I invite anyone who feels so inclined to write an essay in response. These responses can do anything with the parable: buttress it, question it, explicate it, deconstruct it, apply it to life, expand on a single sentence, or anything else. So far, the following authors are considering submitting responses: Peter Mugemancaro, Eliza Wells, Sarah Sabey, Jenny Richards, Tom Griffith, August Burton, James Goldberg, Rachel Jardine, and Joseph Spencer. I hope this will be an exciting combined literary experiment.

There once was a desert as wide as the world. Over most of the land, forlorn winds curled dust and sand into parched skies—but a few cities persevered in the harsh terrain.

One such city bustled and pulsed. The people thrived and grew wealthy. They built highways and waterworks. And at the center of the shining city stood a grand cathedral with facades carved from ornate stones. In the center of that building was a small room. And within the small room was a wide well brimming with crystalline, sapphire waters. There, loving and tending to the well, lived a man who had four daughters.

But as the years drew on, the well-keeper worried that the city had forgotten him—and the water he lovingly tended. In all their hustle and bustle, the citizens had lost sight of where the water came from and how it had been found so many years ago. But the well-keeper determined that he would never let the story die. If nothing else, he would ensure his daughters knew.

And so, on long winter nights, when the air grew frigid, the wellman would gather his girls under heavy blankets around a fire and tell them the tale of the oracle. “In the days when the desert was just a desert, and no city had been built,” he would begin—his voice cracked with age, his words heavy with wisdom—“our ancestors wandered from dune to dune in search of water.

“One day, a young man wandered away from the group and, as night fell, he realized he was alone. Nearly dead from thirst, he heard a voice whisper to him on the wind, drawing him toward a particular patch of sand. Just there, iridescent in the evening’s dimming heat, a fine mist rose and, the next morning, the man could see dew coalescing there, also. Finally, parched and exhausted, he began to dig, and burrow, and finally to excavate with his hands. Slowly, water began to seep through the sand, wetting his cracked skin; then the water began to trickle, and to burst, until finally, to his relief and wonder, he realized he had unearthed an aquifer: a jewel-like pool of endless, gushing, clarion water, sweet on the tongue and cool as a melon in summer.

“Over time, it became clear that this was not happy coincidence—it was not just that the man had stumbled onto water by luck. Rather, as an oracle, the man was gifted with a second sight that made visible the otherwise invisible signs of water. Though others had never seen the mist or dew,” the old man continued, “they longed to be connected to this resplendent source of life, and so they began to build. Over months that grew into years, they built our city, right here. And, around the aquifer itself, we built the cathedral. But for many generations our family’s calling has been to tend—not to the bustling commerce of the city, nor even to the grand cathedral, but to care for the well itself. We are the keepers of the water, the ones who ensure it will always be here, clear and cool, for those who need respite in these dry lands.”

But though the wellman endeavored with all his vigor and devotion not only to tend to the well, but also to pass on to his daughters the beauty and importance of their calling, as the daughters grew, they became their own beings and each walked her own path:

The first daughter became listless with the tedium of tending to the well. It was, after all, inglorious work. She looked longingly, instead, at the ramparts, buttresses, and glimmering bejeweled walls of the cathedral in which the well was housed. On idle afternoons, she would stroll the cathedral’s grand walkways, gazing with an ardent envy at its soaring corridors and regal beauty. Eventually, she discovered that the merchants who hawked their wares on the stone steps outside the cathedral felt like her people and she drifted away from the well and toward the fashion and prestige that defined those who could enjoy what only the very best could afford. She found among them a cosseted comfort, a sense that this was where she belonged.

The second daughter had grown weary from years in the city. She looked around at the failings of her fellow citizens and decided the city was not what it purported to be. She believed a city dedicated to the water would never grow so ornate, so supercilious, so haughty. And so she left. She journeyed to the city’s edge and finally passed out through the final gate. Into the desert she wandered, sure that, over the horizon, she would find a better, truer, more nourishing source of water. But the desert forgave no one the audacity of venturing into its precincts. Within hours of beginning her journey, and just as her hometown slipped behind the receding horizon, the wind attacked her with a ferocity she had not foreseen. Dryness crept into her mouth and her skin, cloaking her tongue with cotton and bristling her skin with cracks and wounds. Just as she thought all might be lost, however, she, too, saw, close to the ground, as the sun set behind her, tiny tendrils of mist curling into the dry air. She fixed herself to that spot and began to press her fingers into the sand. At first, it cracked her skin further and wore against her fingers, but then, slowly, as the cold of night set in, she felt the sand moisten into soil. And then, even deeper, she found a slowly softening layer of mud, and, below that, the smallest pool: water.

The third daughter shared the second’s weariness with the town’s hypocrisy. She, too, knew that something better must await her outside the city’s walls. And so, just a few months after her older sister had disappeared, she too ventured beyond the city’s gates, confident that she would find in the desert a liquid to slake her thirst—sure that she, unlike her progenitors and contemporaries, would preserve the water in all its purity, keeping it clean and building a society that honored what really mattered. Confident that she would become a new oracle, she waited as the sun set on her first night in the sand. But as dusk settled around her, she strained her eyes against the deepening dark and saw . . . nothing. Though she scoured the horizon and lovingly fingered inch after square inch of sand, she found no sign of moisture. Soon, the night grew cold and the sweat of the day cooled and brought to her chills and, finally, shaking. As the next morning dawned, she looked around in desperation for a sign of water, or for help, or for rescue. But as the sun climbed toward its zenith and the temperature inexorably rose, she saw only the pulse of the heat as it radiated off the sand.

Which left only the youngest and plainest of the wellman’s daughters. For reasons she did not know, this youngest daughter noted with a detached sense of admiration the quests and wanderings of her sisters—but never felt called to venture out herself. She was possessed of a settled quiet, a knowledge from very young that her calling was with the well. And so she became proficient at the daily tasks required to keep the water clean and access to the well clear. She recognized that her job held little appeal from the outside; indeed, she understood that virtually no one knew she and her father worked there day after day. But with an abiding sense of what it meant to be whole, a knowledge springing from somewhere deep, she would creep down to the well itself at night, cup the water into her hands, pour it over her face, and feel the rivulets trickle down her skin, letting the liquid quench her thirst as it ran in a cool wave over her tongue.

To submit writing in response to this invitation, visit the Wayfare submissions page, follow the directions for regular submissions, and add the note “Response to Tyler Johnson’s allegory invitation” under #9.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To subscribe to Tyler’s column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Paul Signac (1863–1935).

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EVENT at the Compass Gallery in Provo:

KEEP READING

OLD TESTAMENT

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When: May 7th, 2026 from 5:30–8:30pm

Where: The Compass Gallery, 250 W. Center Street, Provo, UT

What: Reading by the author, Q&A, book signing, and mini art show with both prints and original art. Limited copies of APOS will be for sale at the event.

This is a free event, but please RSVP here on the Compass website!

We’re officially throwing a launch party!! Come to The Compass Gallery on May 7th to celebrate the arrival of the books and this wonderful community that’s been growing for the past four years! If you’ve already ordered a book from the Kickstarter, you’re doing local Provo pickup, and you’re planning on attending, please RSVP on the Compass’s website so that I can have everything set for you. (There will also be limited copies for sale at the event.) So excited to see you all!! I know I say this so often, but thank you again for everything! —Anna

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Curious about APOS? Read an excerpt of the book below.

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Anna M. Wright (@frizz_biz) is an illustrator from Pennsylvania with a BFA in illustration from BYU. Her work often examines the nuance of her religious faith and its members. She loves history, sketchbooking, lemon squares, and old books.

A portion of this excerpt appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

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A hummingbird, ornamented
with emerald and ruby plumage,
greets me. From the feeder, a tinsel-thin beak
extracts sugar water. I, too, drink—
orange juice, slowly—while those wings blur.
Hovering by a string of Christmas lights,
the hummingbird examines green,
red, green, red. Then he glides
into the holy future. I’m left wingless.

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Anabella Schofield is a poet and children's book author from California. She loves to craft wonder-filled works, especially in collaboration with her twin sister.

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I don’t know about you, but some of my biggest regrets in life involve acting outside of integrity by betraying my own understanding of right and wrong. This includes discounting my own inspiration from the Spirit of God, often in deference to others. Regrettably, there have been times in my life where I have acted as though I did not take myself or my personal revelation seriously—or at least as seriously as I should have. My experiences are at least in part a result of gendered messaging around the idea that people who are embodied differently than I am can be privy to a spiritual knowledge about me, and my life, that can trump even my own self-knowing.

One example is when I was twenty years old and preparing to serve a full-time mission. I met with my stake president as part of the protocol. Like many BYU students, I had never spoken with or even met my stake president prior to this formal interview about missionary service. He asked me to tell him why I wanted to go on a mission. After explaining my reasons, he confidently responded with: “You’re right, the Lord wants you to serve a mission.” Although there was nothing negative about this statement, I remember feeling bewildered. I did not doubt that the Lord wanted me to serve a mission and was not seeking validation in this area. Twenty-year-old me thought it strange that he felt the need to tell me I was properly perceiving the divine will for my life. I was already perfectly confident that I was doing the right thing.

While not a detrimental experience, this was a curious one. In ways, that encounter implied that I needed external legitimation in my spiritual decisions. In retrospect, that conversation engendered a sense within me that I ought not to take myself or my personal revelations seriously—or at least that I needed validation from a man in a position of religious authority before I could do so. The result is that I was left more vulnerable to what was a deeply negative experience on my mission; although the mission experience was quite different from my one-time meeting with the stake president, I cannot believe they are unrelated.

Early on in my full-time missionary service, I had strong promptings that I needed to go home at the conclusion of my mission during a specific month. It was over a year away and I was surprised that this was gnawing at me. However, because mission transfers were designed to work out evenly for elders who served for twenty-four months, they did not always work out evenly for sisters, who served for a shorter period. This meant that instead of serving for exactly eighteen months, I would go home a few weeks before or a few weeks after the eighteen-month mark. I brought this up to my mission president during zone conference interviews. During that conversation, I learned that the mission office had scheduled me to go home two months later than the Spirit was telling me I should. Because it was early in my mission, I decided to sit with this knowledge and think about it. Toward the end of my mission, I continued to feel that I needed to go home two months earlier. I approached my mission president, who wanted me to stay longer. After a lengthy back and forth, he finally pulled out the big guns and told me my impression to go home earlier was coming from the adversary. According to him, my revelation was from the wrong source; that was how my priesthood leader accounted for the mismatch. His wife intervened to explain that her husband was making decisions based on what he thought was best for his mission, not necessarily for me, and encouraged me to listen to my own revelation. Although I took myself seriously for a moment, ultimately the guilt and self-doubt won out and I stayed the extra two months, as my mission president had asked. There were blessings during that time, yet the net effect of that last transfer was destructive. For years afterward, I harbored guilt about the deleterious effects of extending my mission rather than returning home to where I believed I was needed much more.

I have come to understand this experience and others like it as instances of spiritual self-betrayal or simply spiritual betrayal. I knew what was true for me and what God wanted me to do. Rather than being faithful to God and myself and my revelation, I betrayed it and broke the divine trust in me, my own self-trust, and enervated my trust in the divine. This was more than the presence of spiritual betrayal; it was also the absence of spiritual fidelity.

