(holding WHITNEY tight, rattled) That was close.

WHITNEY

(letting HUGH hold her) It just came from nowhere.

Their embrace sparks a romantic moment. Maybe even a reconciliation. The romance . . . escalates.

HUGH

Wanna move this to the back seat?

WHITNEY

Eww. On top of the Goldfish crumbs?

HUGH

Alright. We’ll do it here.

WHITNEY

(giggling) Hugh! We can finish this up at the cabin. It’s not that far.

HUGH

No, no. The Deus ex Mack Truck has intervened on your behalf. This is your moment. Seize it before I start thinking clearly.

WHITNEY realizes she’s about to get what she wants. And that may be the most terrifying thing.

She reaches for HUGH.

(END OF PLAY)

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Amy Banta is an emerging playwright from Holladay, UT. She studied economics at BYU, worked twelve years in the military-industrial complex, and is now attempting to raise three children—all of which temper her playwriting with a healthy dose of cynicism and heart.

Art by Emil Doepler.

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FEATURED ESSAYS

Continue scrolling to read “To Enliven the Soul” by Zachary McLeod Hutchins, included in full below.

The teachings and parables of Jesus Christ often revolved around the pleasures of feasting and celebration. In his parable of the prodigal son, for example, Jesus describes a young man who “took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living” (Luke 15:13). This prodigal’s search for pleasure is excessive, carrying him far from home, where he wastes the inheritance his father bestowed on him. But when he comes to himself and returns to his father in humility, seeking only to be “as one of thy hired servants,” the father responds by throwing a party (v. 19). He instructs servants to bring “the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry” (vv. 22–23). Although a love of pleasure and dissipation might be construed as the reason for his reduction to poverty, the father’s response is not to shield his son from fine food and drink and clothes but to welcome him home with a banquet and music and dancing. In response, the prodigal’s older brother refuses to participate in the festivities, complaining to the father that, despite his diligent labors, “thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf” (vv. 29–30). The older brother objects to the music and the dancing and the fine clothes and the rich food, particularly because he has never sought pleasure for himself and because a pursuit of pleasure represents all that he despises in the younger son. Yet the father insists, “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad” (v. 32). In his teachings, as well as in his lived experience, the Savior defended pleasure against the censures of the self-righteous.

Centuries of commentary, and the popular title ascribed to this story, invite us to poor or partial readings of the parable. Introducing the story, Jesus declares, “A certain man had two sons,” and yet we commonly refer to this as the parable of the prodigal son—ignoring or effacing the existence of a second son (Luke 15:11). A better title would be the parable of the two sons, or, more descriptively, the parable of the prodigal son and the abstemious son, the prodigal son and the puritanical son. We readily recognize the nature of the prodigal’s error; he cared too much for pleasure and sought it at the expense of all else, until he was impoverished and estranged from all who loved him. When wise commentators redirect our attention to the elder son, they often characterize his failure as envy or pride. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, for example, said of this older son that “he has, as yet, been unable to break out of the prison of himself. He is haunted by the green-eyed monster of jealousy.” The older brother is envious, as Sarah came to be envious of Hagar, but envy is not the older brother’s defining characteristic. Both the parable’s opening and its action indicate that the brothers are, in literary terms, foils: they represent opposed values.

Readers recognizing that the younger son is a spendthrift who “wasted his substance” should also recognize that the older son is a skinflint who never allowed himself or others to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Each is prone to extreme behavior and represents one half of the dual temptations memorialized by William Shakespeare: “Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, / Or gluttoning on all, or all away.” While the younger brother indulges in a surfeit of pleasure, the older brother lives in a state of repression and self-denial—“all away”—even as he pines and yearns for a taste of the good life he sees the younger son enjoying. To call this story the parable of the prodigal son is to ignore the older son’s extreme and dangerous suppression of the desires that the younger brother too freely gratifies before making his penitent return to a delighted father.

The older brother is a diligent worker and obedient son, but he is also a self-made martyr, unwilling to acknowledge or take responsibility for his own desires. When the father invites him to celebrate his younger brother’s return, the older son complains, “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). In blaming his father, this older son throws the onus for his own joyless life onto another. Though he knows, from experience, that the father granted his younger brother’s extravagant request for his inheritance—half the estate, even before their father had passed—the older son never voiced his own more modest desires or asked the father for permission to slaughter a goat and hold a banquet for his friends. The older son blames his father for the frustrated, pent-up life he’s lived, but the father reminds his firstborn that “all that I have is thine” (v. 31). This declaration of joint stewardship might strike the reader as a belated revelation that the older son should have been informed of sooner. But it is a reminder, not a revelation; when the prodigal asks for his inheritance, the father “divided unto them his living” (v. 12). In other words, the puritanical older son and the prodigal younger son—the two of them—were given a portion of the father’s property at the same time. The older son had always known he was free to slaughter a kid and make merry with his friends, but he never acted on those impulses. He preferred to hold a grudge against his father and to view himself as a virtuous victim rather than enjoy a modest pleasure and lose track of the bright line that distinguished his self-denying identity from his brother’s self-indulgent identity.

The older son’s behavior recalls Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s allegory of the cruise ship. He describes a man eager to sail the Mediterranean Sea and visit the cities of Rome, Athens, and Istanbul who

saved every penny until he had enough for his passage. Since money was tight, he brought an extra suitcase filled with cans of beans, boxes of crackers, and bags of powdered lemonade, and that is what he lived on every day.

He would have loved to take part in the many activities offered on the ship—working out in the gym, playing miniature golf, and swimming in the pool. He envied those who went to movies, shows, and cultural presentations. And, oh, how he yearned for only a taste of the amazing food he saw on the ship—every meal appeared to be a feast! But the man wanted to spend so very little money that he didn’t participate in any of these. He was able to see the cities he had longed to visit, but for the most part of the journey, he stayed in his cabin and ate only his humble food.

On the last day of the cruise, a crew member asked him which of the farewell parties he would be attending. It was then that the man learned that not only the farewell party but almost everything on board the cruise ship—the food, the entertainment, all the activities—had been included in the price of his ticket. Too late the man realized that he had been living far beneath his privileges.

Like the parable of the two sons, Uchtdorf’s story clearly suggests that we might mistakenly pass through mortality without enjoying all that the Father has given us, including the pleasures of food and drink, and not just the more refined or intellectual appreciations of passing through the world’s great cities and learning of their histories and cultures. Both stories warn that a fear of pleasure—that it might cost too much; that it might overwhelm our senses; that it might lead to debauched and riotous living—might lead us to reject or misuse our rightful inheritance.

The younger son’s prodigality is clearly condemned by the parable and so, I would argue, is the older son’s immoderate suppression of appetite and pleasure. They represent contrasting extremes we should shun while striving for a more temperate middle ground. Better for the younger son if he had exercised a modicum of self-restraint; better for the older son if he had made space in his life for modest pleasures and resisted the siren song of martyrdom. Alma repeatedly exhorted that we should be “temperate in all things” (Alma 7:23, 38:10), and Paul similarly taught, “every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things” (1 Cor. 9:25). Both sons stray from the ideal of temperance and moderation. Their contrasting examples of excess should caution us equally against extremes of indulgence and extremes of suppression.

Both the Savior’s life and his parable of the prodigal and puritanical sons suggest a need for moderation in our relationship to desire and pleasure. He fasted for forty days in the wilderness and demonstrated his capacity for self-denial in the service of a higher cause. Yet when his mother asked for wine, Jesus provided a vintage of the highest quality, and when he was invited to feast in the company of sinners, Jesus gracefully accepted the pleasures offered him, whether the kisses and caresses of a woman seeking forgiveness or the extravagant application of precious, perfumed ointment to his head and feet. Jesus is our Exemplar, both in his ability to forgo pleasures when they would distract him from the higher mission to which he had been called, and in his ready willingness to receive, enjoy, and share the pleasures of this mortal creation. His teachings, as well as his life, are reminders that “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”: a time to feast and a time to fast; a time to break the alabaster box of precious ointment and a time to forgo its use so that the proceeds might be sold for the poor; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to kill the kid and make merry with your friends and a time to refrain from riotous living (Eccl. 3:1).

This is a lightly edited excerpt from the book Shall I Have Pleasure? An Answer for Sarah (Greg Kofford Books, 2025).

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Zachary McLeod Hutchins writes about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with a wife and children who deserve better.

Artwork by John August Swanson.

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A NEW STORY OF CREATION

THEOLOGY

POETRY

FICTION

ON THE ROAD TO JERICHO

Introduction

The front page of my evolution course webpage shows a meme of a stern-looking Galápagos iguana with the caption “You are the product of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.”

As a professor, I begin and end every semester with the same reminder to my students: Be a good mammal. Good mammals take care of themselves, one another, and their planet. It sounds simple, but it carries the weight of both evolutionary history and theological meaning. Though humans are a young species, we inherit the evolutionary wisdom of mammals—warm-blooded, social, adaptable beings whose survival depends on cooperation, care, and ecological reciprocity. This is not sentiment; it’s biology. And it’s also scripture. Latter-day Saint theology names the same pattern stewardship—to see the body as temple, the community as covenant, and the Earth as a living partner. To be a good mammal is not merely biology. It is a theology of stewardship.

Evolution is the ongoing creation story, the universe still speaking itself into being. The same forces that shaped iguanas and birds and sea lions on volcanic islands shaped us, too. Cooperation, adaptation, and ecological reciprocity are not accidents of natural history; they are the scaffolding of life. Mammals learned early that survival is a communal act, that thriving requires relationships. In this light, stewardship and evolution are not opposites but reflections of the same truth: Life endures through connection, through care, through love disguised as biology. Our role in that story is both simple and demanding—to take care.

Stewardship is the sacred form of that truth, the theology that grows from the science. Its practice unfolds in three directions: care of self, care of others, and care of the Earth. Each is a covenant, and together they describe what it means to be a good mammal.

Good mammals take care of themselves.

Care begins close in with the body, that small ecosystem of breath and boundary. Mammals know that neglecting the body endangers the whole herd. To rest, to nourish, to move, to heal . . . these are not luxuries but acts of ecological responsibility. In Latter-day Saint language, the body is a temple. In evolutionary terms, it is our first habitat. To tend it well is an offering to both biology and divinity.

To bring this closer to home, I will tell you a story. A dreadful thing happened to me at age forty-three: I got dead drunk, entirely by accident. My husband and I were on vacation in Mexico, fresh from a morning of hiking Mayan ruins in the dark-green jungle. While he went off for a nap, I settled by the beachside pool and ordered the minty, ice-cold coconut drink I’d grown fond of. I assumed it was from the “family-friendly” menu, but a language barrier and my own naivete conspired for a different result. Thirsty from the heat, I drank three tall glasses quickly, unaware that the sweetness was masking a healthy pour of rum.

In short order, the world tilted. Dizzy and confused, I called my husband in a panic, convinced I had sunstroke or worse. With a few questions, he diagnosed the true issue, laughed heartily, and came to collect my sorry, tipsy self from the pool. I learned a few lessons that day: first, that the Word of Wisdom holds up well, and second, that wisdom itself may need updating for the modern mammal.

We may not drink much rum by accident, but we do live intoxicated by busyness, sugar, stress, and neglect. The covenant of care should maybe ask harder questions now: Do you eat enough leafy greens? Limit sugar? Move your body? Get your medical checkups? Protect your skin? Vaccinate? Floss? And, perhaps most sacred of all, are you caring for your mind—that evolutionary wonder that made us what we are? Without it, we’re slow-running, clawless snacks on the savanna; with it, we’ve become caretakers of worlds.

To be a good mammal is to care for yourself without apology. Honor your body as sacred matter, evolved and sustained by Earth. Every breath, every bite, every heartbeat ties us back to soil, sea, and starlight. Remember that, and half of theology resolves itself.

Good mammals take care of one another.

No mammal thrives alone. From the earliest social species to human communities, cooperation has always been the strategy of survival. Mutual care is the oldest covenant, written not just in scripture but in shared breath and warmth. In this light, neighbor love and kin selection speak the same truth: We are built for connection. To take care of each other is to practice the evolutionary art of belonging and to glimpse Zion in miniature.

Once, I held a stranded hummingbird in my hand and felt its featherlight tongue drink sugar water from my fingertips. I whispered to the fragile, frightened creature, “You are safe. It will be OK. I will not hurt you.” When it finally gathered enough strength to fluff its wings and buzz away, I was left in stillness and full of wonder.

In that moment, I understood what my research keeps teaching me: Care is the oldest language on Earth. In the way pollinators cooperate with their floral partners, in the way herds shelter their young, the pattern repeats—life depending on life. Cooperation isn’t a lofty theory; it’s the quiet engine of existence.

From a scholarly lens, both evolution and theology tell this same story. Evolution’s cooperative mechanisms—mutualism, adaptation, resilience—mirror the moral architecture of Zion. Both depend on shared care across scales of being. In the Latter-day Saint context, continuing revelation works like ecological adaptation: a living system learning, refining, expanding through relationship. To be a good mammal is to live inside that process with awareness and to recognize that the laws of survival and the laws of love have always been the same. Though this might seem in conflict, perhaps even a paradox, understanding science makes space for it all.

Watching the pollinators and their floral partners, I’m reminded that life itself is a long conversation of giving and receiving. Every creature survives by tending to another. Humans are no exception; our thriving depends on how faithfully we honor that same covenant of care.

The old biblical question still hangs in the air: Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer has never changed. Yes. We are. We are herd animals, evolutionarily adapted to belong. Civilization’s morality can still be measured by how it treats its young, its elderly, its vulnerable. Tribalism carried us far, driving invention, identity, and culture, and yet the same instinct now fractures us. It is time for a new story, one that expands the circle of our human tribe until no one stands outside it, one species bound by shared breath and shared responsibility.

It’s a lesson our own people tried to live. I was never one to get misty about pioneer stories—too much dust, too many bonnets, too much tuberculosis, and more hymn singing than any sane person could stand. I used to think my Mormon ancestors were reckless and a bit foolish to leave civilization and go West, probably a little gullible to follow men who promised heaven in the desert. But they were also idealists—people who believed in something so fiercely that they left comfort behind with a vision and a hope that life could be better. The very best reason, the most inspiring reason, to go into the wilderness: to fight for a better world.

They believed in Zion. “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18). I believe in that too. That is a world worth fighting for, hoping for, reaching for.

Now I see my ancestors differently. They are precious to me. They were evolution in motion, humans daring to imagine a more cooperative future. That same drive—to build a just, caring community—remains the heart of sacred stewardship.

Zion, like any ecosystem, must adapt or die. It is not somewhere we go but something we make. It is a living process built each time a community chooses generosity over scarcity, connection over fear. We are meant to flourish together. To be a good mammal is to remember that Zion doesn’t end at the edge of the campfire or the chapel. It extends into the soil, the rivers, the air we share. Zion is not a distant city; it’s a living process, a verb disguised as a noun.

Good mammals take care of their planet.

Every act of life depends on the generosity of the planet—its air, soil, water, and light. To care for Earth is not an abstract environmental duty, it is the continuation of our own survival story. Earth is our shared body, our mother, our oldest covenant partner. Stewardship, in this sense, is simply remembering what mammals have always known: that care is reciprocal. The planet sustains us only as well as we sustain it.

About 3.8 billion years ago (as the iguana meme so helpfully reminds my students), in a daring and audacious move, the first cells twitched to life. They carried genetic code and an unrelenting directive: survive and reproduce. From that spark onward, evolution took the reins—life experimenting, diversifying, filling the planet with improbable abundance. At least five times, extinction scoured the slate nearly clean. Five times, life began again, persistent in its pursuit of biodiversity.

And now, here we are. A strange young species called Homo sapiens, armed with a never-before-seen brain and a dangerous knack for storytelling, perched at the top of a web we barely understand. But our ecosystem is not a hierarchy. It’s a body. If the web collapses, so do we. Earth has endured those mass extinctions. The top predators never make it through. Take the lesson. Saving biodiversity isn’t charity. It’s self-preservation.

My oldest son, Jack, took an early stab at ethical coexistence with life on this planet. At five years old—a good mammal, testing out his first moral narratives—he announced that he would no longer eat mammals. When pressed for his reasoning, he proclaimed, “Because I am a mammal, so I will not eat the others.” I honored his sound logic. It lasted two months. Then Grandpa visited and made bacon. Fair. Many of us have surrendered nobler intentions to the lure of bacon.

Still, I was struck by his clarity. Even at that age, Jack understood something most of us forget: that we are part of the web we consume and that belonging carries responsibility.

