Every general conference, Wayfare asks its readers what conference topics they would like to explore over the next six months. One consistent answer has been covenants, not surprising with increasing focus by Church leaders on the “covenant path.”
We agree with President Oaks that covenants do not simply constitute a checklist. There is something more to how covenants are meant to show up in—and transform—our lives. Over the last six months, a group of Wayfare authors set out to explore questions surrounding covenants, interrogating typical metaphors to see where they fall short. They’ve challenged the prevailing assumptions that dominate our usual discourse and offered us textured insights into a concept that figures so prominently in living as a Latter-day Saint.
Through covenants, our Heavenly Parents collaborate with us in the messy fields of life. Living covenants requires not only faith but also action and longing, even in the face of darkened belief. Covenants are an urgent invitation to hold onto God the same way he holds onto us, allowing God to continually return to us. Like the energy required to create a chemical bond between two atoms, covenants motivate us to form bonds with the people around us even when it is difficult. Covenants immerse all in Christ’s love. They are the shape of God’s embrace.
We invite you to immerse yourselves in the illuminating insights and expansive metaphors offered in the following essays and hope that they will prepare your hearts for wider and deeper understanding of the significance of covenants in your life.
The Covenenant Life series first appeared in Tyler Johnson’s column On the Road to Jericho. To subscribe, go to “manage subscription” in your account and turn on notifications for “On the Road to Jericho.”
As He Cleaveth Unto You
What if covenants are meant not to establish a spiritual hierarchy, marking some of us as more spiritual, but to dissolve hierarchies such that we encounter each other with love abounding.
Covenant Longing
What if covenants constitute shared longings for a potentially unachievable divine state toward which we are forever striving—but the longing is the point.
Homeless Jesus
Could temple covenants be meant to draw us, too, out of the temple and into the messy streets of life, where Jesus awaits us in disguise.
Toward a Practical Theology of Sealing
What if covenants are what we weave together with the divine through our failings and efforts and work to make relationships deep and lasting and joyful?
Uphill on the Yellow Brick Road
Might covenants be meant to function like fundamental forces, reordering the atoms of our social and spiritual life into the compounds of discipleship and community.
My Side-by-Side God
When we enter into covenant relationship, is it possible the our Heavenly Parents are not cheering us on from the sidelines but, rather, in the thick of things, running the race with us?
Rising Together
Is it possible that our quotidian concept of covenants as a checklist limits the power that covenants exert in our lives?
Sunny Grames Stimmler, mother of two daughters, is a writer and educator currently living in Ankara, Türkiye.
Tyler Johnson is a Wayfare senior editor and Stanford medical oncologist. He podcasts at The Doctor’s Art.
Art by Bryan Mark Taylor.