In order to better understand an alternate model of spiritual fidelity, I look to a female exemplar from scripture. In the second chapter of first Samuel, we encounter Hannah uttering a profound if protracted prayer, one that presages the Magnificat of Mary that would be pronounced about ten centuries later. In this scene, Hannah is in the temple praising God and dedicating her son Samuel, consecrating him to the Lord’s service. Like Mary would later do, Hannah prophesied that God would create justice on the earth and make wrong things right. She predicted that God would raise the poor from the dust, and lift the needy from the heaps of ashes so that they would sit alongside royalty in seats of honor (1 Samuel 2:8–9). This is just one example of many that Hannah offers to support her claim that God both brings people low and exalts them (v. 7), depending on their needs. Hannah sings the following praise: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies because I rejoice in your victory” (v. 1, NRSV). In this moment, Hannah rejoices not only in the victory of the divine but also in her own vindication that God has heard her prayer, made her a mother, and not just any mother but a mother of a prophet that will be celebrated in the Jewish and Christian traditions for millennia. Not only did God hear her—she heard God; she listened, she hearkened, and she overcame—and she knew it.

Hannah’s prayer beautifully anticipates and mirrors one of the most celebrated passages of Christian scripture, and she is recognized as the mother of a prophet. Yet in the previous chapter, Hannah is also found praying in the temple, and during that prayer, prior to Samuel’s birth, she was met with dismissiveness and disrespect. In 1 Samuel 1, the barren Hannah, whose pain over childlessness was only exacerbated by her husband’s other wife who had children, is described as appearing in the temple because “she was deeply distressed”; while she was there, she “prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (v. 10, NRSV). Promising God that if she bore a son she would consecrate him, she prayed silently while her lips mouthed the words. The temple priest, Eli, assumed she was drunk—and like men of privilege and authority often do, he acted on his assumption before getting curious or asking questions to test his hypothesis, and instead of learning from Hannah’s faithfulness and devotion, he judged and condemned her. Rather than accept his false accusations of inebriation and fleeing from the temple at his insistence, Hannah responds thus, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time” (vv. 15–16, NRSV). To his credit, Eli responds to Hannah’s self-defense and self-advocacy with blessings rather than curses.

There are many things that could be teased out of this story, but for now, I wish to focus on the fact that Hannah looked drunk: Perhaps today onlookers would be more inclined to pathologize Hannah than to assume she had imbibed some illicit substance. That is to say, Hannah looked crazy, but she wasn’t. She understood who she was to God, what she needed to do, and what she wanted. Hannah took seriously her righteous desires and her understanding of who God wanted her to be. Being sure of who she was and what she wanted to lay claim to, she was willing to do whatever it took, including risking respectability to both fulfill the divine will and secure the desires of her heart. Hannah took this risk for the sake of spiritual fidelity.

Let’s unpack what I mean by “spiritual fidelity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “fidelity” means, among other things, “the quality of being faithful; faithfulness, loyalty, unswerving allegiance to a person, party, bond, etc.” and “strict conformity to truth or fact.” For fun, let’s add in one more: “Of a description, translation, etc.: Correspondence with the original; exactness” and “the degree to which a sound or picture reproduced or transmitted by any device resembles the original; esp. in high fidelity.” Hannah embodies all of these definitions as she stays true to her self-knowing, her personal revelation, and stands her ground to receive the blessings and social standing she needs to carry out her divinely given mission.

Hannah evinced what philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson describes as “gendered epistemic confidence.” The branch of philosophy known as epistemology, from which the word “epistemic” is derived, addresses questions of how it is that human beings attain knowledge and who has the authority to make knowledge claims. The term “epistemic confidence” refers to a person’s confidence in their own ability to know what is true and false—they recognize themselves as having the authority to know independent of others. Anderson contends that women often lack confidence in their own knowing, as well as their own ethical commitments and practices. She observes, “Confidence as a social phenomenon, but also as a practical disposition of trust in, or faith with oneself as another, remains vulnerable to personal contingencies,” such as gender and other factors that socially shape bodies.1 To have confidence is to be able to say “I can” in regard to knowing and acting in a way that is congruent with that knowledge; yet too often, gender and other factors of embodiment leave a person feeling that within their social context they cannot know and act in accordance with that knowledge.

Women are often at a remove from their own knowing and, as result, from acting with integrity in accordance with that knowing, precisely because they lack this epistemic confidence. They doubt even their own experiences, including spiritual ones, because they believe their knowledge and epistemic confidence must be mediated by others. As the post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly put it, “Women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.”2 In order to protect not only women but all people from such detrimental circumstances, we must allow God to mediate our relationship to the Church and also recognize that just as with Hannah, sometimes it is those in power that need to re-examine their assumptions and perceptions, rather than just the less powerful people whose views may come into collision with them. If I had better understood this more than half of my life ago, I believe I would have made better decisions, ones that were more in line with my understanding of my personal revelation, and been willing to stand my ground when the legitimacy of that revelation was called into question by others with male bodies and institutional power. I would have trusted that ultimately I needed to answer to God for my missionary service and every other part of my life. I would have made choices that reflected the understanding that I live with more accountability to God than to a fallible leader.

In Mosiah 4:9, Benjamin teaches that human beings should always remember that they cannot understand all that the divine understands, “that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.” Here, Benjamin encourages all human beings, regardless of gender, to take a stance of epistemic humility in relation to the divine, recognizing the provisional nature and limits of their own knowledge relative to divine knowledge. Although this is a message I wholly endorse, with regard to the topic of spiritual fidelity and gendered epistemic confidence, I propose that women consider taking “man” here not as a synecdoche for human beings, but in a literal gendered sense. Read this way, Benjamin’s imperative can be interpreted as an injunction for women to resist the diminishment of their sense of confidence as knowers. In the face of both external and internal pressures to discount their own personal revelation, women are to keep in check external (male) resistance to their revelation, since even male authorities cannot know or comprehend all that God does. We can re-read this scripture as an invitation for women to trust and fear God more than men.

One of our greatest challenges in staying faithful to personal revelation is when it comes into conflict with our values of pleasing others or appearing to be nice. This is one of many reasons that, as a community, Latter-day Saints need to hold up the value of integrity and rank it above niceness and people-pleasing when they are at odds with one another. In moments of tension, we must recall Paul’s teaching that seeking human approval and “people-pleasing” subverts the project of being a servant of Christ (see Galatians 1:10). Hannah models this prizing of integrity beautifully, and she is willing to tell Eli that he is wrong, because he is, as scripture makes plain. In this instance, she is the only one who has the full perspective. It is the woman, in this narrative, who carries the whole story and brings God’s purposes to fruition. She believes her own experience of God and does not allow someone else to distort her confidence in that knowing.

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One of my treasured Christmas ornaments is a small lead eight-petaled flower. It was made by an artist who helped create the windows for the Fort Collins temple, and she added a hook to this leftover rosette for me. The eight-petaled flower is a motif in that temple, evoking Colorado’s wildflowers. For me, it also references the eight-pointed star that is a symbol of Christ.

The number eight is associated with the Atonement of Jesus Christ throughout the Bible.1 In Exodus and Leviticus, among the Lord’s detailed instructions for his tabernacle, the rituals performed there, and the conduct of his people, the eighth day is consistently important. In the Bible, the number seven often symbolizes completeness or fullness. In Genesis, for example, God completed the work of creation and rested on the seventh day. An eighth day, then, is something extra—unexpected, even. If seven days make a whole week, then Day #8 is not simply the first day of the second week, but also a new first day. It is not just a beginning, but a beginning again.

Israelite ritual practice in the Old Testament points to this kind of new beginning in Christ. The sweeping saga of Israelite foundations, captivity, and escape ends triumphantly in Exodus with the setting up of the tabernacle. Christ instructed Moses that this ultimate emblem of God’s covenant with and abiding presence among Israel should be set up “on the first day of the first month” (Exodus 40:2, KJV). In other words, at the start of the second year of their wanderings—not just the first day of the year but the first day of a new year.2 Setting up the tabernacle on this day symbolized the new life redeemed Israel could find in Christ.

Scriptures in Leviticus, too, point to the necessity of new beginnings, as sin and uncleanness are presented as inevitabilities of human life. But, as is spelled out in remarkable detail, this restoration—or new life—comes at a cost. It requires purification, sacrifice and atonement, and obedience. This was true in the days of Moses, and it is true today.

First, purification. Among the ancient Israelites, purification occurred on the eighth day. Individuals recovering from bodily afflictions, for instance, went through seven days of cleansing before being restored to new life in the community on the eighth day (Leviticus 14:8–10; 15:13–14, 28–29). Similarly, Aaron and his sons began their new life as priests in the tabernacle on the eighth day, after a seven-day consecration ritual (Leviticus 8:35; 9:1). The process included washing, anointing, and dressing in sacred clothing (Exodus 40:12–13). Followers of Christ’s restored gospel today are also symbolically purified in his holy temple, with washing, anointing, and sacred clothing. Undertaking these steps expresses our desire for a new, holier life in Christ. As God told Moses, he wants to make us into “a kingdom of priests” and priestesses, “and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).

Second, sacrifice and atonement. Leviticus contains an exhaustive description of ritual sacrifice, including how to sprinkle blood, cleave offerings, and burn animal flesh. Sacrifice in the ancient tabernacle was a hands-on, messy business. In a very real way, it pointed to the incredible sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son, who was the “great and last sacrifice” and “an infinite and eternal sacrifice” (Alma 34:10). On the annual Day of Atonement, the Israelite priest made a special sacrifice so that all the people might “be clean from all [their] sins before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:30). Today, we are called to a different kind of sacrifice. The resurrected Jesus Christ declared to the Nephites, “Your sacrifices and your burnt offerings shall be done away . . . . And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (3 Nephi 9:19–20). When we have a broken heart and a contrite spirit, we want to be something different. We recognize our sin and weakness, and we long for repentance. Wanting to sacrifice our old life and begin again, we turn to Christ.

Third, obedience. Leviticus details the laws and regulations for maintaining the Abrahamic covenant. For example, male babies were circumcised on their eighth day of life, initiating a new life as a member of God’s covenant people (Leviticus 12:3). With exactness in their ritual, conduct, and diet, the Israelites showed their desire for God’s presence to remain with them. For us, too, obedience means committing to a new way of living in the world that allows us to find God in ordinary, everyday things. Obedience to the laws of purification and sacrifice didn’t take the Israelites out of the world. Just the opposite: Obedience to these laws highlighted their embodied existence in the material world. And it helped them find God right there in the wilderness with them. In both the Old Testament tabernacle and in the Lord’s temples today, the faithful make covenants with God and promise obedience. Making and keeping covenants manifests our desire to enter the presence of God.

Finally, rebirth is possible. Jesus Christ was resurrected on “the first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:2, Luke 24:1, John 20:1)—the morning of the eighth day. Christ’s Atonement and Resurrection make rebirth possible for each of us. Speaking of Jesus’s mortal ministry, Elder Patrick Kearon recently taught, “Everything He said and did provided a new beginning for each of those He healed, blessed, taught and relieved of sin. . . . All of us can have a new beginning through, and because of, Jesus Christ. Even you. New beginnings are at the heart of the Father’s plan for His children.” This Jesus that went about doing good is the same Lord that appeared in the Old Testament, offering new beginnings there too. And he offers them still today.

My eight-petaled flower ornament is meaningful to me at Christmas, when it reminds me of the new life, light, and hope ushered into the world by the birth of Jesus. But Christ offers us new beginnings every day of the year. His Atonement, death, and Resurrection, which we celebrate during Easter and springtime, provide the ultimate new beginning. Things can be different from what they have been. I can be different from who I have been. “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). At this verdant and abundant time of year, the earth itself reminds us of the miracle of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which gives each of us the possibility of fresh starts, healing, and new life.