That same truth runs through the world’s sacred texts. In Annie Dillard’s poetic rendering of a verse from the Qur’an, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between—thinkest thou I made them in jest?” (Surah 21:16, quoted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Genesis 2:15 echoes, “The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” This was never ownership. It was trust and stewardship. We do not possess Earth; we are responsible for it. And there will be an accounting, to our God, to our descendants, to our own souls.

But suppose the Master Gardener has returned, and the first question of the millennial interview is “So . . . how is Earth? How is my glorious creation?”

I imagine myself standing there, hands twisted together, wishing for better news. “Lord,” I’d have to say softly, “we lost some things . . . the tigers, the elephants, the whales . . . and more beauty than I can name.”

I hope I never have to say that.

Caring for the planet is not a side project or a sentimental virtue. It is a covenantal duty. Reverence made practical. Stewardship is responsibility without dominion, care without conquest. Earth was never given as property, but entrusted as inheritance: sacred, fragile, alive.

Do we see our planet as a covenant partner? The way we answer will tell the story of our souls. To honor creation is to honor its Creator.

To practice the spirit of collaboration, I’ll invoke other brilliant, sacred minds on our spiritual mandate to be responsible stewards. E. O. Wilson, a great naturalist and advocate for Earth, said in his book Consilience that he believed the world needed a new environmental ethic where science and religion could be united around the shared purpose of conservation. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote. “They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.”

The Prophet Joseph Smith said much the same thing in his own language of revelation, often quoting Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Both men knew that without a living sense of purpose and a story large enough to hold us, humanity loses its way.

Science tells the story of deep time; revelation tells the story of divine purpose. Put them together, and you get a vision large enough to live inside—a sacred narrative of stewardship, kinship, and care. Earth’s covenant and our own are the same promise: to protect what gives us life, to make beauty where we can, to keep faith with the living world.

Conclusion

Genesis 1:31 ends the creation story with the quiet declaration, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” It is good. Scripture says so, and I believe it.

Earth is good. You are part of that creation; therefore, you are created good. That blessing was sealed upon all living things. What remains is our choice: What will we do with that goodness? I have hope that we can be good mammals.

Creation didn’t end at Eden. It continues in every act of care: when we tend our bodies as sacred, when we make kin of strangers, when we guard Earth as a covenant partner. Zion is not yet found, but we glimpse it, reach for it, and bring it closer with each breath, each act of hope, each piece of work well done. To call on one last voice, I offer a statement by environmental activist Anthony D. Williams:

We are here to heal, not harm.
We are here to love, not hate.
We are here to create, not destroy.

Be a good mammal.

Take care of yourself, one another, and your planet.

In doing so, you join the Creator in the oldest, most beautiful work there is: the ongoing creation of a world worth saving.

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Kyra is a Professor of Biology and Program Director for the Sustainability Program at Maryville University, and a Research Associate at Missouri Botanical Garden. Kyra is a St. Louis Biodiversity Fellow in the Living Earth Collaborative. She did her BS and MS at Brigham Young University. Kyra did her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She was Science Educator of the Year by the STL Academy of Science in 2016. Her lab focuses on the need to understand the dynamics of the natural world in a changing environment. You can find her TEDx talk from 2015 under “Plants, People and Pollinators: A Love Story.”

Art by Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920).

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Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals;
    the same fate awaits them both:
As one dies, so dies the other
   . . . humans have no advantage over animals.
Everything is meaningless.   
(Ecclesiastes 3:19, NIV)

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen
   to them all.
As fish are caught in a cruel net,                                                                                                               or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.  
(Ecclesiastes 9:11–12, NIV)

What to Do with Ecclesiastes?

The book of Ecclesiastes has a problem. In truth, it has several,1 but let us focus on its “public relations” problem, which has two aspects.

First, the book is a poem. More precisely, it is a collection of poems and aphorisms, glued together by strands of prose and shaped into a single treatise. And because half of us are allergic to poetry, we are handicapped in discerning poetry’s relationship to faith. This alienation constrains both scriptural literacy and spiritual nourishment. One-third of the Bible comes to us in verse. It is worth asking: Why?

The other half of its public relations problem is that Ecclesiastes is dour. Its tone splices sober and bleak. It declares everything “under the sun” (the achievement of wisdom and all lesser striving) to be futile. This, of course, seems at odds with the Restoration’s thrust. We aspiring Saints seek joy and relish purpose. We are an optimistic people, building Zion, whose gospel is Good News. We see God’s project as a “plan of happiness,” and we wish to encourage one another in its pursuit.

The poetic pessimism of Ecclesiastes thus contributes to the book’s neglect. Although we may have heard the quip “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2), and though we may recognize the scriptural source of periodically popular song lyrics (“To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under . . . heaven” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]) or book titles (The Sun Also Rises, Ecclesiastes 1:5), still Ecclesiastes is not etched in our sensibilities. As a church community, we might sample a few chapters from the book on a single Sunday (if we are in attendance on the right one of 208 Sabbaths in our four-year curricular cycle and have read along with the Church’s Come, Follow Me calendar). But rarely do we encounter the bulk of the book or probe its poetic wealth. We might go decades without hearing this scripture substantively engaged from a pulpit.

This near-absence of Ecclesiastes in our shared thought is arguably a deficit, for despite the book’s pessimism—in part because of its particular pessimism—it brims with insight, beauty, and a perspective that could contribute to our spiritual maturity. The great Latter-day Saint teacher Lowell Bennion, who was also our church’s approximation of Mother Teresa during the second half of the twentieth century, held that Ecclesiastes was “the most realistic book in the Bible.” We could grapple with this assertion, but the book does in fact lend bracing perspectives that could complement other scripture and deepen our lives in the gospel amidst our vale of tears. The ancients, it is true, found reasons to exclude Ecclesiastes from the canon; it was among the last books to secure its place. At length, however, the devout found stronger reasons to include it. Again: why is that so?

How then shall we approach the somber, poetical pith of Ecclesiastes? How might we hold it together with our optimistic view of a purposeful life, a loving and redeeming Lord, and an exalted eternal horizon? Let us first revisit poetry’s connection to faith, then conclude by posing a prompt or two toward renewed thought about an old book.

I: Poetry as Obstacle

What is the source of our indifference to poetry?2 For some, it lies in the effort required of reading unfamiliar forms. Poetry can seem dense or cryptic, demanding attention amidst our busyness. The obstacle of obscurity can feel all the larger if, as with the King James Bible, the language of the baseline text is antique quite before we tangle with its poetic portions.

Others discount poetic expression as inessential verbal tinsel. Why not say things plainly for all to understand? Why gild the lily of the pure and simple gospel? Surely clever or pretty words are less important than correct doctrine, unvarnished truth, and moral clarity. Viewed this way, poetry becomes luxury or distraction. A similar perspective helps explain why some Christian groups ban singing or the use of musical instruments during Sunday services. They fear that such frippery draws attention from worship and toward performance. For related reasons, we often insist that our visual gospel art be simple, illustrative, and didactic.

These are not vacuous concerns. As Nephi insisted, “plainness” can be precious. When we apply these notions unthoughtfully, however, we may diminish Zion and, ironically, thicken the veil twixt us and heaven. We do that by confusing the dangers of the distortion of art (self-aggrandizement, for example) with art itself. Preening may of course glom onto an expression of verbal or visual beauty, just as it can accompany the display of strength, wealth, intelligence, or authority. But the problem is not innate to beauty, authority, or intelligence. The problem is rooted in pride and unrighteous dominion.

While there is a spiritual cost wherever pride infringes, there is also a spiritual cost to bland or rote representations of our gospel. How is it possible to comprehend the gospel’s full splendor without engaging its fruits, including the art it naturally spawns?

In its authentic expression, poetry is not mere verbal decoration. Instead, it transforms the emotional and aesthetic character of diverse scriptural passages, revealing their power, awakening minds and hearts to the good and the true, the powerful and the beautiful. When the newly widowed (Moabite) Ruth pleads to remain with her (Israelite) mother-in-law Naomi, for example, the form and quality of her reported and translated speech (“Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; / Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”) is intrinsic to why the story lodges in our hearts across the centuries. So is it also with the Beatitudes in Matthew’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12). And with the Magnificat spoken by Mary of Jesus’ coming birth, as portrayed by Luke (Luke 1:46–55). So it is with the Bible’s prophetic books. And so it is with its “wisdom literature,” including, especially, Ecclesiastes.

The music, imagery, metaphor, and compression that characterizes poetry, then, need not be in competition with the divine. To the contrary, poetry can partake of the sublime, conveying the taste, feel, pleasure, and idea of the sublime. Most of us would not wish for less graceful, less tasteful temples in which to worship and to enact our most sacred devotions. Neither ought we, by sloth or obliviousness, disdain inspiration in its poetic guise. However humble, varied, and surprising its forms may be, holiness warrants beautiful expression.

II: Hearing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Tune

But though we may acknowledge the place of poetry and the aesthetic of Ecclesiastes, how shall we hear the Lord’s song in a strange tune? That is, what shall we do with the eloquent book’s pessimistic outlook on the world?

Rather than presuming to de-canonize the book by spurning or ignoring it, we might consider coming to it in humility and with imagination—without which any scriptural work might end up on our de facto personal scrapheaps. What follows are a pair of sample prompts for reflection as we generate our own response to the question in the preceding paragraph.

Vapor, Not Vanity

The thought of the “Teacher” or “Preacher” that constitutes the book of Ecclesiastes begins and ends with a lament about human aspirations and human affairs: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8).3 What is intended by “vanity” in this context has naturally attracted attention over the centuries. Modern English translations incline toward “futility,” “useless,” and “meaningless.” These provocative concepts do pick up on strands in the wider text of Ecclesiastes. However, the Hebrew word (hebel) behind them means something more like “mist” or “vapor,” “a puff of air.” Vanity, futility, meaningless, or emptiness are English-cast metaphorical extensions of the word’s Hebrew meaning: a vapor, which may imply “evanescence.” Taken this way, the thought that opens and closes Ecclesiastes may carry the sense of “Life is as a fleeting vapor, which cannot be grasped.”

How would this rendition shade our reading of Ecclesiastes as a whole? Might this sense, crafted by the weary, poetic Teacher, be put in fruitful conversation with Jacob’s striking lament in the Book of Mormon?

And . . . I, Jacob, began to be old; . . . wherefore, I conclude this record . . . saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren, which caused wars and contentions; wherefore, we did mourn out our days. (Jacob 7:26)

A Role for Uncertainty

We Latter-day Saints prize faith. We oft bear testimony of things we “know”: that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the Lord has restored his Church, answers prayer, and will resurrect every person. Many additional things.

Ecclesiastes, by contrast, heaves with life’s uncertainties. The author doubts the world’s fairness, for ofttimes “the righteous . . . get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked . . . get what the righteous deserve” (Ecclesiastes 8:14, NIV; cf. 9:11–12). God “has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV), which seems to mourn that God has implanted a sense of the eternal and the divine inside human consciousness, but left us yearning, orphaned, and ignorant. For example, says our author, “Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3:21, NIV). Death is certain; little else. Not the fruits of one’s toil; not the endurance of wisdom; not the hope of being remembered; not the triumph of justice.

Ecclesiastes sings in a melancholy key. (This fact is not dissolved by our citing the second author who later appended his or her summary judgment to the body of the book, saying “here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments.”4) With its this-worldly focus and its disdain toward much of our human striving, Ecclesiastes cannot stand on its own as a sufficient expression of our hopeful, radiant gospel. But then neither can any other isolated scriptural book, including the canonized gospels or the books of the Book of Mormon. Therefore, might the skepticism, realism, and uncertainty of Ecclesiastes be a useful, though not sufficient, seasoning within our wider faith and canon?

Might it, for instance, like the book of Job, serve as a balancing corrective to the widely held assurance, in both ancient and modern times, that God will dependably prosper the righteous and punish the wicked in visible, material ways in mortality? (See common interpretations of such passages as Proverbs 11:31; 2:21–22; Mosiah 2:24; and Malachi 3:10–11.) Against this thought, and like Ecclesiastes, Jesus noticed that God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good [alike], and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45). If we are certain that it is otherwise, are we not too certain? And therefore, is not uncertainty (“I don’t know”) an adoptable principle within our wider faith? All of us who live long enough will collide, or will know someone valiant and dear to us who collides, with undeserved calamity bearing life-altering or life-ending results. Uncertainty and acceptance toward such contingencies are not spiritual weaknesses. In such circumstances, embracing uncertainty may be the most trusting, faithful thing we can do. Moreover, excessive certainty can breed arrogance, sometimes at the expense of others. “When we know we don’t know fully, we are . . . more concerned about practical, loving behavior. . . . Those who know God are always humble; those who don’t are invariably far too sure of themselves (which is different than grace-filled self-confidence).”5

Conclusion

For thirty years and more I have worked to calm unease among college freshmen and sophomores (and their parents) when they don’t know in what field they wish to “major.” I have tried to persuade them that “not knowing yet” can be crucial, creative space.

Similarly, there is a place for uncertainty in our gospel. Were it not so, we might have arrived on earth unveiled—or we might not have bothered to come to a shrouded world at all. Uncertainty, though not always comfortable, may be mixed with curiosity, hope, and honesty, making for excellent soil from which trust or faith may sprout. Perhaps uncertainty in such a context is another term for openness.

Ecclesiastes is uncertain. In some respects, it is more: skeptical and contrary. It cannot be the last word for us. But let us make room for it in our real—that is, used—canon, like an antiphonal surprise in a symphony. Perhaps we may rediscover in it a functional, intentional, and dissonant chord in God’s wider hymn to us.

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Philip Barlow served as the Maxwell Institute’s associate director and is a Neal A. Maxwell Research Associate. Having previously served as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University, his teaching engages religion and human suffering, religion and the concept of “time,” American religious history, and Restoration movements.

Art by Frans van Kuyck (1852–1915).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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And now, enjoy this first essay from the series, both playful and poignant, examining how we all participate in the story of creation.

BE A GOOD MAMMAL

by Kyra N. Krakos

Introduction

The front page of my evolution course webpage shows a meme of a stern-looking Galápagos iguana with the caption “You are the product of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.”

As a professor, I begin and end every semester with the same reminder to my students: Be a good mammal. Good mammals take care of themselves, one another, and their planet. It sounds simple, but it carries the weight of both evolutionary history and theological meaning. Though humans are a young species, we inherit the evolutionary wisdom of mammals—warm-blooded, social, adaptable beings whose survival depends on cooperation, care, and ecological reciprocity. This is not sentiment; it’s biology. And it’s also scripture. Latter-day Saint theology names the same pattern stewardship—to see the body as temple, the community as covenant, and the Earth as a living partner. To be a good mammal is not merely biology. It is a theology of stewardship.

Evolution is the ongoing creation story, the universe still speaking itself into being. The same forces that shaped iguanas and birds and sea lions on volcanic islands shaped us, too. Cooperation, adaptation, and ecological reciprocity are not accidents of natural history; they are the scaffolding of life. Mammals learned early that survival is a communal act, that thriving requires relationships. In this light, stewardship and evolution are not opposites but reflections of the same truth: Life endures through connection, through care, through love disguised as biology. Our role in that story is both simple and demanding—to take care.

Stewardship is the sacred form of that truth, the theology that grows from the science. Its practice unfolds in three directions: care of self, care of others, and care of the Earth. Each is a covenant, and together they describe what it means to be a good mammal.

Good mammals take care of themselves.

Care begins close in with the body, that small ecosystem of breath and boundary. Mammals know that neglecting the body endangers the whole herd. To rest, to nourish, to move, to heal . . . these are not luxuries but acts of ecological responsibility. In Latter-day Saint language, the body is a temple. In evolutionary terms, it is our first habitat. To tend it well is an offering to both biology and divinity.

To bring this closer to home, I will tell you a story. A dreadful thing happened to me at age forty-three: I got dead drunk, entirely by accident. My husband and I were on vacation in Mexico, fresh from a morning of hiking Mayan ruins in the dark-green jungle. While he went off for a nap, I settled by the beachside pool and ordered the minty, ice-cold coconut drink I’d grown fond of. I assumed it was from the “family-friendly” menu, but a language barrier and my own naivete conspired for a different result. Thirsty from the heat, I drank three tall glasses quickly, unaware that the sweetness was masking a healthy pour of rum.

In short order, the world tilted. Dizzy and confused, I called my husband in a panic, convinced I had sunstroke or worse. With a few questions, he diagnosed the true issue, laughed heartily, and came to collect my sorry, tipsy self from the pool. I learned a few lessons that day: first, that the Word of Wisdom holds up well, and second, that wisdom itself may need updating for the modern mammal.

