The Priest Who Was Imperfect but Decided to Accept God’s Love Anyway

Mosiah 18

Mosiah 18:21-22 And he commanded them that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another. . . . And thus they became the children of God.

This story is about one of the priests that Noah hired to tell him that he was good and that everything he did was good. The priest’s name was Alma. Alma was one of the priests who had mixed yellow with red and made orange. If you remember, yellow represents truth and goodness and red represents falsehood and badness. And the priests had tried to hide all the red by covering it with yellow. But this did not work. It just made everything orange.

The priests had mixed so much yellow and red paint that it had gotten all over their hands and clothes and faces. It was smeared on their walls and floors and carpet. And because everything was turning orange, separating truth and fiction was like trying to find an orange pin in an orange haystack.

Abinadi saw all the orange everywhere and said, “You guys must really like orange.” And this made Noah and the priests angry. They said, “What orange?” Because they had convinced themselves that it wasn’t orange at all. “It’s yellow,” they said. “Yellow is our favorite color.” But even a small drop of red will undo a dollop of yellow. And there was much more than a small drop of red in this paint. It was undeniably orange.

Noah and his priests did not want to admit that it was orange because removing all that orange paint would be a lot of work. Maybe impossible. And they wanted to be perfect already. But Alma looked at the orange paint and said, “Abinadi is right. Anyone can see that this is orange!”

By now you probably realize that the paint was not really paint at all. There was never any orange paint. It’s just a metaphor for something else.

Metaphor a definition:

A metaphor happens when the best way to say what you mean is to say something else. In this instance, it’s hard to explain how truth and untruth mix and stick to our lives. And it’s hard to talk about how difficult it is to separate truth and untruth once they’ve been mixed. And how that makes change difficult. This is hard to explain by itself. So instead we talk about paint. We talk about how paint mixes and sticks to our walls, and hands, and clothes. And when paint is on your wall or hands or clothes it is hard to remove without making the mess worse. And because you understand something about paint, you understand something about yourself.

That’s what we are really talking about. We are talking about how good and bad mix together inside of each of us. You will never be all good in this life. And you will never be all bad. You will always be a mixture. Sometimes you will be red and sometimes you will be yellow and always you will be orange.

It’s easy to get discouraged by that or to feel ashamed. If you have never felt ashamed before, you will someday. You will do something bad, or make a mistake, and you will feel like you can’t look anywhere but at your toes. Or you will wish the ground would open up like a mouth and swallow you so no one will ever see you again. Because you feel oh so ashamed. Because it isn’t always easy to be orange.

But even though you will feel ashamed sometimes, eventually, maybe after years and years, you will learn that you are orange, and your neighbors are orange, and your parents are orange, and everyone around you is orange. And there is some comfort in that.

But Noah and his priests couldn’t accept that they were orange. They believed that God would not love them until they were perfect. And so they told themselves they were perfect even though they knew it was not true. Because they didn’t like to be orange, because they didn’t understand God.

But we do not have to be like them. We can be like Alma. Alma accepted God’s love even though he was imperfectly orange. He knew that God did not love him because he was yellow or red or orange or green or blue. God loved him. That was all. And because God loved him, God could transform him. He saw how God had transformed Abinadi when Abinadi lit up like a flashlight.

Alma realized it didn’t matter if he was orange all over. He didn’t need to be ashamed. He could make mistakes, and he could try again, and that was alright. Because underneath his skin, at the very core of his soul, there was God. And God is good. And God loved him.

Noah and the other priests wouldn’t listen to Alma. They sent him away. And so Alma found other people to tell what Abinadi had taught him about God.

And one of the things Abinidi taught was that God was our Heavenly Father AND Jesus. God is also Heavenly Mother and God is somehow the Holy Ghost too. But they are not really entirely separate individuals anymore. Their hearts have been knit together in love. And because they are all sewn together, you cannot pull on one without pulling on all the others. And because they are all knit together like this, their hearts are bigger and purer and better at loving than we can imagine.

And so Alma and the people he taught decided to try an experiment. They said, “God, we love you and we will accept your love even though we are orange all over. And now that we know we are loved by you, we want to learn to love more like you. So first, we will be baptized, then you can teach us what to do next.”

They knew Noah and his priests didn’t want anyone to be baptized, so Alma and his friends snuck into the woods and found a secret place with a lake where they could live and be baptized. Then the most amazing thing happened. The people started to love each other better and then they started to love themselves better. If they saw anyone in need, they helped. They shared everything they owned, even their money. They stopped feeling jealous or ashamed. They still felt sad sometimes, particularly when someone else was sad. But they also felt happy, particularly when other people were happy.

And because everyone was still imperfect, they had to rely on each other. Some were better at being kind. Others were better at being brave. Some were more patient and others more passionate. But they soon found that together they could be kind, brave, patient, and passionate all at once. They were becoming better because they were becoming together.

Their hearts were growing, but not in size. They were simply connecting. And they could feel more love and more joy and more sorrow and more hope than ever before. They were sharing love and strength and fresh, cold oxygen.

“God,” they said. “We don’t know how we are doing this, but it is better than anything we could have imagined.”

And God must have smiled, because the line of yarn that had lassoed their hearts and was tying them tightly together, was a heartstring from God’s very own heart.

Joshua is an award-winning writer and director. His recent book, Ali the Iraqi, was published by BCC press. Sarah is a literature and theology doctoral student studying the Book of Job in the twentieth century.

Artwork by Maddie Baker.