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Jennifer Champoux lives in Colorado with her husband and three children. She is an independent scholar with a primary research interest in the visual culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is a co-author of Picturing Christ: Understanding Depictions of Jesus in History and Art and the creator and director of the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. Previously, she taught art history as adjunct faculty at colleges in Boston and Colorado. She holds a BA in international politics from Brigham Young University and an MA in art history from Boston University.

Images of the Fort Collins Colorado Temple from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Learn more about the making of the Fort Collins temple stained glass windows here.

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In the years that I was away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I served as a pastor in a Protestant denomination. Ritual, the liturgical calendar, and contemplative practices were all daily rhythms that wrapped my being in shrouds of life. As I felt called back to the Church, I feared those shrouds would unravel in tattered strands and that my being would suffer in their absence.

It took me but a short while to realize what Elijah learned so long ago: God is not in the whirlwind, the earthquake, the fire, nor the intricate chalice. He is ever present in the sound of sheer silence. He is already there, inextricably intertwined in every fiber of our being.

The Simple Act of Being

“Be still, and know that I am God,” I whisper, placing another cup in its slot in the white plastic sacrament tray—small vessels for grace.

Then again, softer: “Be still, and know that I am.”

And finally, “Be.”

Each word peels away the next layer of self until only silence remains—the silence where God has always been speaking.

Preparing the sacrament has become its own liturgy of breath: inhale, exhale, place the cup, remember the holy. The rhythm itself—the simple movement of hands—becomes prayer. For someone who has walked away from the Church and returned, who has stood at altars both wooden and marble, I have come to see that ritual is not merely a thing the Church holds; it is what holds us.

Ritual as the Shape of Compassion

When I was a pastor and hospice chaplain, ritual was at the center of my doing and being. When I didn’t have a prescribed ritual, I would create one—sometimes needing to do so in the moment. Seeing the grief and bewilderment of a family member while they sat at the bedside of their dying loved one, I would offer a rite fitting for the occasion.

Once I was called in the middle of the night to the bedside of Margaret, a hospice patient who had become dear to me. Noting the heartache of her daughter, who could do nothing more than gaze in helplessness to stop the imminent end of her mother’s mortal life, I offered a ritual.

I went into the kitchen and found a clear bowl and filled it with water. I invited others who were scattered throughout the house to join us. As family members gathered around—mother, aunt, sister, and grandmother—I dipped my finger in the water and made on each of their foreheads the sign of the cross with a circle around it to signify eternity.

“Margaret,” I whispered, pressing my wet finger to her forehead, “I bless your head that has provided much wisdom to guide your family. As you prepare for your transition into eternal life, may it be filled with memories and thoughts of joy and peace.”

Placing my finger over her heart, I said, “I bless your heart that has showed so much love to your family and others, lifting and encouraging them when needed and reminding them that they were never alone.”

I continued on to her lips, hands, and feet, partaking in the at-one-ment that was happening not because of what I was doing or saying but because of what Heavenly Father was doing in the midst of those who had gathered to offer their farewell.

Finding the Sacred Again

When I returned to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I feared what I might lose—the breadth of open-hearted theology, the poetry of mystery, the focus on social justice, the unhurried space of ritual. I thought I would have to trade the shimmering ineffable for the stone-cold certainty of unquestionable doctrine.

And yet, having been back for a couple of years now, I see that the surprise of grace, the depth of ritual, the embrace of mystery, the care for the least of these—it was all still there. Not the same shape, perhaps, but the same pulse. I saw the Spirit in quiet ordinances, in the temple’s slow movements, in the sacrament trays passed hand to hand—ordinary as bread, extraordinary as love.

“That they [may] always remember . . . and have His spirit to be with them.”

These words carry the whole weight of communion. To remember is itself a sacrament.

The Bread, the Cup, the People

I used to don a robe and stole once a month and stand behind a green marble altar in a small Chicago church built by Japanese Americans once confined to internment camps. We broke bread—not just for the memory of Christ but for the unbreakable truth that love can rise even from captivity.

When I lifted the loaf, I felt the tremor of two thousand years—the mystery that God hides himself in hunger, in the hands that offer, in the mouths that receive. Behold, the magnum mysterium.

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

And between those three truths—the world continues to breathe.

Rituals of Returning

Now my rituals wear simpler clothes. I fill trays on Sunday mornings and whisper the psalm that centers me back into the living Presence. I enter the temple to stand in water and speak words for those waiting beyond the translucent veil. I lift my hand in blessing for a child being confirmed, the circle of hands around him alive with quiet power.

It turns out that ritual never required marble altars or candlelight—only love dressed in intention.

Mystery and the Everyday God

Years ago in Tokyo, I sat cross-legged in a Shin Buddhist temple, the air thick with sandalwood. The abbot spoke: “A tadpole will become a frog without effort. But a human being must learn to become humane.”

The words entered me like revelation. Compassion—the intentional learning of love—is the shape of enlightenment. Meister Eckhart would have nodded. Thomas Merton would have smiled his quiet smile.

Later, I would read that Merton said ritual is “imbued with the beloved’s presence.” The work of our hands, when done out of love and compassion, become the very hands and feet of Christ. It’s not creating something ex nihilo but bringing into sight that which Heavenly Father has already placed in our midst.

Ritual, then, is simply the act of seeing—the willingness to notice that God has been here all along.

The Burning Bush of the Everyday

Now, as I place the last of the cups in its slot in the sacrament tray, I think of the faces who will drink from them: the widow still learning to breathe amidst the weight of her grief, the father between jobs, the woman waiting for a door to open. Each one unknowingly walking barefoot on holy ground.

The final cup gleams faintly under the fluorescent light. I pause.

Be still.

Be.

The bush burns quietly, and I, at last, am fully present to it as it is to me.

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Brandyn is a father, author, leadership coach, and avid hiker. He loves to get lost in the mountains or ride his motorcycle while practicing wonder and curiosity for all that he encounters.

Art by Henry John Dobson (1858–1928).

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As I made my way into the house today from the garage, I had to squeeze past the large bin of basketballs, roller-blades, skateboards, and other sports gear that has lurked in the corner for years. I keep putting off hauling these things to the thrift store, thinking my grown sons will want them sometime. But I need to take the stuff away. The abandoned equipment looks lonely; it makes me sad.

I am empty nesting. Technically, the “empty” in this phrase fits me more in terms of my emotions than as a description of my exact family situation—I’ve got a young adult son living in the basement, but he is pretty independent from us socially and emotionally. The other children are out on their own, away at college or married.

When my youngest left home a couple of years ago, it took me a few weeks to recognize that my physical symptoms were related to depression. Depression: a pressing down; lowering; sinking. This definition from Merriam-Webster describes my heaviness that fall. I didn’t tie the heaviness to the fact that my boy was no longer at home because it had never occurred to me that his leaving would take such a toll. For one thing, he had been an especially busy high school senior, and we had gotten used to not seeing him around much. I had assumed that his sleeping at the MTC instead of in his rumpled bed upstairs wouldn’t make much difference. But I hadn’t realized until he was gone how much of my attention before he left had been taken by his needs—what and when he would eat and how to shop for it, how to allocate the use of cars to get him to his various practices, how and where to vacation. Though he was rarely home, he took a lot of my attention. Once he was gone, I wasn’t sure what to do with the new mental space.

But the other reason that my depression surprised me was that, when he was young, I had spent so much time looking forward to his leaving. This is embarrassing to admit—what kind of mother counts the days until her children grow up and leave home? For several years, I had been that kind of mother.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy my children. There had been many moments of joy. How I adored their pink little bodies getting out of the bath and into thick towels and zippered pajamas. I loved rocking them drowsy, singing hymn after hymn. As they grew, I loved their zany costumes, the mouth-generated sounds of light sabers and trucks, the zing of nerf bullets passing my ear. And then, there were the books. I can’t imagine a much greater joy than the one I had reading to them—as toddlers on my lap, as schoolchildren drifting off blearily to Charlotte’s Web. Even as teenagers, they allowed me to read to them, and I chose longer, more complex books than the fantasy escapes they chose for themselves so that we could talk together about science, history, and complicated moral situations. I have many fond memories of parenting my children in my home; it’s been the adventure of my life and I know how blessed I am to have been allowed to participate in it.

But there were days—many days, mostly when the children were babies and toddlers—when the exhaustion and boredom of being home all day and up nursing at night made me so miserable that I would count the weeks, months, and years until I could be free like my mother-in-law who I watched run out to her car and hop in, carrying no diaper bags, to do whatever errands she wanted to do. Or, even better, like my husband, who I watched leave every morning for a job that required his specific talents and skills and for which his patients thanked him with notes and gifts. I loved my young children, but I had no talent for or interest in preschool crafts and imaginative play. I made lists of activities I could do to fill the time—visiting a pet store, a park, an elderly neighbor. One desperate afternoon I took my little ones to a fabric store, not because I could sew or had any money for crafts but just to let them see and touch something different, and to let myself get some air.

I felt, sometimes, as if young motherhood sucked my soul. I felt I was being broken into too many pieces. But I had heard a prophet tell me to give up my ambitions—yes, even my interests, even those tied to the talents given to me by God, the ones mentioned in my patriarchal blessing—in order to be home with my children. And so I did my duty. But I cried with envy as my husband left each morning to attend his graduate school, and then I turned from his goodbye kiss back into our small, dark apartment to change diapers and spoon cereal.

So now I’m here, where I had dreamed back then of someday being, with all the time I want to pursue my own talents and interests. I can pull back into me those parts of myself I had divided out into keeping track of everyone else; I can be whole.

Why, then, do I feel empty?

When Jesus was on the cross, he looked down at his mother. Knowing the emptiness she was facing, he turned to his friend John (whom some say might have been his brother) and told him to behold his mother.

This scene fills me with longing; I want to feel the Lord beholding me. I want Him to acknowledge my emptiness.

He also instructed Mary to behold her son.

What would Jesus direct my sight to now?

I am awaiting grandchildren; I know they will help fill my emptiness. But I know that it is dangerous to give my grandchildren and their parents the responsibility of filling me emotionally. I must find ways to be whole without them.

I have found work that I love, work that uses my talents and exhausts me in a good way each day. But having entered the workforce late after staying home with my young children, I am not as advanced in my career as the men and women who began their careers young. I am limited in what I can do. My husband hasn’t felt anywhere near as empty as I in this stage; I think this is because while I was pouring myself into the children’s lives all those years, he was investing in his career. I’m not saying he was an emotionally distant father, but rather that he had something else that took most of his time and attention, and that thing hasn’t changed for him now that the children have gone. If I had been working all along, building my own career, this change wouldn’t feel so momentous, would it? Would it feel like less of a loss?

I look around me now and see other women my age struggling as the children in whom they have invested their lives are leaving home. Making things even more difficult for many is the fact that some of our children are leaving the Church. Some of them are even distancing themselves from us emotionally, choosing not to continue relationships with us. What a devastating chasm these situations create for the mothers who invested years in caring for their children, making motherhood their primary focus, their primary identity.

During a time when one of my teenagers made it clear that he hated us, I spent hours and hours on my knees, and reading parenting books, and seeking answers in the temple. On Sunday mornings, I let the rest of the family leave for church while I sat on the stairs outside my son’s bedroom. I wouldn’t force him to attend with us, and I had learned it wouldn’t help to try to guilt him into coming, but I wanted him to know I was still there, and wouldn’t abandon him even as he chose a different direction. During those years, I was never sure of anything, constantly harrowed by my own weaknesses, which I believed must have contributed to his contempt.