We may not drink much rum by accident, but we do live intoxicated by busyness, sugar, stress, and neglect. The covenant of care should maybe ask harder questions now: Do you eat enough leafy greens? Limit sugar? Move your body? Get your medical checkups? Protect your skin? Vaccinate? Floss? And, perhaps most sacred of all, are you caring for your mind—that evolutionary wonder that made us what we are? Without it, we’re slow-running, clawless snacks on the savanna; with it, we’ve become caretakers of worlds.

To be a good mammal is to care for yourself without apology. Honor your body as sacred matter, evolved and sustained by Earth. Every breath, every bite, every heartbeat ties us back to soil, sea, and starlight. Remember that, and half of theology resolves itself.

Good mammals take care of one another.

No mammal thrives alone. From the earliest social species to human communities, cooperation has always been the strategy of survival. Mutual care is the oldest covenant, written not just in scripture but in shared breath and warmth. In this light, neighbor love and kin selection speak the same truth: We are built for connection. To take care of each other is to practice the evolutionary art of belonging and to glimpse Zion in miniature.

Once, I held a stranded hummingbird in my hand and felt its featherlight tongue drink sugar water from my fingertips. I whispered to the fragile, frightened creature, “You are safe. It will be OK. I will not hurt you.” When it finally gathered enough strength to fluff its wings and buzz away, I was left in stillness and full of wonder.

In that moment, I understood what my research keeps teaching me: Care is the oldest language on Earth. In the way pollinators cooperate with their floral partners, in the way herds shelter their young, the pattern repeats—life depending on life. Cooperation isn’t a lofty theory; it’s the quiet engine of existence.

From a scholarly lens, both evolution and theology tell this same story. Evolution’s cooperative mechanisms—mutualism, adaptation, resilience—mirror the moral architecture of Zion. Both depend on shared care across scales of being. In the Latter-day Saint context, continuing revelation works like ecological adaptation: a living system learning, refining, expanding through relationship. To be a good mammal is to live inside that process with awareness and to recognize that the laws of survival and the laws of love have always been the same. Though this might seem in conflict, perhaps even a paradox, understanding science makes space for it all.

Watching the pollinators and their floral partners, I’m reminded that life itself is a long conversation of giving and receiving. Every creature survives by tending to another. Humans are no exception; our thriving depends on how faithfully we honor that same covenant of care.

The old biblical question still hangs in the air: Am I my brother’s keeper? The answer has never changed. Yes. We are. We are herd animals, evolutionarily adapted to belong. Civilization’s morality can still be measured by how it treats its young, its elderly, its vulnerable. Tribalism carried us far, driving invention, identity, and culture, and yet the same instinct now fractures us. It is time for a new story, one that expands the circle of our human tribe until no one stands outside it, one species bound by shared breath and shared responsibility.

It’s a lesson our own people tried to live. I was never one to get misty about pioneer stories—too much dust, too many bonnets, too much tuberculosis, and more hymn singing than any sane person could stand. I used to think my Mormon ancestors were reckless and a bit foolish to leave civilization and go West, probably a little gullible to follow men who promised heaven in the desert. But they were also idealists—people who believed in something so fiercely that they left comfort behind with a vision and a hope that life could be better. The very best reason, the most inspiring reason, to go into the wilderness: to fight for a better world.

They believed in Zion. “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18). I believe in that too. That is a world worth fighting for, hoping for, reaching for.

Now I see my ancestors differently. They are precious to me. They were evolution in motion, humans daring to imagine a more cooperative future. That same drive—to build a just, caring community—remains the heart of sacred stewardship.

Zion, like any ecosystem, must adapt or die. It is not somewhere we go but something we make. It is a living process built each time a community chooses generosity over scarcity, connection over fear. We are meant to flourish together. To be a good mammal is to remember that Zion doesn’t end at the edge of the campfire or the chapel. It extends into the soil, the rivers, the air we share. Zion is not a distant city; it’s a living process, a verb disguised as a noun.

Good mammals take care of their planet.

Every act of life depends on the generosity of the planet—its air, soil, water, and light. To care for Earth is not an abstract environmental duty, it is the continuation of our own survival story. Earth is our shared body, our mother, our oldest covenant partner. Stewardship, in this sense, is simply remembering what mammals have always known: that care is reciprocal. The planet sustains us only as well as we sustain it.

About 3.8 billion years ago (as the iguana meme so helpfully reminds my students), in a daring and audacious move, the first cells twitched to life. They carried genetic code and an unrelenting directive: survive and reproduce. From that spark onward, evolution took the reins—life experimenting, diversifying, filling the planet with improbable abundance. At least five times, extinction scoured the slate nearly clean. Five times, life began again, persistent in its pursuit of biodiversity.

And now, here we are. A strange young species called Homo sapiens, armed with a never-before-seen brain and a dangerous knack for storytelling, perched at the top of a web we barely understand. But our ecosystem is not a hierarchy. It’s a body. If the web collapses, so do we. Earth has endured those mass extinctions. The top predators never make it through. Take the lesson. Saving biodiversity isn’t charity. It’s self-preservation.

My oldest son, Jack, took an early stab at ethical coexistence with life on this planet. At five years old—a good mammal, testing out his first moral narratives—he announced that he would no longer eat mammals. When pressed for his reasoning, he proclaimed, “Because I am a mammal, so I will not eat the others.” I honored his sound logic. It lasted two months. Then Grandpa visited and made bacon. Fair. Many of us have surrendered nobler intentions to the lure of bacon.

Still, I was struck by his clarity. Even at that age, Jack understood something most of us forget: that we are part of the web we consume and that belonging carries responsibility.

That same truth runs through the world’s sacred texts. In Annie Dillard’s poetic rendering of a verse from the Qur’an, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between—thinkest thou I made them in jest?” (Surah 21:16, quoted in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Genesis 2:15 echoes, “The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” This was never ownership. It was trust and stewardship. We do not possess Earth; we are responsible for it. And there will be an accounting, to our God, to our descendants, to our own souls.

But suppose the Master Gardener has returned, and the first question of the millennial interview is “So . . . how is Earth? How is my glorious creation?”

I imagine myself standing there, hands twisted together, wishing for better news. “Lord,” I’d have to say softly, “we lost some things . . . the tigers, the elephants, the whales . . . and more beauty than I can name.”

I hope I never have to say that.

Caring for the planet is not a side project or a sentimental virtue. It is a covenantal duty. Reverence made practical. Stewardship is responsibility without dominion, care without conquest. Earth was never given as property, but entrusted as inheritance: sacred, fragile, alive.

Do we see our planet as a covenant partner? The way we answer will tell the story of our souls. To honor creation is to honor its Creator.

To practice the spirit of collaboration, I’ll invoke other brilliant, sacred minds on our spiritual mandate to be responsible stewards. E. O. Wilson, a great naturalist and advocate for Earth, said in his book Consilience that he believed the world needed a new environmental ethic where science and religion could be united around the shared purpose of conservation. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote. “They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.”

The Prophet Joseph Smith said much the same thing in his own language of revelation, often quoting Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Both men knew that without a living sense of purpose and a story large enough to hold us, humanity loses its way.

Science tells the story of deep time; revelation tells the story of divine purpose. Put them together, and you get a vision large enough to live inside—a sacred narrative of stewardship, kinship, and care. Earth’s covenant and our own are the same promise: to protect what gives us life, to make beauty where we can, to keep faith with the living world.

Conclusion

Genesis 1:31 ends the creation story with the quiet declaration, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” It is good. Scripture says so, and I believe it.

Earth is good. You are part of that creation; therefore, you are created good. That blessing was sealed upon all living things. What remains is our choice: What will we do with that goodness? I have hope that we can be good mammals.

Creation didn’t end at Eden. It continues in every act of care: when we tend our bodies as sacred, when we make kin of strangers, when we guard Earth as a covenant partner. Zion is not yet found, but we glimpse it, reach for it, and bring it closer with each breath, each act of hope, each piece of work well-done. To call on one last voice, I offer a statement by environmental activist Anthony D. Williams:

We are here to heal, not harm.
We are here to love, not hate.
We are here to create, not destroy.

Be a good mammal.

Take care of yourself, one another, and your planet.

In doing so, you join the Creator in the oldest, most beautiful work there is: the ongoing creation of a world worth saving.

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Kyra is a Professor of Biology and Program Director for the Sustainability Program at Maryville University, and a Research Associate at Missouri Botanical Garden. Her lab focuses on the need to understand the dynamics of the natural world in a changing environment. You can find her TEDx talk from 2015 under “Plants, People and Pollinators: A Love Story.”

Art by Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920).

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In the summer hills behind my maternal grandparents’ home in Southern California, the earth pleads for water like lips, cracked and gaping. Yet the same baked land is home to orange trees from which my grandpa would prepare fresh-squeezed orange juice during our annual family visits. There was nothing more heavenly—like sun-kissed honey ambrosia.

Once my husband and I brought our own children for a visit. On a walk to the eucalyptus tree (or “euca-lipstick” tree, as my young cousin called it), we discovered a brutal scene.

A venomous tarantula hawk wasp, its translucent rust-colored wings held erect by gangly appendages, was dragging its prey along the dirt—an immobilized, hairy tarantula that jerked over the uneven ground like a rubber toy.

Second only to the bullet ant, the stings of these monstrous wasps are ranked most painful in the vast insect world—described by one researcher as “immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline,” the researcher continued, “simply does not work in these situations.”

But the wasp’s prey of choice, the tarantula, has an even more horrifying fate than these poor souls. The female wasp wrestles with its victim, grasping it with long, hooked claws and stinging it between the legs. The tarantula is paralyzed and is then dragged by the wasp to a house of horrors—a lair in which the wasp lays a single egg on the still-living tarantula’s abdomen. After hatching, the larva digs its way down into the tarantula, feeding insatiably upon it, while bypassing vital organs in order to keep its feast alive as long as possible.

On that day, I was still unaware of the notorious sting, so I unwittingly scooped the creatures up—attached predator and all—in a torn plastic water bottle and froze them next to my grandma’s Eggo waffles. Once home in Utah, my son preserved them as part of his eighth-grade biology insect collection. Last I heard, both the insect predator and the arachnid prey were displayed on his biology teacher’s Wall of Fame.

And the cycle of life continues.

It’s relatively easy to find grace and God in some places—fresh-squeezed orange juice, mountain streams, songbirds, coral reefs, laughter, double rainbows, and tangerine sunsets. My childhood crayon drawings are proof enough for me.

But where is God in the gruesome, ugly tarantula hawk wasp burrows? Where is grace in the painful, distressing, soul-wrenching dark nights?

My evolution professor once related Charles Darwin’s dark night of the soul and his transition from a Christian to an agnostic. It did not come, as many assume, solely embedded in his theory of evolution by natural selection—his competitive, dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest species survive.

Rather, some believe, it began with the death of his beloved ten-year-old daughter, Annie. Darwin wrote that his daughter had been “the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age.” Just a week after her tragic death, following months of mysterious illness, Darwin wrote of his Annie, “She must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face.”

Darwin was too grief-stricken to even attend the funeral.

It’s the age-old problem of theodicy. How can we reconcile God’s providence in the face of evil and pain? Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this question for centuries, while everyday seekers live out this wrestle time and again.

My own dark night of the soul has frequently reared its ugly head in the form of chronic illness. It began just shy of twenty years ago, when I awoke at night to use the bathroom and discovered it hurt to walk. It was as if someone had been hammering the tops of my feet in the night while I slept—some deranged little elf on a sadistic mission.

In the morning and as the day progressed, the pain would dissipate. But at night, the phantom would return for his nightly poundings. It was bizarre, because I couldn’t trace the pain to an injury and because it didn’t follow the predictable pattern of pain (more intense, then less, then gone). Rather, it would come and go, sometimes reappearing in a different location, sometimes increasing rather than decreasing in intensity. It was haphazard and unsettling.

Since the diagnostic protocol looked not just at lab tests or imaging but at a full clinical picture over time, it took several years to receive the eventual diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease that frequently affects joints. In autoimmune disease, the immune system is in overdrive. It detects pollen—attack! Peanuts—attack! Any number of other benign triggers—attack! It may even be bored due to our hypersanitized world—attack! Like other autoimmune diseases, RA warps the immune system into a trigger-happy mania that causes collateral damage as it fights against nonexistent enemies. Detonating its arsenal against vague shadows on the wall, it leaves a broken battleground in its wake—my body. And there is no cure.

In addition to my feet, other joints became affected in the initial years—fingers, wrists, knees, and shoulders. I remember those cursed little onesie snaps during my son’s nighttime diaper changes—how absurdly painful it was to pinch those snaps closed. Or lifting my arms slowly above my head to put on a shirt, wincing as my shoulders burned. Or doorknobs—those brilliant little inventions that keep young toddlers out of forbidden areas, but which at times required one hand bracing the other to ease the twisting in my throbbing wrist.

In addition to pain, there is frequently a dragging fatigue associated with autoimmune illness—as if you have ankle and arm weights as you walk through a sea of Jell-O wherever you go. Simple tasks take longer. They’re harder. It feels like the day after you’ve had the flu, when you’re achy and beat, but every day is Groundhog Day, and that day never ends.

Of course, the whole disease ebbs and flows, and some months or years are better than others. In my case, it has warped into a distinct but related autoimmune disease called scleroderma. Whereas rheumatoid arthritis frequently attacks joints, scleroderma targets the skin. The name scleroderma means “thick skin,” which describes the thickened skin that affects many sufferers. But like rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma causes pain and fatigue. It can also attack inner organs, becoming life-threatening if it decides to battle it out with organs such as the heart or lungs. It’s a confusing disease both because of its varied manifestations and its uncertain course.

Lately, it’s my muscles that cause me the most pain. I don’t know if it’s due to a different disease altogether, a side effect from medication, or an unusual manifestation of my growing list of diagnoses. It seems like a paradoxical response to pain, but many days there is nothing I would like more than that little maniacal elf to come back with his hammer and pound my muscles into oblivion. Wrestling with chronic disease often means wrestling with a language problem. I can’t go to my doctor and say it hurts here, and then point to my whole body. I can’t say, please doc, just send me to someone who will squeeze the deep aching from my arms and legs like toothpaste. Please just fix me.

Sometimes, in my dark nights, I pray God would swoop down and take me for a heavenly field trip—not a permanent one, mind you, but just a brief breather. Just for one day.

It’s tempting to wallow in an immature self-pity—turning into myself, becoming caged with only my own suffering. But this is not who I want to be. Another inclination is to downplay my own suffering because many have it so much worse: horrific abuse, loneliness, betrayal, slavery, gnawing hunger, and violent war. Yet I also know this isn’t a suffering Olympics. There are no medals for the most-wounded winners. Comparisons are counterproductive. I’m simply hoping to carry my own cross well, seeking to live a life imbued with grace.

And so, my question resurfaces. Where is God in the burrows of the gruesome, ugly tarantula hawk wasps? Where is God in chronic illness? Where is grace in the painful, distressing, soul-wrenching dark nights?

One of the unique challenges of chronic illness is its ambiguity. Most days, a person lives in a confusing no-man’s-land between health and sickness. It’s often a blurry place of not-quite-sick and not-quite-well.

I may show up to an evening event looking seemingly fine, but I’m able to be there because I have carefully and intentionally rationed my energy during the day. My cross is invisible. I almost never use a wheelchair; I don’t limp or carry a visible marker like an oxygen mask or feeding tube. But I also don’t run or even stand for long, nor do I spend long days meandering through shopping malls or amusement parks.

I’m careful—measured. Even my movements are rationed. There’s a kind of carefree recklessness even in something as benign as conversation—a gesticulation of the arms, large inflections of the voice, an unpredictable expressiveness of the face. But I’ve found that even my conversation reflects this careful conservation. I stay closer to my body. The words are rationed and the movements smaller, slower, and more intentional.

The therapist and multiple-sclerosis sufferer Robert Shuman observed of his progressing illness that “once-simple choices about trips to the city or walks downtown become intensive, hypervigilant, body-scanning, problem-solving matters.” I can relate. Is there a place to sit down? Can I politely excuse myself from a conversation without it being socially awkward? What is my body needing right now—have I demanded too much of it, stretched it too far? Is my body so bossy that it will prevent me from being sufficiently focused on the social task at hand? What will this cost me later today? Tomorrow?

A few years ago, I was at a low point. Daily I felt drained from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. Even showering felt like a monumental task—so big. So heavy. One day I switched a load of laundry in the basement and then lay down on the floor because it was too much effort to walk the half flight of stairs to the family room. Sitting upright at the table for a meal was sometimes too much. There was no relief in sight, and I had no idea how I could be a mother and wife, let alone a fulfilled human being in this body that was absolutely void of vitality. I had nothing.

My sense of spiritual connection was also at an all-time low. The gospel message was “turn to Jesus. He will not forsake you.” But the invitation seemed suddenly inane, nonsensical. I felt forsaken. Utterly abandoned and forgotten by God. The chasm between what God offered and what I believed Him to be capable of offering was entirely too wide, and I found myself stranded in the gap. My arms stretched wide between two truths—the attentive God I trusted, and the absent God I experienced.

There in the dry, parched no-man’s-land was my wrestle. I was Jacob, wrestling with the messenger and crying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Gen. 32:26). I was Sarah, abandoned between promises of a numberless posterity and the reality of an empty womb (Gen. 17:16).

And time stretched on. So much time.

In hunger, I turned anew to all the things that were supposed to help me discover Jesus. My scripture study was not orderly or methodical. I clung to the words of Isaiah, which became almost a mantra for me:

For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. (Isa. 54:7–8)

I read the promises over and over, though deep down I wondered if the words were just pretty poetry and nothing more.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. (Isa. 43:2–3)

My prayers were urgent, though they were largely without words. I stumbled along, doing what I could to care for myself and my family, but feeling very much a forsaken failure. My attentive husband literally carried me when I needed it and, along with family and friends, sat with me, cleaned our house, brought me dinner, and pointed me to hope. I listened to Christian hymns on repeat:

“When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul!”

I practiced daily for grace. Absent experiences of grace, I clung to practices out of desperation.

“Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, thy presence, my light.”

One day—I can point to the exact place I stood in my bedroom, next to my Great-Grandma Esther’s hand-me-down jewelry box—I was pondering some scriptural examples of unflinching faith, including the biblical Esther, who declared, “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16). There were also Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who knew that God had the ability to deliver them from the fiery furnace, but also knew that if He didn’t, they would remain faithful (Dan. 3:17–18); and Mary, who with absolute submission said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).

And I asked myself, if I got to the point where I simply could not find the divine communion and spiritual healing I sought, what would I do? Would I give up on the Lord? Would I turn elsewhere?

Almost as I thought this, in a holy, perhaps mystical experience which I can only call gracing, I knew that I would never turn my back on the Lord. It was simultaneously a decision, a feeling, a direction, and a command. It was also a scripture and a hymn:

Even if I live my whole life and never find the peace I seek, I will not give up on the Lord. I will wait upon Him however long it takes.

On the surface, these words barely touch the significance of the experience for me; I admit they seem wholly unextraordinary. But the experience itself was fire. It was unclear what part of this lightning bolt stemmed from me and what part from God. In some ways, its intensity convinced me that it could not have emerged from my weak self, which was entirely too fickle and frail for such bold declarations. But in another sense, this conviction seemed to stem from the most authentic part of myself—the spiritual core that knew God intimately, even through veiled vision.

But also, in a strange inexplicable way, the demarcation between me and God seemed irrelevant. In communion with God, we were one and the same—indistinguishable. It was a duet, a dance, a covenant: a gift given and a gift received, a promise made and a promise trusted. It wasn’t submission; it was collaboration and union.

After the long wrestle, like Jacob, I had prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Like Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I had been given power from God and all was new.

Isaiah had promised that the rivers would not overflow me (Isa. 43:2), and this moment felt like a gasp for air after having been held underwater for too long. It was an awareness of the feathers being lifted ever so slightly—pointing me towards the enveloping air that was present the whole time, embracing me in grace.1

Over the next few months, my physical health improved and became more manageable. Though it continues to challenge me, and I still have bad days and months, the spiritual epiphany continues to center me when I feel the waters gathering blackness. When I pass through the waters, I remember: the Lord will be with me. And when I flounder in the gap between my hope and my experience, where it’s too dark to see, I wrestle.

There’s a critique of simplistic religious thinking called “The God of the Gaps.” Miracles, so the argument goes, are no longer miracles once we recognize they were accomplished by predictable scientific means—once the unknown becomes known. Was God’s creation of the universe a miracle? No, it was the Big Bang. Are answers to prayer miraculous? No, they were coincidence, or medical intervention. That’s all.

As our scientific understanding increases, the curtain gradually parts and the mysterious gap where God exists becomes increasingly smaller. And eventually, once we learn it all, He’ll extinguish all together.

No mystery, no God.

But my experience has laid bare a different “God of the Gaps”—not one who exists in the mysterious gaps between knowns, but in the gaps between seemingly contradictory and incompatible truths: God is attentive and worthy of my trust, and God is nowhere to be found. I see this God in the paradoxes, the space where the wrestle occurs. As the thoughtful Latter-day Saint thinker Francine Bennion noted,2 opposing scripture illuminates some of these gaps:

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom.” (Prov. 3:13)
“In much wisdom is much grief.” (Eccles. 1:18)

“I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” (Heb. 13:5)
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1)

“Men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Ne. 2:25)
“Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)

There are no easy answers. The ending of this chapter, in fact, sat unwritten for months. Everything is unsatisfactory. Like an open wound, the gap between the split edges pulses in pain. And though the particulars of each story differ from person to person, we all carry wounds.

In pondering the problem of theodicy, the only place I can go that makes a modicum of sense is that God promises to find us in the gap, to suffer there with us and shepherd us through the muck to make some kind of redemption possible. I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to the question of where God is in the muck of life or in the tarantula hawk wasp nests.

When I’m sitting in the dark, the promises make no sense.

But if I instead ask, “What is God doing with me in the muck?,” I might have somewhere to go. It helps me to think of God in terms of relationship rather than as a separate entity, a response rather than an existence, a verb rather than a noun. “Christ’s atonement,” writes Francine Bennion,

makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it.3

For my part, chronic illness has been a significant catalyst in my search for God. I found myself stuck in the gap between daily weariness and contradictory promises that those who wait upon the Lord shall “mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

There’s an unexpected “collateral beauty” in chronic illness. Psychologist Robert Shuman writes that we might “imagine illness as a text, a medium, a way. It is material with which one can work rather than simply an unwanted force to which one is subject. . . . Like the grit in the oyster, the matter of illness becomes the substance of art.”

The medium with which those who suffer with chronic illness must build our lives is not the same as that given to the energetic, hospitable Marthas of the world (Luke 10:40–42). But it’s a different specialty, a different cell, a different clay, and the result can also be beautiful in the body of Christ. It’s the articulate young woman with Down syndrome advocating for special needs rights. It’s my grandma with trembling hands, who for years sent shaky, personal birthday cards to each of her descendants. It’s my father-in-law, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who would chat with the cashier at the grocery store about the loveliness of the day.

My own illness slows me down, challenging me to pay more attention to the life that speeds by. It turns me toward wonderful books and ideas and conversations, and it invites me to cherish important relationships and not spend too much time nursing my hurts. It teaches me to be patient with others who also have some thorn in the flesh, some challenge with which they wrestle. Chronic illness teaches me about wrestling. And it reveals grace.

Granted, some days I forget all this; there’s just fog and weight. At those times I’m drowning in the muck, and the abstract ideal loses footing in the face of the particular reality.

But the same godly tumbling of time and space that brought hawk wasps also brought penguins and wild horses. In the wrestle, new life emerges from death: pain brings perspective and empathy, oranges grow from baked earth, crocuses emerge from ice-encrusted snow, and a phoenix rises from the ashes.

Wounds birth scars.

And I take a breath.

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This essay is an excerpt from Gracing (Faith Matters, 2024) by Hannah Packard Crowther.

Hannah Packard Crowther has an MS degree in biological science education from Brigham Young University and a twenty-plus year vocation as a full-time mom. She aspires to become a theologian, a poet, or a beachcomber. Maybe all three.

Art by J. Kirk Richards.

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Dear Reader,

Summer is rolling away, and although I love fall weather, I’m not sure I’m ready for it just yet. This summer has been a lovely one for Wayfare, and maybe we can linger in the sun for a little longer. Here’s a roundup of what I’ve been reading in Wayfare this month and beyond.

August at Wayfare

Meaningful prayer has sometimes felt elusive to me in recent years, and I’ve often felt flummoxed as I’ve tried to refine my practice. Kim Matheson’s lovely essay on the Psalms (part of an ongoing collaboration with the Maxwell Institute’s weekly essays following the Come, Follow Me curriculum) gave me a new way to think about how to make prayer into true praise.

By the way, if you missed Matheson’s essay on the story of Jacob wrestling the angel from earlier this year, you should check it out. You might just walk away, like Jacob, a changed man.

I also loved a repost of Lance Larsen’s poem “To the New Earth,” from Issue 6. If you have a moment to meditate on the loveliness of our everyday—or perhaps especially if you feel that you don’t!—take some time to chew on this one. And if you’re in the mood for dessert, may I suggest a favorite Michael Lavers poem that I think has a nice resonance with Larsen’s.

(And if you aren’t yet a print subscriber, just think about how beautiful Larsen’s poem would be in print!)

Finally, Greer Cordner’s review of Natalie Brown’s new book After Happiness was an intervention I needed. The gospel is often presented as a formula for happiness, but what happens when the formulas inevitably fail us? There is good news: “After Happiness is a declaration that faith—and faith communities—can withstand heat and hurt and turmoil, and that reducing the gospel to a formula for success does believers a disservice.”

Maybe it won’t be so bad to leave summer behind.

• Prayer for Every Weather by Kim Matheson

• Limping into the Dawn by Kim Matheson

• To the New Earth by Lance Larsen

• Coda by Michael Lavers

• What Can the Gospel Promise? After Happiness Review by Greer Cordner

What Else I’ve Been Reading

Lately I’ve been revisiting “The Cat in the Tree: Why AI Content Leaves Us Cold,” a post by the writer L.M. Sacasas (and Wayfare contributor) that I read last year. He talks about a surprise encounter with a piece of artwork that taught him something profound. My paraphrase: there’s something about art that is human-made that invites us in because it is made by someone trying to imagine us. I would not say that is something that large language models seem to be doing.

• The Cat in the Tree by L. M. Sacasas

• What Are People For? An Interview with L. M. Sacasas and Zachary Davis

And Now For Something Completely Different

Speaking of surprise, art, and art that invites, how about an invitation to dance? Prolific Australian rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released their 1,000th album last week (this is only a slight exaggeration) and it turns out to be a ripping ride through a dozen flavors or more of ridiculously fun techno dancebeats. Is the average Wayfare reader the type to jam out to a DJ-set-in-a-box? Well, I know this Wayfare reader usually isn’t—but I’ve had it on repeat in the car. Check it out on Youtube or Bandcamp.

With these beats to keep me going and a prayer to keep me good, I’m ready for September.

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Jeremiah Scanlan, Associate Editor at Wayfare, is a fiction writer and birdwatcher, currently studying law.

Artwork taken from 19th century illustrations of paper lantern designs.

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Coleman Numbers is a writer, drummer, and aspiring disciple-scholar. His academic interests range across early modern British poetry, 19th-century Japanese women writers, and contemporary science fiction. He and his wife love to cook, read, and daydream about someday traveling the world.

For thousands of years, the book of Psalms has been a prayer book for the faithful. Which makes me sheepish to admit that I don’t enjoy many of the psalms. Some I love. Who doesn’t love Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd . . . . “) or 51 (“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love according to your abundant mercy . . . .”) or 84 (“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”) or 150 (“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”)? The psalms of introspection give voice to the deepest yearnings of our heart to draw near to the Lord. The psalms of praise give voice to those moments of exultation when we are in awe of the beauty of God’s creation and his steadfast love toward people.

But there are many psalms of a different nature that seem to contradict the Second Great Commandment. Some of them simply complain about others, and those are bad enough. But some go further and ask God to curse, destroy, or punish his children. This week’s reading in Come, Follow Me includes Psalm 69, which contains some of the most violent language imaginable: “Let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see . . . . Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents . . . . Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” Is that a prayer that a follower of Jesus should offer?

Prayers of complaint and vengeance make up about a third of the psalms, and they don’t do much for me. In fact, they repel me. They seem at odds with the command of Jesus that we are to relate to others—even our enemies—in ways that are marked by love, mercy, forgiveness, humility, and service. What happened to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6: 27–28, NRSV)?

What are we to do with these psalms? Ignore them and pretend they don’t exist? Surely they can’t be part of a canon whose purpose is to bring us to Christ and imitate his life, can they?

As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with the scriptures, but with my understanding. With the help of those trained in the close reading of scripture, two insights have helped me to see that the psalms that repel me are actually an integral and redemptive part of the canon that help us participate in Jesus’ work of at-one-ment. Strike them from the whole book of Psalms, and I will be missing something transformative. And therein lies a profound lesson about the cost of discipleship. It’s not about finding a path that “works for me,” that always appeals to my tastes. The covenant path takes us on a journey already marked by those who have preceded us, who have learned from their own experience how best to experience the steadfast love of God and seek the well-being of his children.

The first insight comes from Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity School. In her classic book, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (2001), Davis points out that the psalms that are so off-putting to me reflect an honesty and intimacy with God that should be part of a vibrant prayer life in which we bring to God our fears, our anxieties, every part of our fallen selves. “Crying out to God, screaming to God in the darkness,” Davis argues, “there is room for that in the life of faithful prayer.”

The psalms contain a full expression of our fallen humanity, and when we pray all of them, we are not always dressed in our Sunday best, with arms crossed and heads bowed. Such prayers are informed by a faith that “the God who made heaven and earth should care that I am hurting.” According to Davis, that is “a style of prayer without parallel in the ancient world.” Davis points out that the pleas for vengeance that trouble me are not answered by God’s pouring out destruction. Instead, they work a subtle but profound change in the psalmist. “Even while we are still in our anger,” Davis notes, “the cursing psalms are the vehicle whereby we yield to God our own claim to vengeance, and that is the crucial first step to the healing of the entire community.” That first step involves change, not of the psalmist’s circumstances—the Lord doesn’t do vengeance—but of “the psalmist’s experience of suffering.” “And perhaps that has changed,” Davis suggests, “only because she has dared to break the isolation of silence and knows that God has heard.” In other words, the psalms exhibit the power of prayer C. S. Lewis thought its highest value. Prayer doesn’t change God, Lewis taught. It changes us.

More important still, the psalms are prayers that have helped form the spiritual lives of millions of earnest followers of the Lord. They are a prayer book that was used by the children of Israel, the New Testament church, Jesus himself, and his followers for more than two millennia. Using these prayers in our own devotions is not only an act of solidarity with those who have gone before us, but it’s a humble acknowledgment that we need help in our spiritual formation. Just as they have done for disciples of Jesus over the years, the psalms teach us how to pray and what to pray for. To think that we can create a prayer life without their benefit is an act of hubris.

This insight works at cross-purposes with a reluctance among some to use set prayers in our devotionals instead of using only spontaneous expressions. Even though set prayers are used for blessing the sacrament and for temple dedications, there is a common criticism among our people that they are the “vain repetitions” Jesus warned against. Certainly, they can be vain, as can be any prayer not thoughtfully offered. But, as N. T. Wright notes, when his disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he didn’t merely encourage sincerity; he gave them words to say. Henry B. Eyring has called the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught us to pray, “a perfect example of what we should ask Heavenly Father for.”

Prayer is about much more than asking God for the blessings we desire. The greater work of prayer may be that it forms us spiritually. As Brian Zahnd explains, “The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do—but to be properly formed.” And using set prayers like the psalms can help form us in ways that we might not have chosen if left to our own devices. In her book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren tells how the fixed prayers in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer gave her words to pray when grief had left her speechless.

Using the prayers that followers of Jesus have prayed over the years, like the psalms, in addition to our own spontaneous expressions, helps train us how to think, desire, and love as have his disciples through the years. When we rely solely on spontaneous prayer, we can become captive to our own limited concerns. Praying the psalms and other liturgical prayers will reshape our hearts and minds in ways that will stretch us.

In the final period of his apostolic ministry, after he had miraculously survived a serious brush with death, President Jeffrey R. Holland believed that his time on earth had been extended so that he could teach that we need to find ways to improve the quality of our prayer life. Speaking to his fellow General Authorities gathered for the October 2024 general conference, he said with remarkable candor, “We can’t pray as we’ve always prayed because nothing that we are going to do from here to the end is going to be what has always been done. So we can’t be who we’ve always been or pray how we’ve always prayed.”1 A year later, he implored all of us, “However much you’ve prayed, pray more. However many places you’ve prayed, pray in more places. However many times during the day you pray, pray more times in the day.”

One way we can respond to that apostolic charge might be to allow the psalms—all of them—to become a part of our prayer life so that they can do in us what they have done for so many for so long.