We tell parents that “no other success can compensate for failure in the home,” but parents don’t have complete control over how their children “turn out.” What, then, is the definition of failure?

One day during this difficult time with my son, my husband and I took a hike together in the mountains where we found ourselves once again discussing our fears about the situation, reviewing again all the things we’d tried and the ways we continued to bumble. And then, in a pause as I stopped again to catch my breath, something happened. A thought like a voice said to me clearly and so emphatically that I believed it, deeply and resoundingly: “Your son has his own story. As for you and your parenting, your offering is acceptable to me.”

I knew then that my child was no longer my business, and that God was gently taking him from my hands, asking me to cease fretting and let go. As my children move away from me, I remember that my heart has been righteous in its yearnings, and I repeat these words to myself.

Paid subscribers can read the remainder of the essay here.

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Darlene Young has published numerous essays as well as three poetry collections (most recently, Count Me In, Signature 2024). A recipient of the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, she teaches writing at Brigham Young University. Her work has been noted in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in South Jordan, Utah. Find more about her at darlene-young.com.

Photos by Michelle Watkins (@michellewatkinsphoto).

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EVENT: Thursday, April 23rd at the Compass

DEADLINE APPROACHING

KEEP READING

FICTION

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It has been an unseasonably warm winter here in Utah. But last week, my yellow daffodils bowed patiently beneath an inch-thick layer of spring snow. I had the urge to go out and prop them up and whisper to them, telling them not to give up—that the sun would show up in the morning to melt the snow so they could stand tall again. Seeing the bent shape of them hold the press of the heavy white blanket, I felt the strange sensation that they had a soul, these tiny flowers I had watched push through the dirt, stretching their arms to the heavens like I sometimes do. Richard Rohr teaches that “when we love something, we grant it soul, we see its soul, and we let its soul touch ours.”

Each April, Earth Day gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the living world that surrounds and sustains us and ask how we can better honor and care for it—how we can let its soul touch ours. Here, we have collected five essays that take up this question from distinct perspectives.

In “Toads Returned,” Mike Maxwell argues that caring for the world is an act of Christian discipleship, recounting the way he has allowed his yard to thrive as its own vibrant ecosystem by curating a naturally healthy environment for native species. In “To Hold Our Inheritances,” Becky Wilson examines the beneficial and detrimental effects of social and natural forces on our landscapes, using the decay of the Great Salt Lake as an example, and offers ways to take responsibility in both stewarding the earth and allowing it to steward us. In “Redeeming Natural Theology,” Rachel Meibos Helps and Steven L. Peck read the natural world’s excess of beauty as evidence of a God who values beauty for its own sake. In “The Wounded Heart of Utah Valley,” Max Perry Mueller tells the story of Utah Lake, which was once the sacred gathering place of the Timpanogos. And in “Loving Our Sacred Home,” Ben Abbott sees Earth not as a storehouse of resources but as a conscious, sacred being to which all of creation is inseparably connected through love.

We hope each of these essays will help deepen your commitment to love and care for your own corners of the world, and recognize the way the earth cares for you in return. Happy Earth Day!

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As I made my way into the house today from the garage, I had to squeeze past the large bin of basketballs, roller-blades, skateboards, and other sports gear that has lurked in the corner for years. I keep putting off hauling these things to the thrift store, thinking my grown sons will want them sometime. But I need to take the stuff away. The abandoned…

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Former president of the American Academy of Religion, Dr. Mayra Rivera, stated in her presidential address that in recent years record-breaking climate disasters have become so commonplace the meaning of “unprecedented” has eroded. As she listed diverse catastrophes, I thought about one ecological crisis close to my heart: the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. This disaster is pertinent to me and my faith community whose church headquarters lie in Salt Lake City. When I visited the lake last December, I was deeply perturbed both by the sixty degree weather and the bird carcasses strewn every few feet across her shores on Antelope Island.

In talking about cataclysm and upheaval, I do not wish to instill fear. Rather, I hope to offer a framework that may provide pragmatic support while sustaining a wonder for life as we respond to our climate realities.

I base this framework on what Dr. Rivera refers to in her presidential address as “looking into the entanglement of our inheritances.” When I refer to the entanglement of our inheritances in this essay, I mean the interactions that have shaped and continue to shape our circumstances. These interactions include the relational ties between people and place that form our social and climate conditions. Such ties can lead to both gifts and damages.

Reflecting on our entanglements centers the relationships that have created our environments and our place within them. When we regard ourselves as inheritors, we recognize both that we have received our circumstances and that we are part of their ongoing creation.

In an exercise of looking into the entanglement of our inheritances, I want to explore how the Great Salt Lake landscape has shaped and been shaped by human settlement. Looking at related webs of creation is nothing short of pressing; in recent decades, the lake has lost over 70% of her water volume. Because reflecting on our inheritances means seeing ourselves in our circumstances, examining the Great Salt Lake’s inheritances is also examining our own. By exploring these entanglements, I suggest a framework for holding and stewarding the relationships that have built our surroundings. Tending to these points of convergence can heal and transform our interconnectedness into life-giving relationality.

From tectonic tension that opened the basin where the lake formed to rivers providing habitat for wetlands of broad-leaf cattails, the Great Salt Lake landscape has been shaped through interactions among forces and ecosystems. These interactions include human influence, such as the role of my Latter-day Saint ancestors who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. My ancestors were determined to secure food and stability after facing famine and persecution as they were forced out of Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri. They quickly began irrigating farms and building settlements, transforming the social and ecological landscape.

These transformations are simultaneously glorious and disastrous. Their rapid development enabled a massive population boom. In just over a decade of the Latter-day Saint arrival, the population more than tripled. This growth has continued; now Utah’s population surpasses 3.5 million. It strikes me that each number in these millions marks the arrival of a person into the world, one who—if you will—comes into being within a vast entanglement of inheritances of their own. For this immensity of life, I take the post-settler transformation of the Valley as extraordinarily tremendous.

Ensuing relationships in the Valley between humans and the lake have extended effects beyond Utah. In 1936, William Brighton opened Utah’s first ski resort, and subsequent development created a recreation industry that now draws millions each year. The Great Salt Lake acts as a natural engine for lake-effect snow, enriching the mountains. Thus, the ski industry is a result of our interactions; we maintain the slopes and the lake helps maintain the snow.

In the 1950s, local residents began harvesting brine shrimp from the lake, a practice that now supports nearly half of the table shrimp consumed worldwide. Likewise, during World War I, the Utah Salduro Company began extracting potash from the lake to compensate for disrupted imports from Germany; today this fertilizer nourishes oranges, berries, pistachios, and almonds grown on farms in California and Florida. Interactions creating world-famous recreational sites as well as global and national food systems between humans and the lake have, like a butterfly effect in motion, sent far-reaching gifts around the world.

Just as post-settler interactions with the Great Salt Lake landscape have borne positive fruits, they have also brought with them far-reaching harms. My early ancestors to Utah built their developments on top of natural grazing lands, diminishing herds of elk and encroaching upon major Indigenous hunting trails, fishing grounds, and campsites.1 These changes blocked access to long-held pathways of livelihood and survival, displacing Timpanogos bands and other Indigenous communities.2

The displacement caused by Mormon settlers not only transformed the environment but was also violent. In 1850, the Mormon militia attacked a Timpanogos village, killing up to 100 individuals in the Fort Utah Massacre. This was not an isolated incident. Reflecting on another massacre along the Bear River, Darren Perry, Elder of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation observes, “It is not without irony that these Mormons who were pushed from their homelands as victims of hate, would soon do the same violence to others.”

Violence committed by my ancestors and other settlers repeated cycles of harm and devastated Native communities. This violence, combined with environmental changes and disease, contributed to the sharp decline of Native populations across the region. Much as each birth marks the arrival of an immense being into the world, each loss marks the departure of the same. This harrowing transformation of the social landscape reveals deep wounds and invites repair.

Practices beginning with my ancestors also started the ongoing displacement of the Great Salt Lake. Missionaries from the British Isles returned to Utah with alfalfa seeds. The hay gained popularity because of its adaptability to the surrounding climate. In time, alfalfa alongside other livestock feed crops became widespread. Irrigation of these water-intensive plantings diverted large amounts of water from rivers that would have otherwise flowed into the Great Salt Lake. These diversions marked the beginning of the lake’s steady decline. Even during a brief surge in the 1980s caused by unusually wet weather, the lake stood five feet lower than she would have without human diversions. Diversions have now caused the lake to receive only about one third of her natural streamflow.

Looking into the entanglement of our inheritances reveals that, while nonhuman interactions have shaped the Great Salt Lake for millennia, recent shrinkage stems largely from human consumption of water. Over 70 percent of this use comes from agricultural irrigation. We continue to cultivate thirsty crops like alfalfa and grass hay because of stable export markets, the availability of existing irrigation, and agricultural infrastructure. Climate change, outdoor municipal water use, and mineral extraction are smaller but nonetheless significant contributors to the lake’s decline. Considering these relationships between humans and the lake underscores the breadth of our entanglements and the ways in which our actions can actively diminish and transform the environment around us.

These relationships also make clear that damages to the lake reverberate through all connected life systems. As we drain the lake, dust arises from her exposed lakebed, increasing the rate of snow pack melt and shortening the snow season. This dust releases particulate matter containing arsenic and other minerals that can enter the lungs and bloodstream and that pose serious health threats to communities inside and outside of Utah. When Owens Lake, a comparable though significantly smaller saline lake in California dried from the overuse of water in the 1920s, neighboring communities dealt with respiratory diseases as dust mitigation efforts cost the state 2.5 billion dollars. Indeed, the lake’s losses are human losses.

The Great Salt Lake landscape abounds with transformations that have resulted in both gifts and damages. To reiterate, while my ancestors built the foundation for a new community that I love, their re-creation of the landscape and deliberate violence contributed to devastation for and displacement of native communities. Likewise, while our relationships with water through the diversion of rivers has supported regional agriculture, these same patterns of irrigation have largely driven the decline of the Great Salt Lake. These relationships reveal our inherent interconnectedness with the land and each other. They also reveal that, without making changes on our part, both the lake and related systems of livelihood cannot be sustained.

We practice holding tension when we look at these inheritances that bring us both wonders and horrors. A recent conversation with one of my professors has made me think that tending to such tensions can lead to new life and healing. My professor told me, “It is often in the convergence of competing truths that sanctity is revealed. This is ultimately what crucified Jesus.” He continued, “He was pulled in tension between justice and mercy, humanity and divinity, tradition and innovation.” My professor’s response etched its way into my soul and made me see how the space Christ created for opposing truths led to retribution, redemption, new life, and creation. Jesus was capable of holding all these tensions completely and likewise is capable of holding all of us in our uniquely contingent and conflicting inheritances.

As competing truths converge for sanctity to be revealed, their relationships are prioritized over their competition. Thus, part of holding tensions together involves a devotion to staying in relationship. This may look like expanding the latticework of our understanding so all tensions, or inheritances, elucidate and inform each other, guiding a path towards healing by allowing the needs of various landscapes and the experiences of diverse people to be held together.

I see paths toward healing arise in the case of the Great Salt Lake landscape as we hold these tensions together. For example, as people attend to alfalfa’s impact alongside its steady demand, rather than dismissing either, they recommend creating stable markets that would allow farmers to transition to less water-intensive crops like wheat.

When each environment, landscape, and inheritance is valued as part of the same latticework, we live within our means to make space for our mutual flourishing. This means we turn aside from developmental projects that, though they may respond to a specific climate calamity, shift harm to other environments by not centering personal responsibility. For the Great Salt Lake, respecting the value of all environments and inheritances points toward reducing our water consumption rather than importing water from distant sources or relying on cloud seeding for manufactured precipitation. Reducing our water consumption includes household efforts for water efficient landscaping and agricultural efforts to lease or donate water shares to the lake.

Our mutual flourishing also requires tending to the harms of specific entanglements. The Wuda Ogwa Restoration project is an example of tending to such wounds from settler violence. This project spearheaded by the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation aims to restore 350 acres of land along the Bear River where the U.S. military massacred hundreds of Shoshone people amid tensions influenced by Latter-day Saint communities. The restoration work is expected to send 13,000 acre-feet of water to the Great Salt Lake each year while transforming former agricultural fields back into wetlands. Volunteers, biologists, and engineers are supporting the effort; last November, hundreds of volunteers from Utah and Idaho helped plant 50,000 native trees and seedlings.

The Great Salt Lake needs about one million acre-feet of additional water each year, but projects like this show the possibility to heal and revive our landscapes as well as each other. I believe it is for these possibilities of repair and new life that sanctity can be revealed in our converging relationships. In this way, our relationships with each other and the world can become sacred and holy.

These potentials in our relationships inform how I interpret my Latter-day Saint faith’s teachings regarding our relationship with the earth. Restoration scripture suggests a role for humans as stewards of the earth, sometimes using language of human dominion. Doctrine and Covenants 59:18 reads that “all things which come of the earth . . . are made for the benefit and use of humanity, both to please the eye and gladden the heart.” This verse carries the potential to fill us with a sense of our belovedness as we view everything as divine gift. It also, I must admit, pinches a vertebra in my spine. By presenting all things of the earth—including deep-sea creatures humans did not know existed for millennia—as made for human pleasure, the verse may incline us to forget that the earth, of which we are a part, has the power to destroy as well as to bless. By forgetting, we risk losing a sense of our ultimate reliance on our surroundings, and thus our humility.

When scriptural rhetorics of stewardship or dominion are viewed in light of the entanglement of our inheritances, however, they suggest that we need not define ourselves based on superiority or inferiority but rather based on our reliance on each other. Letting go of hierarchical ways of understanding ourselves does not mean overlooking differences among forms of life nor applying human value systems and standards to snap-peas or otters. Rather, attention to our entanglements causes us to recognize that the earth can and does dominate humanity as humanity can and does dominate the earth. We come to join with Moses after seeing the creation of the world in saying, “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10).

When we recognize that the earth also stewards us, our role as stewards of the earth invites us to practice gratitude, humility, and joyful reciprocity. We see that from the air we breathe to the food we eat, we exist because of our relationships with our surroundings. As a part of “that which come[s] of the earth,” perhaps we too are created for the benefit of other creations. Our glorification is reliant on each other, and holiness can bloom from the mutual stewarding that creates the conditions for life.

I love the biblical promise that Elijah will turn the heart of the parents to the children and the heart of the children to their parents (see Malachi 4:6, KJV). When read in light of looking into the entanglements of our inheritances, this verse can be viewed ecologically as well as relationally. Turning our hearts to each other may be a call to see the circumstances we have inherited, hold opposing stories and tensions as we examine why these circumstances continue, and respond to our circumstances in order to better mutually steward one another. Doing so has the potential to transform our inevitable interconnectedness with our surroundings into life-giving and holy relationality. The scriptural promise comes with a warning; if we do not build a welding link between us, “the earth will be smitten with a curse” (D&C 128:18).

Like all landscapes, the Great Salt Lake was crafted through natural processes over millions of years. She has also been shaped, and largely diminished, by people. To look into the entanglement of our inheritances is to recognize that we are an integral part of these processes. In holding these inheritances, we recognize that the health of one life-form is the health of us all, inspiring us to hold tensions together so that we can experience mutual flourishing. Repair, redemption, and holiness follow from prioritizing our relationships so that we can pass on an inheritance where new life can continue—inheritances for the lake, for the communities who depend upon her, and for those who will inherit the landscapes we continue to cocreate.

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Becky Wilson was born in Wisconsin and spent most of her growing up years in California. She received her bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University and is pursuing a Master’s of Divinity at Harvard.

Art by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931).

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The Lord my pasture will prepare
And feed me with a shepherd’s care.
His presence will my want supply
And guard me with a watchful eye.
My noonday walks he will attend
And all my silent midnight hours defend.

When in the sultry glebe I faint,
Or on the thirsty mountain pant,
To fertile vales and dewy meads
My weary, wand’ring steps he leads,
Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow,
Amid the cooling verdant landscape flow.

—Joseph Addison, 1672–1719

Toads returned to my backyard last year.

I live in Salt Lake County, Utah, where the namesake of our county, the Great Salt Lake, has come under the cloud of an ominous threat from human overuse of the available water in Northern Utah. The lake is a critical component of our ecosystem, as it protects the Salt Lake area from toxic minerals that lie beneath the lakebed, including naturally occurring arsenic. When the lake recedes, the dry lakebed is exposed to wind erosion that quickly launches the poisonous minerals into the atmosphere, harming all forms of life across the Great Salt Lake basin.

There are other liabilities with the lake’s decline. Salt in the lake prevents the lake from freezing in the winter. This large unfrozen body of water accelerates “lake effect” snowfall from storms originating from the Pacific Ocean during winter months, increasing snowfall by as much as 50%. That snowfall gradually melts in the spring and summer and is the primary water source for the three million people and every other living thing in the semi-arid climate of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem. Less snowfall in the mountains means less runoff water to the lake, creating a baleful downward hydrology cycle.

The wetlands around the lake are also a critical migratory refuge for sixteen million birds that make annual journeys from Alaska to Mexico and back. The decline of lake habitat contributes to declining bird populations. Declining bird populations disrupt the sensitive balance of plant life, insects, amphibians, fish, and brine shrimp (“Sea Monkeys,” for those of you old enough to remember), mammals, and inevitably, humans.

Two years ago, to do my small part in addressing lake decline, I let a quarter acre of my Kentucky Bluegrass lawn die by ending my practice of watering it with automatic sprinklers three to four times a week during hot summer months. No more water, no more fertilizer. No more weed killer. No more grub pesticides. I simply let grass on this quarter acre die and allowed it to repopulate with native plant species that had evolved to thrive in northern Utah’s semi-arid climate. All of this ended up in a Washington Post story that summer.

I didn’t let all of my lawn die. I preserved an area under a large Sycamore tree where the grass does not need as much water due to shade from the tree. It’s an area for family picnics and where my grandkids play when they come over. I still water it and it still gets some traditional lawn treatment, including modest fertilizer and weed herbicides, though I have scaled those back significantly from my past practices.

My yard is a few hundred yards from a small creek that flows out of nearby Corner Canyon. When we moved into this newly built subdivision twenty-five years ago, indigenous boreal toads populated our suburban neighborhood. Within five years of our moving in, the toads disappeared from our yard.

Amphibians are incredibly sensitive to toxins. Their departure from habitat is often a “canary in a coal mine” barometer of the declining health of an ecosystem.

My Christian discipleship calls me to care for all of creation. Latter-day Saint theology enshrines this ethos powerfully in restoration sources like the Doctrine and Covenants1 and in the temple endowment narrative. I find this best illustrated in the Gospel of John 3:17, where the author writes, “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

Originally authored in Greek, the English word “world” is a translation of the Greek word “cosmos.” Cosmos is all creation. It’s every living thing that is created. Jesus’s mission is to all creation, not only the people, though people might be the highest form of God’s creation. The call I hear in scripture is to make my best effort to emulate Jesus, which includes ministering to people as well as the rest of creation. That’s how I understand Christian discipleship.

Fast forward to two years ago. After turning off the water and returning my quarter acre to its natural habitat, the toads reappeared—paradoxically, after we stopped dumping thousands of gallons of water on our lawn every summer. Environmental dryness from climate change is a frequent culprit in the disappearance of amphibious creatures across the globe so somehow my actions had the opposite effect.

I don’t believe my toad recovery came from turning off the water. Rather, I believe it was the discontinuance of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers that I had been applying to this space for the past twenty years. Without a non-native pristine Kentucky Bluegrass lawn to cultivate, there was no longer any reason to be spreading toxic chemicals on that quarter acre.

In addition to toads, garter snakes, squirrels, and voles also returned. So did owls, hawks, and falcons, hunting the small creatures. Rather suddenly, we were seeing all of these species in our yard again. Nature is resilient when we give it a chance.

Juvenile toads are particularly sensitive to toxins like pesticides and herbicides, and I rarely see them in the bluegrass area. Once they mature, with greater resilience, the adult toads seem to really like the small bluegrass lawn patch, despite the modest lawn treatments I still use in that area, which is cooler and wet with more bugs to eat and more hiding places in the long grass.

My unscientific theory is that when the juvenile toads from the creek made their way toward my yard in those first few years of our residency, they were met with an impossible concentration of toxins that were far too much for their immature constitutions to survive. Lawn herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. So they stopped coming. They stopped even trying.

But by creating healthy conditions for the juveniles to mature, toads now come and stay through adulthood. The juveniles flourish in the indigenous habitat. The adult toads can abide in all of my yard and enjoy, and even seem to prefer, the tranquility they find in “fertile vales and dewy meads” of the cool, wet Kentucky Bluegrass area beneath the shade of the large sycamore tree. The toads, my grandkids, and I all thrive “amid the cooling verdant landscape” in this small corner of creation, which I steward and call home.

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Mike Maxwell serves on the boards of Latter-day Saint Earth Stewardship and Great Salt Lake Interfaith Action Coalition, organizations activating communities of faith in the effort to save the Great Salt Lake.

Art by Werner Drewes (1899–1985).

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“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” —Attr. Flannery O’Connor

“Writing is a form of prayer.” —Franz Kafka

Wayfare loves words, and since you, lovely reader, are reading Wayfare, I’m willing to bet that you love them too. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you not only love reading words, but working with them. Learning them, arranging them, splicing them, dicing them, befriending them, rearing them, poking at them with a stick, crouching in a stream all night with a net as you watch bleary-eyed for the right one, the one you’ve been waiting for, to flash in the moonlight. In other words, writing.

Writing is a joy—and frustrating, mystifying, and a lot of hard work! Thankfully, the world is full of wonderful guides. What follows is a brief (and non-exhaustive!) list of such guides that Wayfare staff have turned to in their own writing adventures. Whether you’re writing a piece of scholarship, a poem, a novel, a talk for next Sunday, or tonight’s journal entry, we hope you might find one of these resources useful like we have.

Also, it’s worth remembering: “There is no good writing, only rewriting.” The phrase has been attributed to everyone from Tolstoy to E.B. White, but regardless of the provenance, we think it’s true (whichever famous writer said it, they know their stuff!). We become when we write, and just like there are many ways to become, there are many ways to write. So trust that your own process will find you, and that this is something we can all enjoy refining over our lives! To paraphrase Paul, test everything and hold on to what’s good.

Please also enjoy a few photographs of bookshelves belonging to Wayfare staff, displaying many of these beloved companions. Reader, beware: Your browser may experience a mysterious multiplication of shopping tabs; at the same time your wallet may experience a certain lightness of being.

Enjoy!

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain - George Saunders

George Saunders presents seven short stories by Russian masters of the form followed by analysis of how each story works (or doesn’t). The stories are beautiful, the analysis incisive; the book teaches by example, over and over again. Each story brings different tools and techniques to the party.