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Thomas B. Griffith is a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and a graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He previously served as Senate Legal Counsel of the United States and as general counsel at BYU. Today, he is a fellow at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and remains active in constitutional scholarship, civic engagement, and rule-of-law initiatives.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902) and Michel Simonidy (1870–1933).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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In my essay on Exodus 15 earlier this year, I looked at one basic religious practice: praising God. I argued that to praise God is both to recall his divine glory and to call it into being in the present. At root, the act of praise is simple but powerful: in his act of creation, God infused the world with his glory, or light; in our act of praise, we look for that glory, gather it into speech or song, and reflect it to its source. Like the mirrors in a sealing room, praise concentrates and amplifies divine light by reflecting it.

In that essay, I also gave readers an IOU. Exodus 15, for all its poetic power, only gives us an introduction to praise: It isn’t difficult to worship on the far side of the Red Sea, with your feet on dry land and your enemies defeated. But just as God made fertile pastures and dry wilderness, he included joy and suffering in the created order. And so, if my theology is right, suffering must also be offered up to God as praise. I promised that I would tackle this more advanced version of praise when we arrived at the Psalms. The praise of suffering is praise for experts. And the Psalms are the canon’s unsurpassed teachers.

The Psalter is not a random collection of poems; it is arranged into five books, traditionally understood to mirror the five books of Moses, and this week’s reading crosses from Book IV to Book V. The first three books are full of sorrow and lament, while Book IV (Psalms 90–106) begins a turn toward praise, and Book V (Psalms 107–150) completes the turn into joyous celebration. As a whole, the book of Psalms demonstrates how to use lament as material for praise. And this week’s chapters, which straddle books IV and V, zoom in on the turning point. In what follows, I’ll pay special attention to Psalm 102.

Certain psalms are classified, based on their form and content, as “psalms of lament,” and Psalm 102 is a great example. The German scholar Claus Westermann noticed that psalms of lament display a distinctive emotional arc: They move from a cry of distress to a petition for help, and finally to an exultant expression of praise. Building on the work of an earlier scholar, Hermann Gunkel, who first classified the psalms into types, Westermann noted that the transitions between these phases usually happen with no explanation: The psalmist begs for rescue from the jaws of death and then, in the next breath, praises God as if the rescue has already occurred. But the rescue itself is unseen.

Yet another German scholar, Joachim Begrich, had proposed an explanation for this puzzle. If the psalms were the liturgy, or prayer book, for ancient temple rites, perhaps the abrupt transition from petition to praise marks a gap in the performance. At the unlabeled turn from misery to joy, perhaps the temple priest, speaking for God, spoke an “oracle” or promise of salvation to the petitioner, who then responded with praise. Imagine the interaction between Hannah and the priest Eli at the temple in 1 Samuel 1:16–18, if only Hannah’s words survived: It would look something like the curiously abrupt shifts of tone in the psalms of lament. The hypothesis of the missing oracle is speculative, of course, but it offers an explanation for the sudden left-turns in these psalms.1

Let us pause for a moment to praise German biblical scholarship, which has flooded such light on the literary jewel of our canon, the Old Testament!

Psalm 102 illustrates the pattern worked out by these scholars. The first eleven verses are an acid bath of suffering. The Psalmist expresses his grief in a series of metaphorical images: His days vanish like smoke, his bones smolder, he eats ashes like bread, he sits like a lone bird on a rooftop (see vv. 3, 7, 9). Then, at verse 12, with no preparation, he bursts into praise: “But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.” If Begrich is right, the priest would have uttered God’s promise of salvation in the gap between verses 11 and 12. The text we have is the petitioner’s side of the exchange, with silence where God’s promise used to be.

This is a compelling reading, especially for Latter-day Saints who know the powerful rhythms of a performed temple liturgy. But Westermann was after something more than a historical reconstruction. He wanted to understand the biblical text as present-day readers encounter it, unexplained gaps and all. Does the psalm as a written text, rather than an incomplete historical performance guide, have an implicit salvation theology of its own?

Taking the received text of the psalms of lament at face value and reading them as literary wholes, Westermann argued that these ancient poems transfigure the emotional registers of lament and praise by means of juxtaposition. With no buffering transition, it’s as if praise seeps into lament, and lament into praise. He wrote:

In the Psalms of the Old Testament there is no, or almost no, such thing as “mere” lament and petition, . . . By nature it cannot be mere petition or lament, but is always underway from supplication to praise. . . . no longer mere petition, but petition that has been heard. . . . no longer mere lament, but lament that has been turned to praise.2

The formal interpenetration of lament and praise in the psalms creates an emotional register in which grief can, always and already, imply praise, like a waning moon on its way to waxing. Conversely, praising God at the moment of deepest despair can paradoxically imply, not deny, the extremity of one’s pain.

Building on Westermann’s insight, I’d suggest that the psalms of lament are a training ground for the would-be praise expert looking to level up. They’re the perfect texts to practice an interpretive skill I think of as a kind of textual train-hopping; the ability to run alongside a scripture, pull myself into it, and then ride along to its destination.

Because the threshold between lament and praise remains unlabeled in Psalm 102 and the divine promise remains unspoken, the exact nature of the rescue remains unspecified. Was it God’s promise of safety, of healing, of comfort, of faithful accompaniment? A psalm of lament makes itself available for application to any of those needs. The poem can bear almost any interpretive burden a reader lays on it.

The superscription to Psalm 102 shows how this works. The superscription is the short line printed above the first verse of some psalms, indicating the type of psalm, the attributed author, a performance instruction, or occasionally a narrative setting. When a superscription names an attributed author, it most often gives a specific name—for instance, David, Asaph, or the sons of Korah. But the superscription to Psalm 102 reads: “A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD.” Psalm 102 is not put in the mouth of a particular historical figure but instead leaves the identity of the sufferer open to anybody in the position it describes. The superscription to Psalm 102, in other words, invites anyone who is afflicted and overwhelmed to borrow its words free of charge.

Moreover, the psalm’s unlabeled blank space between verses 11 and 12, the exact moment of rescue, is a kind of entrance sign for readers: “Enter here to catch the train from affliction to praise.” I step into the poem at the space left empty for God’s promise; because that promise remains unspoken, it can apply to any present need. Then, gratefully sinking into the language of the psalm, I allow its emotional momentum to carry me up the mountain from misery to praise. The psalmist does the hard work of finding adequate words and offers his posture of consecration as my own.

The psalm itself seems to anticipate that this is how its language will be used; in fact, it seems that this kind of scriptural train-hopping is what it was designed for. Verse 18 reads, “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.” The poem here states outright that it exists for readers who do not yet exist, readers like you and me. This is a text that I can climb aboard in 2026, load up with my twenty-first-century heartaches, and ride from desolation to praise, especially as a beginner. The psalms of lament help a prayer novice like me utter expert-level praise.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1902).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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In a ward history, it is traditional to note what occurred, rather than what did not occur. However, seeing as the summer of 2026 was the first time in twelve years without any mishaps, I believe it should be noted. At the young men and young women’s camps, there were no ER visits, no bears, no food poisoning, no official warnings by the state police, and no wanton loss of tent or bicycle. Is it possible that this is because no member of the Hastings family attended either camp in any capacity?

As the ward historian, it is not within my purview to speculate on either correlation or causation.

(I must admit, though, that I do wonder why the Hastings are always given positions of responsibility when they are so prone to wreaking havoc.)

Unfortunately, mishaps would soon begin again for our ward—and they began in force in September 2026, with a broken church bell.

But first, a little context. At the very end of March, Church headquarters announced that beginning in September, the church schedule would be changing. During second hour, instead of attending either Sunday School or a gendered class (Young Men’s, Young Women’s, Relief Society, or elders quorum), everyone would attend both. There would be five minutes to get from sacrament meeting to Sunday School, exactly twenty-five minutes in Sunday School, a precise five-minute passing time, then twenty-five minutes in the final class.

When this change was announced, it threw members of our ward into crisis. The next Sunday was testimony meeting, and in between testimonies of Jesus and testimonies of Michigan’s NCAA Final Four victory with tangential gospel connections, multiple people shared their stress about the transition. Brother Bott stood up and said that if Rip Van Winkle went to sleep twenty years ago and woke up today, he wouldn’t recognize the Church, what with sleeveless garments, changes to the temple ceremony, and high priests having to meet with the elders quorum (something he is still bitter about, having been ordained a high priest one week after the change and so never getting access to an exclusive Sunday meeting). Sister Byers said she wasn’t sure we would have time for in-depth discussions in Sunday School if we only had twenty-five minutes. Then Sister Hastings stood up and said that we should actually just go back to the three-hour church schedule, which got a chorus of groans—as a ward, we might struggle with change, but everyone embraced two-hour church.

After a few more pulpit expressions of stress, Bishop shared several Facebook posts from members of the other ward that meets in our building—the Rutleg 1st Ward. On the multi-ward Facebook page, their ward complained that the September schedule change would be difficult because of the transitions. (They asked, “Have you ever seen a 35-year-old woman get from the chapel to the Relief Society room in 5 minutes?” Honestly, it’s a fair question.) As always, all it takes to unify our ward is mentioning the 1st Ward. As the 2nd Ward, we unanimously decided that we would set an example for the 1st Ward in sustaining the prophet and magnifying the new schedule. Also, Primary had been doing this for years—if four-year-olds can do it, how hard could it be?

Unfortunately, this involved putting new wine in old bottles (an expression that is not Word of Wisdom–friendly, but was said by Jesus, so is allowed).

Take, for example, the average Sunday in Young Women’s. Sacrament meeting inevitably finishes late, at 10:05. The young women start trickling in at about 10:12. The first leader arrives at 10:15. By 10:17, the young women are there. By 10:22, all the Young Women leaders become unlost (including Sister Hastings, who is an advisor but due to the food poisoning incidents is no longer allowed at girl’s camp). Then there’s finding someone to pray, choosing a song, and voting on whether it’s a cappella or the untunable piano. Sometimes an expedition is sent to the chapel for hymn books. They pass around the question box, get blankets, and repeat the theme twice (in English and Spanish). There are also announcements—if you don’t announce the weekly activity verbally, with an excited tone of voice, no one comes, despite endless reminder texts. By then it’s 10:45 a.m., leaving fifteen minutes for a lesson. I’ve heard—though I have not been able to confirm it through independent sources—that once they didn’t manage to start the lesson until 10:53 a.m. Unfortunately, this cannot be blamed entirely on Sister Hastings.

Needless to say, twenty-five minutes per class meant we had to train. And train we did. In addition to watching the Church’s videos and doing the prescribed fifth Sunday lesson, we held firesides and did a practice run on the last Saturday in August. We were completely prepared.

However, we forgot about Brother Underwood.

When Brother Underwood isn’t busy arguing that the local Protestant megachurch is the great and abominable church, he serves as the ward librarian and bell ringer. Bell ringer should be a simple calling: You press a button five minutes before church is over and a buzz rings throughout the building, signaling that it is time to think about closing prayers and lunch. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen.

Sometimes he plays the bell like a foghorn for an excruciating thirty seconds. Other times, he taps a doctrinal mastery scripture in Morse code. Once, when the stake president was teaching a fifth Sunday lesson, Brother Underwood did six five-second blasts, followed by thirty seconds of silence (the stake president, lulled away into carnal security, started talking again), a twenty-second peal, four seconds of silence, then ten quick taps.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that some callings should not be magnified.

There is wild speculation in the ward as to why he chooses to do this.

Is this a call for help? some folks whisper. Or worse, a call for attention?

Sister Hastings takes the bell-ringing as a personal affront. (However, Brother Underwood began ringing the bell long before the Hastings moved here from Ohio.) Once, Sister Hastings confronted Brother Underwood about his bell-ringing, complaining that it is disruptive. He shot back that her kids are way more disruptive than the bells have ever been. As ward historian, I should not take sides on these things, but I fear I must side with Brother Underwood: As a whole, the Hasting clan is much more disruptive than Brother Underwood.

While others speculate about the cause of the incessant bell-ringing, I know the truth. There are people like the Hastings who are always given great responsibilities. And then there are people like Brother Underwood who only receive callings requiring very little responsibility, callings that would not be missed if everyone just stopped doing them. Now, most people have short stints in these callings, but some people get stuck in this track. It becomes a sort of label: We don’t trust you to do anything else, or we think other people would do a better job than you at anything that’s actually important, so you get to spend an eternity as the bell ringer, the emergency preparedness specialist, or the ward historian.

Yes, I am well aware that I am on this track. I have now been the ward historian for twelve years—I’m on my third bishopric. I also know that no one in the ward reads these yearly histories. I post a link to them on the multi-ward Facebook page every year, and four years ago, my son (who really should get around to having children of his own) helped me set up tracking on the link, so I know that on average, two people read it per year. One of them is my sister. But the yearly histories are also sent to Church headquarters and probably put in a vault somewhere—hopefully the bomb-shelter one for family history that can withstand anything. I have to believe that someday, someone will benefit from the history of the Rutleg 2nd Ward, so I write the very best, well-researched, impartial accounts that I can.

Because of the skills I have developed as the ward historian, unlike everyone else, who just speculates on Brother Underwood’s motivations, I actually asked him.

For Brother Underwood, at first ringing the bells creatively was a way to dare the bishopric to release him and give him another calling. But then he started to enjoy it. He made the decision, as I have, that if ringing bells is what others have decided he can contribute to building up the kingdom, then gosh darn it, he will ring those bells.

Honestly, my heart swells as I write these words. But now, back to 2026.

Despite Brother Underwood’s flagrant ten-year pattern of calling magnification, none of us considered him in our 2026 planning.

On our first Sunday with the new schedule, he rang the bell at 10:05, signaling that Sunday School should start. Unfortunately, the loud, buzzing, piercing bell came during the middle of Brother Bott’s opening prayer in the adult Sunday School class, and Brother Bott lost his balance, knocking over (and shattering) a dozen glass bottles full of various materials which Sister Byers had brought for an object lesson.

At 10:25, Brother Underwood held the bell button down for the next five minutes to make sure that we all vacated Sunday School by 10:30. Many people vacated the building.

During the final class, he rang the bell at the start but not near the end (we think Bishop distracted him). To make up for it, after church he played “Come, Come Ye Saints,” though it’s hard to be sure because the church bell only has one note.

Apparently, Sunday went much better for the Rutleg 1st Ward, despite their March murmurings and the fact that they didn’t practice at all.

As a fellow church member who is kept away from callings of responsibility, I’ve always felt a little defensive of Brother Underwood. However, his behavior on this particular Sunday was too much for even me, and I officially joined Team Stop Ringing the Church Bell.

The next week, we arrived at church to discover that our prayers had been answered: The bell was broken. Clearly, it was a miracle wrought from on high. Second hour went beautifully, with the exception of Brother Underwood weeping noisily in the hallway. I stood next to him for a moment, but I didn’t know what to say or do to help him feel better. I ended up giving him a bag of fruit snacks which I keep in my purse in case I run into any noisy toddlers. He accepted the bag, but it didn’t seem to help him feel better. I suppose there’s a reason I have never been called as the compassionate service leader.

On week three, the bell was still broken, but Brother Underwood decided that even if he could not perform the letter of his calling, he could still perform the spirit of it.

He visited every single class and interrupted the teachers to declare (sometimes with a lengthy speech) that there were five minutes left. The catch: Brother Underwood can only be in one room at a time, yet he insisted that there were five minutes left whether the teacher actually had two minutes or ten minutes. Time began to have no meaning, and some of us glimpsed the experience of living on Kolob when Earth is rolled together as a scroll.

After church, Sister Hastings declared, “I think I miss the church bell.”

We all mumbled our agreement.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have broken it,” she added.

I think we should all appreciate the fact that we can once again blame the Hastings (and, by extension, their home state of Ohio) for all of our problems.

It’s been months, and we still don’t have a working church bell. Brother Underwood visits every class at random times, declaring that there are five minutes left. Most teachers have learned to cut him off, thank him, and shoo him out the door so the interruption takes twenty seconds instead of a minute.

My favorite week, though, was when I subbed for the four-year-old Primary class.

(Yes, they do let me sub in Primary. I am one of the only prospective substitutes who has actually completed the child and youth protection training, and since teachers are always absent, they are forced to ask me for help. I’m hoping that someday they’ll actually ask me to teach a lesson rather than just be the second living, breathing adult in the classroom.)

Anyways, I was subbing the four-year-old Primary class. It was about three minutes until church would be over, and the kids were scribbling with crayons on paper. And then, Brother Underwood entered the room.

Before he could say anything, the youngest Hasting kid yelled, at the top of his lungs, “FIVE MINUTES LEFT!”

Brother Underwood smiled—a full, heartfelt smile. He left without a single word.

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Katherine Cowley is the Mary Higgins Clark Award nominated author of The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet. She has also published two other novels and numerous short stories, as well as the nonfiction book Write with Jane Austen: Masterclasses with the Master Storyteller. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband and three daughters.

Art by an anonymous American (1935–1942).

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We are so excited for RESTORE:CONNECT, happening September 24-26 at UVU in Orem, Utah. New this year is a special format designed to make your experience more interactive and connecting than ever before, and we’re thrilled that so many of our favorite Wayfare authors will be presenting! With smaller classrooms and more time for presentations, you’ll be able to choose the topics and speakers that most interest you.

Use the discount code WAYFARE when you register for 10% off, and be sure to stop by the Wayfare booth to say hi when you’re there! We would love to meet you.

Learn more about Restore and see the full agenda here.

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WAYFARE AUTHORS AT RESTORE:CONNECT

The principles of life are sweet like honey, said Joseph Smith. Get a taste of the goodness that you will find at Restore with this collection of our favorite essays from Wayfare authors and see the topics they will explore at Restore:Connect 2026.

Sarah Perkins Sabey

• I Often Go Walking

• Nevertheless, Peace

James Goldberg

• Mormon Literature is Arriving

• Sealing and Salting

Chad Ford

• Seventy Times Seven

Jennifer Finlayson-Fife

• Our Bodies are Holy Things

Thomas McConkie

• Divine Vulnerability

Matthew Bowman and Chris Blythe

• Spiritual Cartography

• Lessons from a Summer in Nauvoo

August Lamm and Marian Edmonds-Allen

• The New Luddites

• Expanding Circles of Love

Joseph Grenny

• For Misfit Members and Those Who Love Them

Melissa de Leon Mason

• Patterns, Pieces, and Possibilities

Patrick Mason

• Rediscovering God in Rwanda

Sharlee Mullins Glenn

• Shadow of Absence

Amy Watkins Jensen

• Tokens of Meaning

Bethany Brady Spalding

• Yearning for our Mother

Kathryn Knight Sonntag and Maxine Hanks

• The Mother Tree

• Thou Shalt Be Ordained

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 25, 4-5PM - WORLD PREMIERE OF A STAGED READING OF SHARLEE MULLINS GLENN’S BRIGHTER AND BRIGHTER UNTIL THE PERFECT DAY

Directed by renowned director/producer Kathy Curtiss, this staged reading of Brighter and Brighter brings to life an offering of imagination that, in the words of the late Carol Lynn Pearson, “invites us into new layers of thought” and brings “the Mother back into the Motherless House of this world.” Featured actors include Rick Macy, Dianna Graham, Melissa Dalton-Bradford, Daniel Tuutau, and more.

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Restore is our annual Faith Matters gathering—a three-day event of inspiring speakers and outstanding music, art, and community, all centered on restoring faith, belonging, and wholeness…

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How can teachers in the Church teach more effectively in just twenty-five minutes? How do we both prepare better as well as engage more quickly?

This sample lesson plan offers one model of how to teach open questions anchored in text.

With this recent announcement, teachers will start teaching second-hour church lessons in twenty-five–minute increments in September 2026. This change (down from fifty minutes) raises opportunities as well as challenges. One opportunity is to bridge discussions week to week with thematic questions, thus creating more frequent and sustained themes. We aim to meet many of the implied challenges by elevating and accelerating the following teaching standard: Teachers should model how inspiring, open-ended questions invite the class to interpret scripture (to see a new question in the text). Teaching succeeds when it models and invites class participants to use scripture to raise and address questions to which they do not already know the answer. In short, may we aim to teach open questions anchored in text.

Excellent teaching leads to fewer “Sunday School answers” in Sunday School, Relief Society, and elders quorum; it deepens literacy, the dignity of standing in uncertainty, and testimony.

In what follows we offer just one of many possible lesson plans for twenty-five minutes. (There are many other ways to teach, many of them surely preferable!) What all twenty-five–minute lesson plans have in common, again, is that they focus on teaching open questions anchored in text. Here’s just one flexible way to do so. The flexibility: please scale the number of specific question prompts (for example, A–C below) to match the number of small discussion groups in your class; for example, small classes might just have one text-specific prompt (A) while larger classes might have more (A–G). Scaling the prompts to the class size makes sure each class member has the opportunity to interpret scripture.

The sample lesson also includes teaching tips and whiteboards that help visually set up learning in three parts: (1) big picture on top, (2) text specifics on bottom, with a (3) literal middle space or gap for the class to fill in between the questions (top) and the text (bottom). If the lesson plan below succeeds, everyone in class will have had a chance to read scriptures (or the assigned text), ask non-obvious open questions, and explore the text and their thoughts with at least a neighbor.

In twenty-five minutes, that’s saying something!

Lesson Plan Start

A Teacher’s Timeline: 0:00 to 25:00

0:00 Introduction (about four minutes)
4:00 Set the Story (about four minutes)
8:00 Discussion Launch (less than a minute)
9:00 Internal Group Discussion (five minutes)
14:00 Group Reporting & Class Discussion (less than ten minutes)
23:00 Closing (about two minutes)

In the weeks before the lesson: Work with your fellow teachers and teaching leadership to organize bridging questions that create thematic connections from week to week. One example might be a single question that bridges across three or four weeks of readings. Another might be a series of weekly questions that build on one another. These provide continuity over time between discussions, especially when time is short for in-person discussions.

In the days before the lesson: As you read the assigned scriptures and Come, Follow Me manual, look for three passages that are short yet dense in substance: These might be pivot points in the narrative, surprising phrases, or other curiosities. These make excellent anchoring passages. When in doubt, supplement with BYU Professor James W. Faulconer’s excellent The Scriptures Made Harder series (accessible for free here: Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants), which consist almost entirely of text-anchored questions.

In the minutes before the lesson, prepare the board and, if relevant, privately invite people to offer opening and closing prayers. Find a template board below. It has three spaces: 1. Bridging questions at the top. 2. Class discussion comments in the middle. 3. Anchoring passages and questions on the bottom. The teacher prepares 1 and 3 before the class. The class provides 2 in discussion.

Photos of boards will model a sample lesson below. The class participants might walk into class to see the following on the board).

0:00: Introduction: The teacher welcomes the class, circulates announcements by paper or digital means only, invites any new friends who wish to introduce themselves, and briefly invites the class to share thoughts on the bridging question on the board from their home scripture study since last week.

4:00: Set the Scene with a Prepared Story: The teacher briefly presents a big-picture arc of the scriptural story at hand—without drawing any conclusions. To read out loud for four minutes, prepare a bit more than 500 words.

8:00: Discussion Launch: With the setting established, the teacher now refers to three specific anchoring passages (A, B, C), together with two open-ended questions (A1 and A2, B1 and B2, C1 and C2) for each anchoring passage on the board.

(See the sample board above.)

9:00: Internal group discussion: The teacher then invites self-organizing groups of class participants to choose one or two of the three anchoring passages listed on the board—A, B, or C—and then to read these passages together, read the surrounding bits if needed, and then report their thoughts back to the rest of the class. They have five minutes—no more: ready, set, go!

14:00: Group Reporting and Class Discussion: Each group selects its own spokesperson, who then briefly summarizes to the class the group’s discussion.

(The board above now includes comments summarized from class discussion. The teacher might close by drawing connections between the different main points, such as with the circles below. Typically, the teacher will find better connections back to the bridging questions at the top than between the group comments in the middle; but with practice, that may change.)

23:00: Closing: The teacher thanks the class for their discussion, repeats the bridging questions that the group reading is addressing, repeats the reading assignment for next week, and promises to lead with the bridging question (on the right) next week. The teacher then bears very brief testimony on the bridging question’s theme and dismisses the class.

Lesson Plan End

Supporting Teaching Tips:

• Wait time. Silence is strength (especially when class feels rushed). Use it deliberately. Even a single second of silence can make some class participants nervous; use that to serve them. Take confidence in standing in silence after asking a question. Waiting to speak at least five seconds after asking a question and at least five seconds after someone answers a question encourages deeper responses. Better yet: ask a question, wait a full ten seconds (this can feel like a very long time), and then ask the question again using new words—and then wait even longer again before responding. Eventually, almost all classes will participate. It can be helpful (to both teacher and students) to explain after asking a question, “I’ll wait a few moments to let you think about your responses.”

• Don’t use class time to read out loud in a row. Don’t do “round robin” reading: in other words, do not take time to have class participants read from a passage sequentially. Sequential reading aloud, while common, is generally not a desirable teaching practice. (It weakens comprehension while raising anxiety among participants.) Instead, invite class participants to read alone, to read in small groups, or to listen to a skilled and fluent reader (chosen ahead of time) while focusing on an answer to the question. (With youth and Primary students, asking them to draw something related to the question while they listen to a reader is a good strategy for focusing attention.)

• Use eye contact to facilitate discussion. While one person in a group is responding, direct your attention to the others in the group. Avoid making eye contact only between speaker and teacher; use your eyes to invite others to participate.

• Open a single response into broader discussions. After receiving a response, acknowledge their response gratefully and then immediately turn to the class, asking, “Does anyone have anything to add? How has your experience been different or similar? When, if ever, might it be helpful to see it in still another way?”

• Extend discussion by asking questions like these often:
  “Beautiful, so what makes you say that?”
  “Thanks so much, can you say a bit more?”
  “Help me understand this better. Who can elaborate?”

• Have transitions and closing statements ready: Teachers may help class participants adjust to the new schedule with transition and closure phrases. Model courage, curiosity, and discussions spanning months.
  “We are now about halfway through our short time together today.”
  “We can bring this discussion into the bridging question next week.”
  “That’s a good place to pause, not because we’re done but because we are not.”
  “Let’s hold that tension until next week. It’s healthy and good to think.”

• Without pressure, encourage all people to speak (often the shy have the best things to say):

  • Ask a question, promise to cold call folks randomly, and note that anyone may simply “pass” without follow-up. Then ask the question again.

  • Ask a question, and invite everyone to “turn and talk” to the person next to them, promising to cold call on a pair to briefly report on their discussion, noting that any pair may also “pass” for any or no reason.

  • Invite people to write briefly their own responses. These responses may be shared anonymously or kept private.

• Teach open questions anchored in text. When in doubt, consult Faulconer’s texts linked above.

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These tips for teachers were gathered by Wayfare editors with decades of teaching experience in Sunday School and in various professional contexts.

Benjamin Peters is an editor-at-large for Wayfare.

Art from the Circle of Pontormo (about 1494–1557).

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A few months ago, I began reading a psalm with my husband every night as part of our evening prayers. We would take turns reciting verses while the other person clutched their chest at a poignant metaphor, raised their eyebrows at the more violent imagery, or smirked at some unexpectedly funny line. It was the first time I’d read the Psalms as an adult and certainly the first time I’d immersed myself in them with any regularity. I admit: they were better than I’d remembered. They were urgent and moving; the metaphors were exquisite, and at least once a week we’d encounter a chapter that somehow gave voice to the frustrations we felt about the kids or to our anxiety about a situation in our ward. The Psalms were far from the stuffy, repetitive things that I’d remembered from my youth. And as I read through these ancient poems in preparation for my own devotions every night, I learned something else: My own prayers are pretty boring, by comparison.

There is nothing boring about the Psalms. They are some of ancient Israel’s most vibrant poetry, and they capture a wide array of human experience in their short stanzas. There are psalms for when you’re in the hospital (Psalm 6; 38; 102) and psalms for when you leave (Psalm 30), psalms for attending the temple (Psalm 24; 84) and being an outlaw on the run (Psalm 3; 7; 17; 59; 64). The Psalms show what it looks like to pray in an election year (Psalm 72), on your wedding day (Psalm 45), before you enter the bishop’s office (Psalm 51) and when you walk out (Psalm 32), when a friend betrays you (Psalm 55), on the front lines of battle (Psalm 60), when your garden produces well (Psalm 65), at ward choir practice (Psalm 95), when you are blindingly angry (Psalm 58), or confused in a courtroom (Psalm 35), in turbulent social times (Psalm 12), or when you feel abandoned by God (Psalm 13; 22; 42). There’s even a psalm for praying during a thunderstorm (Psalm 29)!

But through all that variety, there is one thing that the Psalms hold constant: They praise. They praise constantly. I can see why I found them repetitive as a teenager. No matter the setting, no matter the attitude of the speaker, no matter how long or short each psalm happens to be, nearly every one of them includes some element of praise. In a poem expressing fright at the prospect of death, we also hear “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1). In the same breath that another laments being surrounded by enemies, it also says with confidence, “The Lord is my light and my salvation. . . . The Lord is the stronghold of my life” (Psalm 27:1). Even as the psalmist describes “eat[ing] ashes like bread, and mingl[ing] tears with my drink,” he can also testify that “You, O Lord, are enthroned forever. . . . You will rise up and have compassion on Zion” (Psalm 102:9, 12–13). If there’s one thing the Psalms teach us better than any other scripture, it’s that prayer is meant for every moment of our lives—and that, somehow, praise can be found through it all.

The pastor Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “The Psalms show praise as . . . the goal at which all the psalm-prayers arrive after their long travels through the unmapped back countries of pain, doubt, and trouble. . . . The verb ‘praise’ (halel) in its noun form (tehillim) furnishes the title to our prayer book. ‘Book of Praises’ (sepher tehillim) is the Hebrew title to the 150 prayers that we commonly name ‘The Psalms.’” But as he also says, this title is counterintuitive: “This title, ‘Praises,’ catches our attention because it is inaccurate. Most psalms are complaints. They are calls of help by helpless and hurting men and women. They are wrung out of desperate conditions. . . . How can it be appropriate, then, to name these prayers ‘Praises’?”

How indeed! Why does a book dedicated to the troubles and griefs of God’s people also foreground so much adoration? How can they lament in so many different voices and from so many different contexts and share such a unified commitment to praise?

The answer, I believe, is found in Psalm 1:

Blessed is the one . . . whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. (Psalm 1:1–3)

Notice the image: a tree planted by a stream. It’s easy to imagine, really—it’s the kind of thing you see in a Thomas Kinkade painting or a nice bit of landscaping. But the point is agricultural, not aesthetic. Because this tree is “planted by streams of water,” its leaves are always green, its branches never shrivel, it bears fruit like clockwork every spring. This is a tree that flourishes independent of the weather. Even in times of drought, it survives where other trees cannot. It doesn’t rely on rainfall or snowfall or morning dew or any form of weather-dependent precipitation because it is nourished by something much steadier, and much more abundant.

And the implicit promise to the reader is that if they learn to pray in the way modeled by the Psalms, they will become like that tree. It is this image that the following 150 chapters illustrate. The voices across the Psalms sometimes rejoice and sometimes sorrow. They are illustratively subject to the gamut of mortal weather conditions. But they also insist on unfailing adoration. It runs through this book like water running down a hillside.

This well-watered tree reminds me of Christ’s promise of peace not as the world giveth (John 14:27) or Paul’s serenity that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7). It’s the kind of steadiness that I’ve seen in the lives of friends and loved ones who, no matter the circumstances of their life, hold faithful and hopeful. The Psalms reissue the promise that that sort of peace is possible, and then they set about—for 150 chapters—showing it to be true. Here, in these pages, are avatars of the entire human condition, a whole congregation of sorrowing and rejoicing and frightened and ecstatic and bitter and romantic characters, all brought together in a single book of worship. Prayer sustains every speaker. It is the way each of these voices negotiates their situation, whatever it may be. And then these prayers are collected into a single book, bound by the promise that God hears his people, with the image of a flourishing broadleaf on its cover.

The Psalms don’t depict the variety of human emotion simply for accuracy’s sake; rather, they are showing us the height and breadth of what prayer will help us endure. They are showing us the weather conditions through which we might have always-green leaves, the depths through which God’s word will sustain us. And, most importantly, they sample the songs of those who have learned to drink from that stream. Listen closely. Can you hear the burble of lively waters in the background? Can you see the sparkle that glints in its eddies? This is the current that flows through the Psalms; this, more than anything, is what they channel.

God is our refuge and our strength,
An ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear.
(Psalm 46:1–2)

Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous.
. . . The earth is full of his unfailing love.
(Psalm 33:1, 5)

Sing the praises of the Lord,
you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
. . . Weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.
(Psalm 30:4–5)

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
. . . Lord my God, I will praise you forever.
(Psalm 30:11–12)

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Kimberly Matheson is the Laura F. Willes Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research centers on Book of Mormon theology, Christian contemplative practice, and the continental philosophy of religion. Kimberly holds a PhD in theology from Loyola University Chicago, an MTS in philosophy of religion from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in ancient near east studies from Brigham Young University. She is the author of Helaman: A Brief Theological Introduction (Maxwell, 2020) and sits on the boards of the Book of Mormon Studies Association and the Latter-day Saint Theology Seminar.