Ryan Fairchild

And along the way, George Saunders reminds us why both writing and reading stories changes us. You’ll be inspired to be not just a better writer, but a better person.

Jeremiah Scanlan

This book not only changed the way I approach writing, but more importantly, it changed the way I read story.

Katie Lewis

On Writing Well - William Zinsser

The book that got me hooked on reading about writing. Clear, practical advice about the principles, methods, forms of, and attitudes we bring to writing. Focused on writing non-fiction, especially journalism, but applicable to all forms of writing.

Sunny Stimmler

Becoming the Writer You Already Are - Michelle Boyd

Becoming the Writer You Already Are is geared primarily towards academics and academic writing, but Boyd’s approach is to provide tools and practices for writers to identify their own writing process, which is valuable for all writers! I love the focus here on process and uncovering the default process that a writer has, and then finding ways to lean into that process, rather than resisting it. Definitely a book I’ll revisit again and again.

Conor Hilton

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within - Natalie Goldberg

Writing Down the Bones is the book I go to when I’ve let my inner critic take over or when I’ve talked myself out of writing altogether. Drawing on her background in Zen Buddhism, Natalie Goldberg treats writing like a spiritual practice. Through personal anecdotes and practical exercises, Goldberg encourages writers of all levels to show up to the page regularly, with honesty and courage, and to use the ordinariness of life as their best material. It is hopeful, funny, and inspiring all at once.

Tricia Cope

Rhetorical Grammar - Martha J. Kolln & Loretta S. Gray

Rhetorical Grammar is the rare college textbook I decided to hold on to after I graduated. It succinctly and clearly describes various grammatical rules and patterns, but more importantly, it also describes how grammar can help authors get their ideas across most efficiently.

Mark Melville

The Elements of Style - William Strunk & E. B. White

Rule 17: “Omit needless words.” A most assigned college text, The Elements of Style is as beloved as it is short. Dorothy Parker put it well: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” In a more positive key, Elements drives home a lesson: every draft needs to be rewritten. It makes a good place to begin—and then begin again.

Benjamin Peters

Plain Style - Christopher Lasch

A critical older sibling to The Elements of Style, historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style convincingly elevates matters of punctuation and plain style to no less than the stakes of democracy. We are in trouble when we cannot call things by their proper names and cannot deliver “plain, forthright speech.” Lasch’s witty principles both model and convince that writing in a plain style is worth the struggle. I know of no other political essay of a high order that doubles as a primer on clear writing. (The Joys of Yiddish might attend the same family reunions.)

Benjamin Peters

Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird is the book I turn to when I need to get out of my own way and get words on the page. Anne Lamott manages to combine no-nonsense tough love with just enough tenderness to keep writers from giving up. I credit her encouragement to overcome perfectionism (“The voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,” she declares) and write terrible first drafts (she uses a more pithy and profane word) with getting me through every wobbly, uncertain first stab at a story.

Lorren Lemmons

Love, love, love this book.

Sunny Stimmler

This book’s good enough to be a beach read and simultaneously change your writing and your life!

Tricia Cope

Making Your Case - Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner

Although this short book is written for lawyers, I can’t think of a better resource for how to make a clear, organized, and persuasive argument. Scalia and Garner teach how to cut to the heart of a matter both at the structural level and sentence level—how to polish grammar and word choice so that the argument shines clearly. Whatever one’s politics, it’s hard to argue with the fact that Antonin Scalia was one of the most talented writers in the history of the US Supreme Court, and it’s a treat to learn from him and Bryan Garner.

Jeremiah Scanlan

They Say, I Say - Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein

A brief, actionable guide to scholarly writing, providing clear ideas for how to structure sentences, paragraphs, and essays. I particularly love the way that the authors help writers embed their ideas in an ongoing scholarly conversation.

Conor Hilton

A great teaching tool. Full of sentence templates for “the moves that matter in academic writing.” I’ve used it for years with student writers at all levels.

Sunny Stimmler

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation - Lynne Truss

A very entertaining read, even for people not invested in correct punctuation usage. While you’re laughing at her examples, the author is reminding you how to decide what punctuation to use, and where to put it.

Lori Forsyth

Seven Drafts - Allison K. Williams

Editing can feel insurmountable, especially with a messy draft. I love Williams’s systematic approach to tackling different aspects of writing—each draft focuses on a different element, whether a building block like plot, character, or setting or the nuts and bolts of language itself. The book is geared toward book-length projects, but it’s packed with gems that can be applied to any writing project.

Lorren Lemmons

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace - Joseph M. Williams & Joseph Bizup

This book gives actionable steps for making your writing clear and succinct. It’s an excellent resource on revising writing, especially for places in a draft where it may have taken several sentences to discover what you were really trying to say! Williams and Bizup help bridge the gap between a vague goal of writing that “flows” and “makes sense” and actually achieving a text that’s approachable to readers.

Layne Christensen

The Chicago Manual of Style

The reference is an inimitable beast. Use it. Cite it. Never, ever read it. Wage grammar wars with your nerd friends with it. (Cede only begrudgingly to other style guides such as APA, MLA, IEEE, and the like.) It contains the closest thing I know to a searchable complete compendium of all the style, usage, and grammar details necessary to write, edit, index, and work in professional English.

Benjamin Peters

Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing - John R. Trimble

Probably the first book I ever read on how to write—the first of many to encourage clear, concise writing with great tips on thinking well and increasing readability. It focuses on literary analysis and the structure of traditional academic essays. Trimble’s style itself is precise and full of light humor, busting the myth that academic writing must be dry and dull.

Sunny Stimmler

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

Most of us have grown up hearing various English “rules,” but this dictionary shows that many of these rules get in the way of clear writing. In fact, the language’s best writers (e.g., Shakespeare) have flouted the rules for centuries. A reference book with “dictionary” in the title sounds like a snooze fest, but the entries are written in a surprisingly entertaining style, with just the right amount of snark. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage will tell you which rules you can safely ignore—and which will actually help you.

Mark Melville

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In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we spend a lot of time talking about covenants. We speak of the covenant with our first parents, with Enoch, and especially the covenant with Abraham and Sarah. In the book of Exodus, we find a record of the first covenant that God made with Israel as a whole people. Occasionally overlooked and often misunderstood, the Sinai Covenant is the covenant that the biblical authors are most concerned with. We usually call this covenant the law of Moses. Although the law of Moses can sometimes have a negative reputation among members of the Church (and broader Christianity), this is an unfortunate characterization of the primary way in which Jehovah interacted with his children for centuries.

Back in Exodus 6, as the Lord began the process that would culminate at Mount Sinai, he told Moses what he wanted for Israel: “And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7, KJV). Fundamentally, this is the Old Testament idea of God’s relationship with Israel. Israel is to be Jehovah’s people, and he is their God. All of the commandments, regulations, and covenants that the Lord gave to his people in the scriptures were in service to this bond. When Deuteronomy commands Israel to “love God” (see Deuteronomy 6:5), this love is essentially an expression of the deep relationship that God is forging with Israel.

Thus, when Jehovah brings the people to Mount Sinai and offers them a covenant relationship with him, he elaborates on his purpose behind giving Israel a covenant: “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:4–6). This, then, is the vision of the law of Moses and the Sinai Covenant: “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” The law of Moses should not be understood as a bad law, given to bad people, but was instead a way for the Lord to help Israel, then and now, to become the kind of people that he wants them to be.

Even before Jehovah gives Israel a single commandment, the Israelites affirm, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Rather than describing a people who are wicked and rebellious, Exodus begins with the depiction of a people who are willing to do anything God asks them, even before they know what that is going to be. This is an act of tremendous faith on the part of the Israelites, as they choose to put their trust in a covenant relationship with Jehovah even before they know what the parameters of that bond are going to look like. A covenant with the Lord is not intended to be transactional, where we keep God’s commandments in order to get what we want. It is instead based on our trust in a divine Heavenly Father who wants us to be like him and has prepared a plan to that end. The covenants we make today are part of the plan, and so were the covenants in ancient Israel.

This perspective invites questions on what it means to be a “holy people” and a “kingdom of priests.” The laws in the law of Moses give a clue about this. As it is currently organized in our Bible, the first commandments in Jehovah’s covenant path are what we call the Ten Commandments. These commandments involve regulations about the proper ways to interact with God and proper ways to interact with other human beings. Note that Exodus puts the connection with God first and foremost: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This is followed by a command against images and idols. These commandments indicate that one of the most important aspects of humanity’s part in the covenant is our faithfulness to God.

This kind of enduring faithfulness is not something that we only feel for God when things are going the way we want them to go. Our covenant with the Lord and his relationship with us is not something we enter into simply to get blessings. God is trying to make his people into something holy, and sometimes that process can be painful. Because of our covenant trust in Jehovah we understand that his cosmic perspective is superior to our own mortal views. The ancient Jewish midrash on Exodus, Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, contains a beautiful expression of the kind of trust enjoined by our covenant connection. This text is a commentary on Exodus 20:20 by Rabbi Akiva, one of the most famous Jewish sages.

R. [Akiva] says: Ye Shall Not Do with Me [Ex. 20:20]. Ye shall not behave towards Me in the manner in which others behave toward their deities. When good comes to them they honor their gods. . . . But when evil comes to them they curse their gods. . . . But ye, if I bring good upon you, give ye thanks, and when I bring suffering upon you, give ye thanks.1

This is not always easy to do, but it is no mistake that trust in God is at the foundation of the covenant path and the beginning of the doctrine of Christ. Sometimes we try to turn something else into Jehovah, like ancient Israel did with the golden calf, but one of the lessons of the revelation on Mt. Sinai is for us to let God be who he really is, rather than who we want or imagine God to be.

Thus, one of the primary purposes of the scriptures is to show us that God is a being in whom we can trust. For the ancient Israelites, the primary saving event was the rescue from Egyptian bondage. We see in Exodus 19 and 20 Jehovah pointing to bringing Israel out with a mighty hand. For us, the primary saving event is the redemption and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We participate weekly in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper so that we can “always remember” what God has done for us. Remembering and focusing on these events and the covenants associated with them help us to appreciate the ways in which God is helping his children become a “kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.”

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Avram R. Shannon earned a BA in ancient Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University (2007), a master of studies in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford (2008), and a PhD in Near Eastern languages and cultures with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in religions of the ancient Mediterranean from The Ohio State University (2015).

Art by Isidor Kaufmann (1853–1921).

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

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Wayfare Issue 7 contains something special: a new piece of music by Jon Forsyth called “Let Me Drown With Moses,” which is equal parts bluesy and folky, inspired by Appalachian hymnody.

Even better, YOU are invited to join the first-ever Wayfare Flash-Mob-Sing-Thing to learn, record, and perform “Let Me Drown With Moses,” under the direction of Dr. Kameron Kavanaugh, artistic director of Sound of Ages.

Will you sing with us?

Part 1: Next Wednesday, April 22, 6:30PM

Our “ad hoc ward choir” will meet for one hour in Provo (near BYU) to learn and record (informally) this new piece of music. Note: The address will be sent to you after you sign up—see link below. Singers of all abilities are welcome, and we definitely want YOUR voice. (Especially recruiting basses and tenors ... you know how it is!)

Part 2: Next Thursday, April 23, 7:00PM

Our “ad hoc ward choir” will perform “Let Me Drown With Moses” at the Wayfare Issue 7 release party at The Compass Gallery in Provo (250 W Center St). Not only will the music be fun, but the event is always a great party, and you’ll be the first to hear and see the gems in Wayfare Issue 7.