Art by John Hafen (1856–1910).

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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In Tyler’s parable, a desert city has forgotten that its existence depends on a well and its life-giving waters. The well’s guardian instructs his daughters in how to tend the well and keep its waters pure; he teaches them about the oracle with second sight who found the well, around which a cathedral and eventually their city was built.

Despite their family’s charge to look after the well, each daughter chooses her own path. The first daughter finds her place in life among the city’s merchants and material splendors. The second daughter, weary with the city’s pride and opulence, leaves the city and finds a new well of water. The third daughter attempts the same feat but is not led to water and finds only heat, sand, and scorching sun. The fourth daughter remains in the city and carries on the work of her father.

I am weary. A private, permeating loneliness is my constant companion, though I am rarely alone. With the citizens of my city, I enjoy a life of luxurious ease and comfort. I dress in fine linens. I enjoy walks through the gardens and visits to the grand cathedral, with its ornate carvings and beautiful furnishings. I bustle about the shining city, often accepting invitations to attend extravagant celebrations: feasts of rich, flavorful delicacies and banquets laden with excess. Laughing and chattering, we exchange superficial pleasantries and toast to freedom and prosperity while quietly seeking to outperform each other. Wealth, as any law-abiding citizen knows, is a symbol of divine favor, and when one is favored, there is no need to look beyond.

Yet the unabating loneliness claws at me. I am bewildered by disillusionment. Piety feels counterfeit when prosperity is worshipped. Have we forgotten the living water—the source of life—which sustains our every breath? How can a city dedicated to the water grow so prideful and indifferent? The smiling, grinding pursuit of flawlessness is becoming deafening. Optimize. Maximize. Produce. Perform. Clanging cymbals, tinkling brass. I know it is my responsibility to tend to the well, but the clattering cacophony is causing me to go mad. Clanging cymbals, tinkling brass.

I wake one night, parched. A whisper of a breeze passes through my window, carrying a voice, which speaks inside my body. “Go,” it says. “It is time.” I don’t think it; I simply receive it. Rising from bed, I tuck an apple and some soft cheese into my satchel and give my sleeping father a tender kiss. I pray that he will understand.

At the city’s final gate, I turn and look back. I hesitate for a moment, torn between the pull of familiar safety and the beckoning of a call. Again, the clear and gentle voice on the breeze speaks. “A magnificent refuge is inside you. Be bold. Be humble. Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you. Ask no permission from the authorities. Slip away. Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place.”

The dark desert greets me first with silence, cool and sweet. Then, soft sounds of the creatures who carve their existence in this barren place fill the air like a layered symphony of coos, chirps and clicks. For the first time in a very long time, I am not lonely. As the dawn breaks, I savor the dry air and the warm early sun on my face. I cry. Wordless prayers expose my wide-open, listening heart, and for a time, I move lightly, gently, filled with a quiet sense of wonder.

But there is deception in the desert’s early tenderness, and within hours of sunrise, a cruel, hot wind picks up, swirling and flinging sharp, red dust that cakes my mouth and burns my eyes. I stagger for hours without a sense of direction, perhaps only stumbling in a frenzied circle. My skin cracks and blisters and my eyes blaze. Doubt and shame begin to build within me and then crash over me like angry waves. What have I done? I have left behind everything that kept me safe and worthy: my community, my rituals, my identity, my role. And for what? In a tailspin, existential pain roars through me, wordless and bottomless.

At last, I surrender to the desert’s ferocity, collapsing face down in the scorching sand. The blazing sun burns through me. I lack the strength and the will to move.

When I awake, many hours have passed. The sun has slipped behind the horizon, and the fading light is dim but soft. All is quiet and the dust storm has stilled. I slowly sit up and look around. I touch my ragged clothing, torn from the desert’s havoc, and wipe away strands of matted, sand-filled hair from my eyes. Shivering, I gasp and choke, spitting clay-colored sand. I’m so thirsty. I let out a cough and a small, anguished cry.

Then, to my astonishment, I notice tiny tendrils of mist, rising and bending into the dark, dry air. Slowly at first and then with growing awe, I press my fingers into the fine, red-gold grains of sand. As I dig and burrow, salt cakes my forehead and the cracks in my hands begin to split. I am tempted to relent in my exhaustion, but a quiet force within me calls me to persist. I begin to sense that I am not alone. A gentle presence works alongside me, and I perceive with second sight that I am joined by my ancestors: women who have wandered in ages past from dune to dune in search of water. Silently, we excavate together, as moist sand becomes a trickle and then, at last, a shimmering pool of bubbling, resplendent, living water.

I recognize now the voice which beckoned me from my sleep in the city: it is the voice of the women-spirits who came before me. They speak to me in perfect gentleness and love. “You are called and anointed. You will bring respite, healing and wisdom to this parched land. Rise up and be blessed.” Wordless sermons of light fill the air as the women-spirits sing. I open my hands to the cool, clean water and receive it in great gulps. As it pours down my face and washes over my body, I utter a single, fervent whisper: “yes.”

“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it” Genesis 28:16.

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Jenny Richards holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Franciscan School of Theology and a Master of Music from Juilliard. She is currently a student at Duke Divinity School. Jenny’s loves include her family, the piano, and inflatable dinosaur costumes.

Art by Ion Theodorescu-Scion (1882–1939)

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This week, we’ve gathered a collection of poems featured in Wayfare Issue 6. Keep scrolling to read “To the New Earth” by Lance Larsen, or click the links below to find additional poems from Issue 6. Don’t miss our excellent poetry collection. You can receive new poems in your inbox by turning on notifications for Poetry when you manage your subscription.

TO THE NEW EARTH

by Lance Larsen

No surprise that you’re brilliant and clean, quick 
as flames, bright as a Urim and Thummim.
But some days I miss the Old Earth, clouds
that brought not just the smell of rain
but burning garbage and the distant
waft of a smashed skunk. Back then, cities 
were always grungy, farms held together
with bailing wire. Wars and famines: I’m sure 
you’re happy to be done with them, likewise 
hurricanes and choking volcanic ash.
But don’t you have a soft spot for your own
weird history? I mean tulip mania and astrolabes,  
the platypus and plate tectonics, seances 
and phrenologists walking their hands 
over a stranger’s skull in search of the soul. 
And books⎯the old-fashioned kind 
with words and ink, and you licked your finger 
to turn a page? You miss them, right? 
I wish you could scrounge up a stray attic 
or two from the lost days and turn me loose
looking for rare LPs, maybe a bolo tie 
or Ouija board or some great uncle’s lost 
accordion. How can I know who I am 
without a few castoffs to keep me company? 
How I’d play hangman and call it prayer,
how I’d touch my uncle’s sideburns 
and pretend he was Methusaleh waking
from a long nap, or James Dean. I was neither 
found nor lost back then but always 
hovering between. We didn’t know which 
rituals would save us, so we tried them all: 
incense and candle making, calisthenics, fasts,
ice baths, pleas scrawled on slips of paper.
What will the new rituals be? Hope 
was nowhere and everywhere, a burning 
in our fingers, a sweet gnawing in the bones. 
It sang to us. We could taste it
in fireflies, in jazz leaking from open
windows. And radiance. Do you remember 
radiance? Some ether, some sparkly  
presence we yearned to touch in the next 
life, not this everyday gruel of the already saved. 

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Lance Larsen, former poet laureate of Utah, recently published his sixth poetry collection. He has received a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship.

Art by Mark Rothko (1903–1970).

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ARTS AND CULTURE

THEOLOGY

The book of Job has become a touchstone for me. Like all great scripture, it’s not so much the answers it provides as the questions it raises for our consideration. As a scientist, as a writer, as a teacher, all, it’s always been questions that open new worlds and present promising vistas that help me navigate the complexities this earth life confronts us with. Job is all about questions.

Job opens with an imaginary frame-story signaled by, “And one day . . .” the ancient Middle Eastern equivalent of “Once upon a time . . .” in which hassatan, the satan, the adversary, is visiting the divine court (don’t equate the satan here with the Satan we are familiar with later in the scripture; in this story he is the divine prosecutor). God opens with a question, “From where do you come?” and he answers, “From roaming the earth and walking about in it.” Then God asks the ominous question, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?” And we are off to the races. The adversary points out that it’s no wonder that he’s so righteous; you’ve blessed him with everything. If you take that away, he will curse you post haste. God says something like, “Have at him. Do your worst.”

And that the satan does. In short order, he strikes Job’s livelihood and kills his livestock, then his children, then, noting that Job still hasn’t cursed God, he is sent a plague of skin sores that leave him suffering immensely. His suffering is so egregious he wishes he had never been born. A group of Job’s friends gathers to “comfort” him. They all “know” that suffering does not come willy-nilly into life. Suffering comes from unrighteousness, so they enjoin Job to figure out what he’s done wrong. He must have acted badly because everyone knows God blesses the righteous and curses the sinners. Job is angry and confused. He knows he did nothing to deserve this, and yet he is suffering (Job’s legendary patience is not in the canonical book; it comes from later responses to the book). God seems to have been lying down on the job. Job demands redress and decides to take God to court and demands he appear to answer Job’s accusation of neglect of earned blessings. His wife mourns the loss of all that she had worked for, as the canonical text says in Job 2:9, “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.” A cold statement, yet what is often unacknowledged is that she, too, has just lost all she loves and has worked for.

However, in a variant in the Greek translation of the text called the Septuagint, we see her suffering a little more clearly: “How long will you persist and say, ‘Look, I will hang on a little longer, while I wait for the hope of my deliverance?’ For look, your legacy has vanished from the earth—sons and daughters, my womb’s birth pains and labors, for whom I wearied myself with hardships in vain. And you? You sit in the refuse of worms as you spend the night in the open air. As for me, I am one that wanders about as a hired servant—from place to place and house to house, waiting for when the sun will set, so I can rest from the distresses and cries that have now beset me. Now say some word to the Lord and die!” (Job 2:9–9e).

She is essentially a slave forced to watch the loss of all her offspring and all she has hoped for. She wants it to end. Her suffering is so profound she wants her husband to do the hard work of accepting his fate, cursing God, and ending all their suffering.

The rest of the chapter, in beautiful poetry, depicts his friends trying to admit that all of his and his wife’s suffering is because of something he’s done or not done. Job insists God has wronged him. God needs to give an account of his failure to keep his promises.

Suffering is one of the most profound and heartrending aspects of existence. We all know this. We all have suffered. I find it strange that as I get to know anyone in any depth, it becomes apparent to me that they have suffered. They have faced darkness. A place empty of joy that creates agony, terror, pain, and hurt of the deepest kind. And so often it seems pointless. And the “why” is rarely answered.

And in Job, sort of unexpectedly, God answers the summons to stand trial for his crimes, or at least to explain himself for this mess. And what does the Lord do? Does he offer a treatise on suffering? Its whys and wherefores? Send comforting messages enjoining patience and hope? No, he arrives as an ancient Middle Eastern storm god, addresses Job from a whirlwind, is dressed for battle, and offers a detailed tour of his creation.

He first asks Job some questions to show that he is not going to give an account of himself to the likes of Job:

“Gird your loins like a man, 
	that I may ask you, and you can inform Me,
Where were you when I founded earth?
	Tell me if you have understanding.” (Job 38:3–4)

The chapter continues with God’s questions. God then shows him his ignorance and how little Job understands of his ways:

• Have you ever commanded the morning, / appointed dawn to its place . . . ?

• Have you come into the springs of the sea / in the bottommost deep walked about?

• Did you take in the breadth of the earth?

• By what way does the west wind fan out?

• Who split the channel for the torrent, . . . to rain on a land without man?

• Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades / or loose Orion’s reigns?

Then, in chapter 39, God gives Job a test over his knowledge of the animal world, questioning Job, like a seasoned Biology 100 professor at BYU:

• Do you know the birthing times of mountain goats?

• How long are they pregnant?

• How did onager asses get free agency?

• Can you get a cord around a wild ox?

• What do you know about the way ostriches lay eggs?

• Can you explain the power of the warhorse?

• How does a hawk fly?

• How does an eagle build its high nest?

Then God introduces two monsters, beasts of such power and magnificence that only God can confront their might: Behemoth and Leviathan. (I’ve got another essay coming on these strange and fantastic creatures—a couple of the most interesting aspects of creation in all of scripture, but for now, let’s think about how Job wants God to address suffering.) However, God says nothing on the subject. He just doesn’t. Not directly. He puts Job on the back foot. The message the Lord delivers is, “You are not ready for that question. You are incapable of understanding. The creation is beyond you—how much more so when you consider the deeper reasons for the universe’s existence.” I’ve felt that message in my own life. Like you, suffering has been a part of my life. As it has been for God. In Doctrine and Covenants 19:15–18, we read:

Therefore I command you to repent—repent, lest I smite you by the rod of my mouth, and by my wrath, and by my anger, and your sufferings be sore—how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not.

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;

But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;

Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink—

Back to Job. I’ve seen hints of what Job may have learned as he considered God’s menagerie and the details of his diverse and beautiful creation. Moses seems to capture something in the Pearl of Great Price:

And it came to pass that Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created; and Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered.

And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth.

And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed. (Moses 1:8–10)

Recently, I visited some of the oldest living things on Earth. The bristlecone pines are found high in the desert mountains of the Great Basin. Seeing them has been on my bucket list for a long time. In 1963, a graduate student was doing tree-ring studies of these trees, whose age was known to be old, but exactly how old had not been ascertained. He suspected that they might be old enough to help him reconstruct ancient climates. Not knowing quite what he was doing, he tried to take a core sample and broke the metal increment borer on the tree’s hard heartwood, so he decided just to cut it down. The sad ending for a 5,100-year-old tree that had survived so much before meeting the saw of an errant graduate student—including drought, storms, lightning, insect, and fire. It turned out to be one of the oldest trees of this species ever found.

I have wanted to visit these for a long time. A population of these Malthusian pines in Great Basin National Park is now struggling due to the rapid pace of anthropogenic climate change in ways they have never encountered in their thousands-of-years history. However, my encounter was different than anticipated. I recorded this as I set up field recorders designed to capture the high-altitude ecological soundscapes.

I think I expected to find a sense of holiness in this place, a place of wonder and enchantment, being among the oldest living things on the planet.

But I find here a sense that all of my life and the life of humanity is but a passing moment. There’s no concern about me at all. There’s no sense that something knows me or feels me.

These trees are beyond me in ways that I don’t really understand, that I can’t even comprehend. And I feel like I’m staring at the vast sea of being and haven’t yet been able to capture even a drop in that ocean.

This is an amazing place. I am so happy to be here, so happy to experience the wonder of this place, the magic at my level. Not at the level I expected. I expected to somehow partake of the ancientness of the trees or the feeling of grandeur and holiness, but all I can feel is a sense of inadequacy and a sense of a kind of loneliness—that these beings are beyond me and far beyond whatever I am.

On the same trip, I encountered ants ranching mealybugs. At the tips of young pines, ants were protecting them from predators and harvesting the sweet honeydew they exude to rid themselves of excess sugars, which the ants then use to feed their colony.

And there on the edge of the Great Basin’s dry frontier, I had an inkling of Job’s confrontation with the divine. Yes, there is suffering. None escape it. Not even our heavenly parents, who at the very least lost a third of their children, and who must have suffered in ways I cannot comprehend. I can, however, sense the depth and importance of this creation, and despite the pain and suffering, and the groaning of creation, as the Apostle Paul calls it, there is something at its heart. Something that goes beyond, or through, or above, or below, or within existence that grounds all the reasons that so easily escape us in our walk through a landscape that neither Job nor we can scarcely comprehend. Yet somehow, as the Lord so vividly describes, this “something” depends mightily on mountain goats, ostriches, and bristlecone pines.

Sources

Robert Alter, trans. The Hebrew Bible. Vol. 3, Ketuvim: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Michael P. Cohen. A Garden of Bristlecones: Tales of Change in the Great Basin. University of Nevada Press, 1998.

Mark Larrimore. The Book of Job: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2013.

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Steven L. Peck is an associate professor in the Biology Department of Brigham Young University and has published over fifty scientific articles in evolutionary ecology, ecological mathematics, and the philosophy of biology. He is currently a fellow of the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, working on the interface between faith and science. As a writer, he was awarded the 2021 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters for his award-winning novels, short stories, and nonfiction books on faith and science.

Art by Abraham Rattner (1895–1978). Photos courtesy of Steven L. Peck.