Sign up and invite your friends too by filling out this quick form.

Sing-Along Sign-Up

And if you haven’t already, RSVP for the release party at The Compass Gallery.

RSVP

Thanks!

Wayfare Music Team

PS: Note that we’ll cap the choir at about 40 voices. First come, first sing.

I. A Familiar Sunday

During sacrament meeting last week, I found myself unexpectedly moved by a verse from Will L. Thompson’s hymn:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Do something more 
Than dream of your mansion above.
Doing good is a pleasure, a joy beyond measure,
A blessing of duty and love.”

As the congregation sang, I felt a tightening beneath my ribs followed by a quiet gathering of attention. Reality pressed close. The chapel became thick with presence.

I was filled with awe—and gratitude.

I had felt that abiding immanence before—on long runs in wide and wordless places—but never in the repetition of sacrament hour, never among others. Something in the familiar rhythm opened slightly, and what was ordinary began to feel quietly revelatory.

Having been baptized only months earlier—on May 11, 2024—I was still learning how a sense of covenant belonging rearranges one’s inner architecture.

What settled on me that morning had a name I had not spoken in years: kabōd, the weight of divine presence.

II. The Weight in Glory

In the Jewish scriptures, kabōd ( כָּבוֹד) shares its root with kāvēd (כָּבֵד), the liver—regarded in antiquity as the body’s heaviest organ. From this sense of anatomical weight, the word expands to signify heaviness, mass, and eventually the dense, felt substance of divine presence pressing upon the world.1

But as the term traveled across languages and time, its meaning changed.

In the Septuagint, kabōd becomes doxa (δόξα) in Greek and later gloria in Latin—reframing divine presence not as weight but radiance, not as proximity but as splendor.2

But the Restoration reclaims the weight of glory within a radically intra-ordinary reality—one that sacramentalizes the mundane rather than escaping it.

Per Joseph Smith, “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure” (Doctrine and Covenants 131:7)—stark non-dual ontology articulated in a nineteenth-century idiom.3

Spirit made wholly real and matter made really whole.

They are not divided into higher and lower orders of being—they are one consecrated reality.

If spirit is matter more fine or pure, its distinction is one of degree rather than kind. Fineness implies greater subtlety; purity implies coherence unimpeded. Refinement, then, is not reduction but intensification: a heightened degree of relational capacity sustained within the luminous order of glory.

Smith then boldly expands glory’s polyvalent nature, identifying it as “intelligence”—a move reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s observation that “we are a way for the universe to know itself.”4

What Sagan gestures cosmically, Restoration scripture names intimately: The light that fills the immensity of space is the light that enlightens our eyes, animates our senses and quickeneth our understanding.5

And if existence itself is a gift—as Adam Miller states—then glory is that gift awakened.

Through those sentient eyes, scripture speaks of glory’s many experiential modes: a weight we can feel, a light we can see, and a power that quietly changes whatever it touches.6

And here—in its plurality—glory restored reveals its essential character: It never exists alone.

In John’s Gospel, glory is not withheld but extended: “The glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one” (John 17:22).

Glory is not divine ornament but the medium through which unity becomes possible.

III. The Space Between

There is a coherence that holds without pressing, a way things belong before they know their own names—felt not as brilliance, but as balance.

Glory abides here—where spirit and matter meet in degrees, and either-or falls silent before the symphony of both-and.

It is the quiet grammar by which reality speaks and is known. Like grammar, it is not learned so much as awakened to. Long before a child understands its rules, those rules are already at work—ordering breath into sound, sound into meaning. The same grammar that holds a child’s first halting words also holds Shakespeare’s soliloquies. What changes is capacity.7

An analogue appears in what Alfred North Whitehead calls creativity, “the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact,” by which “the many become one and are increased by one”—an advance rooted in relational becoming rather than external command.

So too with glory—the many gathering into one, ever deepening by degree.

It coheres but never commands, rendering reality intelligible long before intelligence is organized into awareness.

Awareness ripens into fruit; fruit into agency; and with agency, freedom—the risk without which love is not yet real.

And in Christ, love is at-one with grief, sealed by a hope beyond loss.

IV. The Widow

As a physician assistant trained in emergency medicine, I have spent years meeting people on the worst days of their lives. The stories that change me are rarely the dramatic ones. Instead, they are the quiet moments of recognized meaning, when patients teach me what I would otherwise never know.

One such moment came with a mother who has never left me.

She was in her forties, visibly grieving, composed yet hollowed, bringing her four-year-old to the ER for chest pain.

His tests were normal.

He was fine.

She was not.

Months earlier, her husband, only fifty, had died suddenly of an aortic dissection. She had rushed him to the ER but left to arrange childcare.

He died before she returned.

She had moved to California with her children to be near family, carrying widowhood and catastrophe.

In the sterile ER light, she showed me pictures—her husband, their father, a life upended.

I broke—then opened—and finally sobbed with her.

The pain in that room was vast, but not despair. It was the holy weight of love refusing to vanish. Her lament did not need words to be understood.

She wore a small cross. I asked if she had a church. She did—a nondenominational church that she had recently started attending.

I told her, gently, “I’m a Latter-day Saint.”

She smiled.

Back in Arizona, her neighbor had been a bishop.

The ward had cared for her after the death—meals, moving help, presence.

There was a weight to their kindness—creative, steady, and communal—a glory that doesn’t blind but binds; not brilliance but bearing.

It was glory made tangible—the divine weight of a community’s lament carried in casseroles and boxes, in the quiet fulfillment of covenant: to mourn with those who mourn, and to comfort those who stand in need of comfort. The many, gathered in grief, became one.

She hugged me before she left.

For a moment, the world seemed to contract around a shared center.

The room grew heavy with that same weight, the gravity of grief, joy enough to make strangers kin.

Presence gathered.

Faith embodied.

And the Church became as true as the gospel.

The Book of Mormon also portrays this illuminated solidarity most vividly in 3 Nephi 17, where Christ’s shared weeping becomes the medium through which glory descends. Presence becomes communion, grief becomes luminous, and the divine is revealed not in spectacle but in tears (see 3 Nephi 17:5–23).

Through tears, a line from Orson Pratt surfaced gently in my mind—wherever wisdom, knowledge, love, and truth dwell, there dwells God in all his glory.8

In that ER room, the texture was the same. Glory was not something withheld for another world, nor confined to temples or visions. It was the recognizable residue of God’s own character, and wherever that character appears, God is already present.

I felt a quiet reverence settle over us.

Awe—then gratitude followed.

V. The Glassblower

That night after my shift, a simple image appeared on my screen: three jars of increasing size, each holding the same dark knot.9

It stopped me.

Grief shifts—but its center of mass remains. We grow around what we cannot lay down.

The next morning I recalled a quote from psychologist and theologian Gerald May:

“Grief is neither a disorder nor a healing process; it is a sign of health itself, a whole and natural gesture of love . . . . No matter how much it hurts . . . grief can be an end in itself, a pure expression of love.”10

What followed surprised me.

As I gazed in quiet contemplation, something in the sketch began to change, though nothing otherworldly had intruded.

Reality became intra-ordinary, softening into something luminous.

The jar lines thickened into presence, molten residue at its edges, softened by heat, faintly aglow.

The knot inside had not diminished, yet the vessel seemed newly capable of bearing it.

A figure materialized—a glassblower—

and with him the sense that lament, when held in love, becomes workable matter.

Not erased.

Not resolved.

But warmed, opened, and capable of shape.

I saw him bending over the furnace, gathering what once felt rigid and dark, touching it to flame, then exhaling the original grace of life into what had been cold and unworkable.

Heat, breath, and turning—nothing more—yet together they were capable of transforming what seemed shattered into something strong and translucent, able to bear light.

And in that softening, I again recognized what I had felt that morning in sacrament meeting.

Kabōd—

the unfolding shape of glory.

I was again struck with awe—

and the deep gratitude that follows in its wake.

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Jason Lomheim is a happily married father of two and a recent convert, baptized on May 11, 2024. His work explores the challenges of discipleship, theological questions, and the luminous moments of inspiration that mark his faith journey.

Art by Anton Hlávacek (1842–1926).

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The woman kneels in the sharp grass at the water’s edge and gently sets a handwoven basket into the cold current. A forbidden child sleeps inside. The mother has defied Pharaoh for as long as possible. She can no longer hide her son; he has outgrown her protection. Jochebed checks once more to ensure no water is entering the vessel she has prepared with pitch and straw, the meager resources of a Hebrew slave. The basket is tight, secure. She glances around to make sure she is undetected by the soldiers who guard this part of the Nile. She looks in at her boy, and the ache deep inside starts to rise. God has guided her to do the very thing Pharaoh decreed—throw her Hebrew son into the water. How will he survive the dangers, the currents, the evils lurking beneath? Where will the water carry him? She forces herself to push past her fears and begins to close the basket. For the last time, she reaches in and gently brushes the boy’s hair from his forehead. At her touch, she sees again, with savage clarity, the vision.

It first came just after her baby crowned, after Jochebed pushed into the sacrificial fire of childbirth instead of pulling back. Puha, the midwife, breathed in wonder and whispered, “The child is still within the veil.” As Puha’s hands gently opened the sac to draw out the child, water gushed forth, and with the flood, divine sight:

The color blue-green, everywhere. A deafening sound—the roaring of water. A fierce current, unyielding and inescapable, driving a small vessel toward a foreordained destiny. Separation. Confusion. Followed by dominance. Position. Wealth. Jochebed, trembling, knows it is the child’s destiny. Water, everywhere. Power, immense. Rejection. Meekness. Pain. And finally: A burning tree that does not consume. Glory. God . . .

The vision fades. Jochebed has seen, like the prophetess Sarah, Mother of Israel, that her son is destined for greatness. She knows, somehow, that the water that was meant to destroy will deliver him. It is this assurance from God that has given her the strength and the wisdom to prepare this vessel—this ark—that will carry him safely through the water. And yet, Jochebed hesitates. She watches over her son a little longer. She basks in his loveliness, trying to memorize his small features. The child is heavenly, possessing a beauty uncommon even among the Egyptians. Her son is strong yet vulnerable, only months old. Her certainty about casting him into the water has begun to fade when Miriam’s voice brings her back.

“Mother. Mother!”

Jochebed spies her daughter’s face across the river, hidden in the reeds. Miriam, her eldest child, who awoke that morning with the idea that she was quick and small enough to hide undetected and watch where the water would carry her brother, is now frantically pointing. Jochebed glances around and sees an Egyptian soldier coming toward her. Quickly, she secures the top with a leather strap, pushes the basket into the Nile, and stands up. She has agonized about this moment for months, and it is over in an instant. She grabs her water pots, turns, and waves her arm to draw the soldier’s attention away from the water. It works. He has not seen the basket floating downstream. Unconcerned, he follows as she walks back to the settlement.

With each step, as the distance grows between Jochebed and her children, her faith and resolve threaten to break. Will they survive beyond her reach? Did she use enough pitch? Will Miriam know what to say if she is caught? With mounting fears, she parts her lips and prays. Please, God, let the water guide and not destroy. Please, let Miriam, so quick and wise, witness her brother’s deliverance.

Deliverance. The word wraps around her like a shawl. Jochebed begins to hum the words of a song the elders of Israel have sung for decades about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. She can hear the deep, harmonious voices of the sons of God, bringing peace to her soul:

Who is he? The Deliverer. The Mighty Deliverer. Who delivered Abraham an heir—the first of a nation as numerous as the stars in heaven, causing life to bloom in the barren desert of Sarah’s womb.

Who is he? The Deliverer. The Mighty Deliverer. Who delivered Isaac from the altar of sacrifice to test both him and Abraham, and provided a ram in the thicket.

Who is he? The Deliverer. The Mighty Deliverer. Who delivered Jacob from famine and brought his beloved son, Joseph, long thought dead, back to him again.

O, Who is he? Who is the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob? He is the God of Deliverance—the God of Miracles. And he will deliver Israel once more.

As Jochebed finishes the song, she stops on a hill close to home. At last, she dares to look back toward the river, wondering where her son has been carried, hoping Miriam has seen. She watches and waits, needing deliverance. Then, in the distance, she sees Miriam running. As she draws closer, Jochebed sees that her face is streaked with tears. Her legs buckle beneath her. What if?

Kneeling, she hears Miriam shouting, laughing. Miriam’s tears are tears of joy! She throws her arms around her mother and explains that the waters carried the basket to Pharaoh’s sister, who heard the baby crying and had compassion on him. He was too beautiful! She believes her gods have brought him to her. She will raise him, but she needs a wet nurse. “I told her I would bring someone. Come, Mother! Come quickly.”

Jochebed takes Miriam’s hand, and as they race back to the river, her mind repeats the words of the ancient song again: Who is he? The Deliverer. The Deliverer! The Mighty Deliverer.

Miriam leads Jochebed to the porch of Pharaoh’s sister. The baby continues to wail. It is a strange sound. She has never heard him cry so loudly. He would surely have been detected and killed by the soldiers if he had cried that loudly at home. Pharaoh’s sister places the child in Jochebed’s arms. “Feed my son. I will pay you for your time.” Jochebed nods. The two women, tall and handsome, see each other eye to eye, and they know the other knows—this boy must survive. Their gods have revealed it to both of them.

“His name will be Moses,” Pharaoh’s sister finally says. “Because I drew him out of the water.”

But you were not the first, thinks Jochebed, who remembers Puha, who drew him out of her womb.

Later that night, as Jochebed breastfeeds Moses, basking in the wonder of deliverance, she quietly sings the ancient songs. Her eyes grow heavy. She sleeps but dreams:

The roaring sound of rushing waters. Great walls of sea rising high on either side—a highway in the deep. Water pulling back; dry ground. The Hebrews running. Pharaoh’s chariots closing in. A man standing at the water’s edge, arms outstretched, holding a branch of the burning tree high in the air. It is Moses. The water that was meant to destroy will save. His eyes are full of fire—the power of God coursing through him. Moses! Moses has become a living ark, carrying an entire nation through the water, a vessel of God to deliver his people from extinction. Moses—the one who draws out.

Jochebed awakes, trembling. She has seen again, like the prophetess Sarah, that her son’s deliverance is the deliverance of many. Moses is great beyond her understanding. She remembers the first vision and knows that his path to this future moment will lead him through great loneliness, rejection, and pain. She aches to shield him from it all, when a quiet assurance, like before, washes over her, and she knows his family will walk with him, Aaron and Miriam. The rest is unclear.

The baby stirs in her arms, rooting. As she puts him to her breast, feeling him eagerly draw out her milk, Jochebed looks into his angelic face with awe. Who is he? The Deliverer. The Mighty Deliverer.

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Charlotte Eaves Winder has a degree in English Teaching from BYU and is working on a Master’s in Creative Writing from Harvard Extension School. She has taught LDS seminary and institute and enjoys spending time with her family, reading, and gardening.

Art by Winslow Homer (1836–1910).

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could have whatever you want, whenever you want it, without needing to gain it or make it by the work of your own hands? Pixar’s prescient 2008 film WALL-E raises this question and responds in compelling fashion (WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton [Emeryville, CA: Disney Pixar, 2008]).

The movie portrays a world in the not-too-distant future that is supposed to be utopia. Humans have taken up residence aboard the outer-space cruise ship the Axiom (funded by retail mega-giant “Buy-n-Large”), in which your every wish is granted at the touch of a button—while you continue to recline atop your hovering armchair. A pleasant voice intones over the PA, “Buy-n-Large: everything you need to be happy!” Lunch-in-a-cup is delivered directly to your hover-chair. Screens projected inches in front of the passive viewers constantly pipe in prepackaged entertainment (alongside a steady stream of ads, of course). Liberated from labor, people swell up to comic proportions; the population looks like a band of oversized babies. Consumption has wholly supplanted creation.

Would it be great to live in a world where you are freed from the need to work with your hands? The movie answers with a resounding no: life aboard the Axiom looks a lot more like a dystopia. It takes a spunky little garbage-collecting robot called WALL-E to help recover a more human future for the erstwhile occupants of earth. And tellingly, essential to the rescue strategy is reconnecting with creation: WALL-E has to deliver a fragile seedling, a sign of life from a forgotten planet, into the heart of the Axiom in order to initiate the return voyage home. The movie concludes with the bewildered humans putting the precious young plant into the ground as the captain of the ship explains, “This is called farming!” The epilogue during the end credits shows people creating anew: gardening and building and painting and more. It’s a beautiful coda to a moving film—one that helps us understand just what is at issue in our adoption (or lack thereof) of the quiet ambition’s calling to work with our hands.

The problem is not that some of us are creative and that some of us are not. The problem, as WALL-E so powerfully portrays, is that our consumerist digital age seduces us to surrender our creative nature for a life of passive consumption.

Master craftsman Doug Stowe agrees. In his book The Wisdom of Our Hands, Stowe marvels at the diverse expressions and benefits of creative handiwork. “The hands have been the fundamental means through which the world has been shaped, measured, studied, and understood,” he writes. He observes how the hand itself is a tool—used for kneading, grasping, cutting, striking, and so on—and how all the actions of tools come from the motions of human hands.

“Our hands are the means by which we test the substance of the physical world and come to an understanding of our place within it,” Stowe writes. “With our hands, we measure the temperature, the weight, and the shape of things and whether they are coarse or smooth. So, the hands are not only instruments of creativity; they are also sensing devices without which our understanding of our world would be incomplete” (24). Coining a delightful phrase, Stowe praises the blessings of “sawdust therapy.”

For this reason, Stowe laments the state of our present world, in which we are increasingly disconnected from the work of our hands. “Either we are active participants in the creation of human culture, or we are passive consumers of it,” he writes. “Those who make things—whether lovely, handcrafted things from wood, or music, or spaghetti—have a leg up on, or should I say a stronger grasp than, those who allow themselves to become idle consumers of a culture produced by others” (125).

Wendell Berry trenchantly underscores this point in his classic essay “The Pleasures of Eating.” He observes how specialization of production has led to specialization of consumption, so that now “patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers.” True to his core concerns, Berry then turns to the food industry, whose patrons have “tended more and more to be mere consumers.” With wry fatalism, Berry concludes: “The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach” (Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in What Are People For? [New York: North Point Press, 1990], 146). He might as well be describing the passengers aboard the Axiom. We’re all tempted to live on it now: a hurtling spaceship of hopelessness.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Consumption has its place, and there is no sin in enjoying the works of others’ creativity (such as WALL-E!). We are, however, created to be creative; to work with our hands as an expression of God’s image within us and for the benefit of our neighbors. This aspect of quiet ambition is available to us all. So what’s an easy entry point for being more creative? And moreover, what is it about creativity that pushes back on the dread effects of quiet desperation?

Soli Deo Gloria

When I first met Lance, I wouldn’t have taken him for the creative type. I don’t think he would have taken himself for that. He has more the persona of a dude rancher. He stands 6’3” with a handlebar mustache and a laugh that can be heard two states away. He wears cross-shaped pins that are draped in the flag, often sports a black ball cap that has on it a rifle and 2A, and whenever his phone rings he gets a greeting from (as he refers to him) “45.” He also has the kindest heart you can imagine.

Once upon a time, Lance had designs on ministry. Sure of his path, he and his wife, Caroline, pulled up stakes and moved across the country to attend seminary. But he’s a right-brain thinker, and the left-brain exactitude needed to learn Greek, the language of the New Testament, quickly did him in. After only a few months, Lance dropped out.

Head hung low, he and Caroline retreated to their hometown to pick up the pieces. Hadn’t God called him? Didn’t he have good works prepared for him? It was a real moment of vocational and even existential crisis. But existential crises have to wait when you’ve just got to find a way to put food on the table, and after spending their savings to make the move to seminary, Lance had to find work fast. One thing he knew he could do was work with his hands. He couldn’t be a pastor, but at least he could be a painter.

Lance threw himself into the work and established a reputation in the community as not merely some utilitarian house painter but a real artist. He took pride in his work, doing it “as for the Lord and not for men.” Still, he would speak wistfully of his missed opportunity for ministry, like a broken-hearted lover lamenting the one that got away. When a friend and fellow church member started seminary, you could hear the pious envy in Lance’s voice when he asked about it. He relished in and excelled in his vocation as a painter, but it was nevertheless undeniable that he felt something was still missing.

And then one day Lance came to me with an idea. It had been excruciating for him, he said, to sit in our pews at church Sunday after Sunday. “Are my sermons really that bad?” I asked. He laughed. “No, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s these walls. They’re bare white and they have more cracks than Humpty Dumpty. Let me paint them.” Then he laid out his vision for restoring the grandeur of our 140-year-old sanctuary. Frankly, I was a little skeptical, but I brought the plan to our church council, and a few months later Lance and his team began their work.

I could hardly believe the creative artistry. Not only was he able to restore nearly a half-mile of lineal feet of cracks in the aged plaster—no mean feat—but he brought back the historic stenciling, brought out the latent beauty of original architectural details, and all told made our house of God to look as good or better than when it was first built by German immigrants in the 1800s.

“Lance,” I said, marveling, “you’re a true artist.” I wondered not only at the work done, but how God had worked in Lance’s life. It hadn’t gone how he had planned, but the Lord was undeniably using his creative gifts of “working with his hands” to bless many lives.

Lance tugged my sleeve. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to show you,” he said. He led me around to the entrance to the sanctuary. There, in dazzling gold letters over the doorway, were three words: Soli Deo Gloria.

When we work with our hands in a spirit of faith, we’re not just making stuff. We’re fashioning hope. We’re leaning into the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90:17: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!”

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Adapted from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti. ©2025 by Ryan Tinetti. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

Ryan P. Tinetti is a pastor who now serves as a professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis). He is the author of Preaching by Heart and The Quiet Ambition. Ryan served for fourteen years in parish ministry.

Link to The Quiet Ambition: https://www.ivpress.com/the-quiet-ambition

Art by Lacee Black (@sakurasenshi).

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               Who sees open windows with closed eyes?

The ice stretches deep below our home,
down to aquifers filled by ancient storms.

My silhouette opens lost worlds;
yours shines forth ours;
below, our ice grows ever downward.

Daily we live in perfect parallel,
ever equal, never reaching, never kissing.
Our conscious sky radiates but its honest self,
in calm, tornado green.

Our eyes cannot close—
not to our world—not to lost worlds—
without feeling a crack of growing ice.

Scientists say we sleep better in the cold.
Perhaps, sleeping in frozen air, we do reach.

               Perhaps our ice does kiss?

— after Annie K Blake’s painting “We Live Close By”

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Theric Jepson is the current editor of Irreantum. His novel Just Julie’s Fine has some Greek letters but no Greek words and only for math reasons. thmazing.substack.com