The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute: https://mi.byu.edu/old-testament-reflections.

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After Happiness: Living with Faith in a Time of Crisis 
By Natalie Brown 
Greg Kofford Books, 2026

At the heart of Natalie Brown’s new book After Happiness is a trajectory that will feel familiar to many readers: After years absorbing the promise that success and happiness will come to anyone who lives the gospel, a young adult learns that personal, economic, and societal problems reveal the truth to be much more complicated. This is not to say that After Happiness is a story about disillusionment. Rather, After Happiness is a declaration that faith—and faith communities—can withstand heat and hurt and turmoil, and that reducing the gospel to a formula for success does believers a disservice.

After Happiness combines elements of multiple genres—part memoir, part theology, and part cultural criticism. Brown opens her book in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at a time of historic optimism (before the War on Terror and the Great Recession), plus personal optimism as she prepared to start college. In this era, Brown notes, “formulas for happiness that were specific to post-war America” had become a key lens through which Latter-day Saints viewed their experience of gospel living in the late twentieth century (8). Brown quotes many general conference sermons to illustrate a pattern that she identifies as “happiness formulas.” For instance, in 1995, Lynn A. Mickelsen promised Saints that “joy will come to us as we keep God’s commandments.” And in 2002 Richard G. Scott observed that “some individuals go through life consistently doing the right things”; as a result of this faithfulness, Scott claimed, “[t]hey seem happy, even enthusiastic about life” (21). The positive correlation is clear in each conference quote: Commandment keeping and gospel living bring happiness and success. Brown follows this rhetoric in Latter-day Saint discourse into the 2020s, highlighting the lasting impact of “happiness formulas” on Mormon thought.

Notably, the formulas continued to appear in conference talks even as American optimism took a hit as the twenty-first century opened. Threats to optimism came in many forms, including political turmoil (notably the September 11^th terrorist attacks, wars, and partisan divisions), economic crises (especially the 2008 market crash and its aftermath), and a pandemic that endangered human health and relationships. Each of these crises, Brown argues, revealed cracks in the “prosperity gospel” mindset that had seeped into Mormon culture. Whereas Latter-day Saint rhetoric had featured “reassurances that gospel living would lead to earthly happiness . . . the loss of our collective prosperity requires us to reconsider how we understand the promises made to those who follow the gospel and the ways in which we worship as a community” (9).

To do this work of reconsidering, Brown hypothesizes about the effects of patterns in general conference sermons that imply a formulaic approach to happiness. She points out, for instance, that LDS leaders began using the phrase “plan of happiness” much more often in the late 1900s and early 2000s than they had previously (18–19). This trend accompanied promises that Latter-day Saints would find happiness and success through covenant living. As a result, Brown worries that many Church members began to self-silence, or to silence others, believing that any admission of their own unhappiness would come across as a lack of faith. In fact, in her work as a writer, Brown herself has received pushback from critics who have accused her of being too “negative” or “a complainer” because she acknowledged unpleasant experiences (44–45).1 Culturally, Latter-day Saints have assumed that “performing the signifiers of a happy life” was “evidence that one is living righteously” (41).

But Brown insists that the gospel offers something much deeper than these shallow performances of prosperity. Rich communities of faith, and strong connections to God, hinge on love rather than on happiness. And love of God and of neighbor is, as Jesus said, the crux of the gospel (Matthew 22:37–40).

The kind of love these commandments require, however, almost always shows up in pain rather than in happiness. Brown argues that Latter-day Saint theology of neighborly love is rooted in “mourn[ing] with those that mourn” (Mosiah 18:9), and she notes that rejection and persecution cut through LDS history.2 Given the theological and historical prevalence of Latter-day Saint suffering, then, Brown concludes that Church members must engage with “negative” qualities like sorrow, doubt, and fear. In perhaps the most personal chapter of After Happiness (chapter 4), Brown pairs her own doubts, pains, and losses with those of the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi, who kept faith despite family dysfunction, financial ruin, and prolonged homelessness. “Our task,” Brown reasons, “is the same one given to our fathers before us: that we keep moving forward with faith on a path that is often disappointing and yet full of solace if we are willing to give up our scripts and let God prevail” (128).

Chapter 4’s exploration of personal pain through a scriptural lens reflects one of the core strengths of After Happiness: The book blends theory and lived experience. Whenever Brown analyzes the national and global crises that challenge LDS prosperity-gospel assumptions, she anchors that analysis with illustrations from her own personal crises. In particular, Brown reflects on the ways her father’s health challenges, job loss, and early death led her to reexamine the happiness formulas she often heard at church. Additionally, her experiences starting, pausing, and restarting a PhD program (with a reluctant detour through law school) also brought her into conflict with many assumptions about her role as a devout Latter-day Saint wife and mother. As Brown explores both global and individual narratives, she highlights scriptural passages that reiterate how messy gospel living can be. “Tragedy . . . is the normal state of affairs” in the Book of Mormon, she argues (108). And if such faithful figures as Nephi and Alma and Mormon suffered despite their devotion, why would Latter-day Saints expect that living the gospel would bring nothing but peace?

Brown’s critique of Latter-day Saints’ formulaic approach to happiness is comprehensive and nuanced. For example, she analyzes restrictive assumptions about gender roles within the Church, noting that the idea that a family’s happiness depends (at least in part) on a mother not working outside the home is no longer economically feasible for many faithful families. But she also points out that “[t]he twentieth-century Mormon feminist question of whether women could or should balance career and family reads like a luxury of the past in our less prosperous times” (5). Her personal experiences further complicate things. She writes about receiving criticism from Church members for pursuing academic and professional goals while parenting (even though, she notes, many men would be praised for doing so). She also presents the brutal realities of a job market that offers little hope for humanities PhD candidates, and the challenges of trying to balance her career opportunities with those of her spouse. Working outside the home is an economic necessity, not a choice, for many Latter-day Saint women. But working outside the home can’t happen without suitable jobs on the market. It is impossible to root happiness in formulas of gender roles or career choice; there’s just too much that’s out of our control.

What a happy Latter-day Saint individual, family, and community looks like defies formulas, Brown argues, and so it is time to challenge those formulas.

Perhaps one of the best indicators that Brown is on to something with her challenge of “happiness formulas” lies in the fact that it leaves one wanting more. Personally, I wanted to see more discussion on two issues. First, in what ways were late twentieth-century LDS happiness formulas part of broader patterns in American Christianity? After all, Latter-day Saint rhetoric linking righteousness to happiness echoes that of Norman Vincent Peale—the Christian minister turned self-help guru whose dominant media presence shaped generations of American Christian thinking about morality and happiness. In fact, I looked this up: LDS Church leaders quoted Peale multiple times in general conference addresses and Ensign messages during the late 1900s.3 And the phrase “the power of positive thinking”—which was also the title of Peale’s bestselling book that claims to teach biblically-based optimism as the basis for success in life—appears in several Church publications.4 Peale is only one example of a prominent influence on American ideas about Christian happiness, but After Happiness engages very little with non-LDS sources. Brown does an excellent job analyzing how Latter-day Saint leaders shaped Mormon ideas about happiness; but who or what shaped these ideas among Latter-day Saint leaders?

Second, there is room for more discussion about the ways that Latter-day Saints outside of America experience the happiness formulas Brown dissects. In a few places throughout the book, Brown acknowledges that “many of the cultural norms that we experienced as being synonymous with living the gospel were never possible outside of the United States” (5). However, the bulk of the book is firmly grounded in American Mormonism. Of course, this grounding reflects an important reality: For most of the twentieth century, most of the prominent Latter-day Saint leaders have been Americans who spoke from their own cultural standpoints. But because After Happiness aims to complicate the cultural assumptions that have pervaded Mormon ideas about what “living the gospel” looks like, more examples from outside of the United States would be welcome.

No single book can cover everything, though, and After Happiness does the hard work of starting conversations that challenge unspoken assumptions. Brown’s analysis feels right and relevant, and is a strong foundation on which future reflections about these patterns can build.

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Greer Bates Cordner is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Boston University School of Theology.

Art by Harald Slott-Møller (1864–1937).

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Please enjoy three essays on prophecy, all featured in Wayfare issue 6. Keep scrolling to read “Through the Strait Gate: The Transformative Power of Prophecy” by Zohar Atkins, and click the links featured here to read “Hope, Fear, & Creation: Living in Response to Prophecy” by Don Bradley and “The Spirit of Prophecy: The Shape of Jesus in Time” by James Goldberg.

When Walter Benjamin was fleeing Nazi Europe in 1940, he reached out for a different understanding of time and agency than the one that seemed to be closing in on him. He wrote: “We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”

In that desperate moment, when prediction had failed catastrophically, when the future seemed foreclosed, he discovered the prophet’s deepest secret. The prohibition against soothsaying wasn’t arbitrary religious law. It protected something infinitely more precious than fortune-telling: the space for transformation itself.

Benjamin understood that the biblical prophet succeeds not by predicting the future accurately but by creating possibilities for people to change it. This insight cuts against everything our data-driven age believes about wisdom and authority. We worship at the altar of prediction: algorithms that forecast consumer behavior, models that anticipate market movements, analytics that promise to reveal hidden patterns in human conduct. But the prophet operates by entirely different logic.

Jonah, history’s most reluctant oracle, proves the point. God dispatches him to Nineveh with words that sound like inevitable doom: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4, JPS). Jonah delivers the message with all the enthusiasm of a man reading his own death warrant. The city erupts in repentance—sackcloth, ashes, fasting. Nineveh survives.

By every contemporary measure of expertise, Jonah failed spectacularly. His prediction proved false. His credibility lay in ruins. Yet this “failure” represents prophetic success at its most sublime. The prediction failed because it succeeded—not as forecast but as catalyst. Jonah’s words didn’t describe an inevitable future but awakened a dormant capacity for change.

This reveals prophecy’s central tension. The prophet speaks about the future precisely to prevent it from happening. Prophetic speech creates space for humanity to turn around, to come home to itself, to become what it was meant to be rather than what it seems destined to become.

Benjamin grasped that this makes prophetic time fundamentally different from soothsayer time. The fortune teller fills tomorrow with magical necessity—what will be will be. The prophet fills today with transformative possibility—what could be if you change. Every second becomes what Benjamin calls a “strait gate”—not because the Messiah will certainly come, but because the Messiah might come if we create conditions for that coming.

Yet where does the prophet get the authority to speak such world-altering words? Amos provides the most honest answer about authority ever recorded: “I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet” (Amos 7:14, NASB). The shepherd-turned-oracle admits he has no credentials whatsoever. He was tending sycamore trees when the word of God erupted through him like wildfire.

This uncredentialed authority scandalized ancient Near Eastern sensibilities. Mesopotamian courts employed professional diviners—specialists trained in reading omens, interpreting dreams, and advising kings through established protocols. The Israelite prophet claimed something unprecedented: direct divine authorization that bypassed every human hierarchy, every institutional filter, every credential system.

But this divine authorization comes with a terrible requirement: The prophet must use divine authority to challenge human authority. Nathan confronts King David about his adultery with Bathsheba, speaking truth that could cost him his head (2 Samuel 12:7). The prophet’s job description requires speaking truth that disrupts comfortable power arrangements.

Thus the prophet serves power by challenging it. And the worthy leader is the one who accepts the prophet’s critique. David’s greatness emerges not from moral perfection but from his capacity to respond to prophetic rebuke with repentance: “I have sinned” (2 Samuel 12:13). The king who can be corrected proves himself worthy of correction. The leader who remains teachable deserves to lead.

This distinguishes prophetic discourse from advisory discourse. The advisor helps the king achieve his stated goals more efficiently. The prophet questions whether those goals deserve achievement.

Like the artist who ventures into the realm of imagination, sometimes torquing convention to find new means of expression, the prophet functions as a creative force rather than a mere spokesperson. Both prophet and artist embrace productive uncertainty—not because confusion has value for its own sake, but because the most important transformations happen at the edge of current understanding, in that uncomfortable space between what we think we know and what we might discover if we remain open to change. The artist’s canvas and the prophet’s words both become spaces where new possibilities can emerge. Most biblical prophets are not known for their miracles, but instead for their poetry, where meaning is so compressed that it can hardly be paraphrased. The prophet stretches language, transforming conventional speech and summoning us to a different register of attention.

The prophet’s challenge extends into the most audacious realm imaginable: arguing with God himself. Abraham negotiates with the Almighty over Sodom and Gomorrah, bargaining down the number of righteous people needed to spare the cities (Genesis 18:23–32). Moses stands between divine wrath and human destruction after the golden calf incident, interceding so forcefully that God “repents” of planned punishment (Exodus 32:11–14, KJV). The prophet functions as defense attorney for humanity against the court of heaven.

This advocacy reveals prophecy’s deepest commitment: defending human possibility against every force—divine or human—that would foreclose it. The prophet advocates for values that resist measurement, for goods that transcend optimization, for possibilities that calculations cannot capture.

The prophetic voice persists in asking uncomfortable questions that our metrics-obsessed culture prefers to avoid: What are we really optimizing for?

But the tradition itself acknowledges prophecy’s shadow side. False prophets appear alongside true ones throughout biblical narrative. Prophecy itself is vulnerable to manipulation and self-deception.

Jewish tradition recognized that prophecy as direct divine communication wouldn’t and couldn’t continue indefinitely. The Talmudic story of the Oven of Akhnai captures this historical pivot with characteristic wit. In this famous rabbinic tale about a legal dispute over ritual purity, when a heavenly voice intervenes to support Rabbi Eliezer’s legal interpretation, Rabbi Joshua responds with words that redefined religious authority: “It is not in heaven” (Bava Metzia 59b). The Talmud reports that God laughed with delight at being overruled by human reasoning. Divine revelation yields to interpretive community. The age of direct transcendent communication ends; the era of collaborative meaning-making begins.

This transition created profound loss and gain. We lost the immediacy of prophetic authority—voices that could cut through human confusion with divine clarity. But we gained something unprecedented: the responsibility to become interpreters ourselves, to engage collectively in the work of discernment that prophets once performed individually.

Yet something crucial was lost that our age desperately needs: voices willing to challenge the reduction of human complexity to algorithmic simplicity. We need prophetic virtues even if we cannot recover prophetic authority.

These insights about prophecy have fundamentally shaped my approach to education. Most educational technology functions like sophisticated soothsaying—analyzing student performance data to predict learning outcomes and delivering predetermined content through algorithmically optimized pathways. But education rooted in prophetic principles operates by different logic entirely. Like biblical prophets, prophetic teachers refuse to tell students what they want to hear. Instead of confirming existing assumptions, prophetic education challenges those assumptions, probing their foundations and revealing their hidden implications. And just as the prophet seeks to transform rather than merely inform society, great teachers turn students into lifelong learners rather than just “correct answer” machines.

The prophetic model offers essential guidance for anyone wielding authority or influence in our prediction-obsessed age. We face a choice that parallels the ancient decision between prophet and soothsayer. We can build systems that forecast human behavior based on past patterns, optimizing for efficiency and predictability. Or we can create spaces that honor the human capacity for genuine change, that defend dignity against reduction to data points.

We should not reject prediction outright but keep a space open through which “the Messiah might enter.” My argument in favor of transformative prophecy is not an argument against science or empirical knowledge. Rather, it’s a recognition that the most important human realities resist reductionism because they emerge through transformation. The ancient prohibition against predicting the future wasn’t an antiscientific stance, but a normative intervention against fatalism.

Benjamin found in the prophetic and rabbinic tradition that remembrance is not just an act of recalling past facts, but an active engagement with human capacity for renewal. By insisting that redemption is not inevitable, Benjamin recovers the unique power of the present moment, what he calls “now-time” (Jetztzeit) and what Giorgio Agamben, drawing on Paul, calls kairos. When the French revolutionaries shot at the clock towers, Benjamin sees them, in a prophetic mold, following the example of Joshua stopping the sun in the sky, taking aim at linear, “homogeneous,” measured time itself.

The ancient prophets summoned us to agency and potentiality by claiming divine authority. Our question is whether we can cultivate prophetic virtues through human faith and commitment alone. Yet our uncertain conditions are not new. They are intrinsic to the prophetic endeavor. When we abandon the soothsayer’s magic, we don’t lose access to the future. We discover that the future remains open, responsive to our choices. The prophetic art means seeing this very moment as a potential entry point for something genuinely new.

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Zohar Atkins is a rabbi, scholar, and poet, and founder of Lightning Studios, an education company devoted to inspiring learning as a way of life. He blogs at “What Is Called Thinking?” and writes a weekly Torah commentary. He podcasts at Meditations with Zohar.

Art by Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947).

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ON THE ROAD TO JERICHO

THEOLOGY