Hello my beautiful friends, I’m Jessie and this series is all about attracting light. How will these 2 minutes benefit you? Because light is the channel through which ALL blessings flow. It’s the Savior’s conduit from heaven. If you want specific blessings, it serves you to understand how light works.
Let’s talk dirt, mistakes, and sin. The scripture I’m going to share is D&C 1:33. But before I read it, let’s understand the context: This is the time from the moment of sin until the moment of repentance. It’s that gap of time directly following sin (which could be seconds, days, weeks, or years) but it’s after disobedience and before the repentance.
Okay, D&C 1:33: And he that repents not, from him shall be taken even the light which he has received; for my Spirit shall not always strive with man, saith the Lord of Hosts.
To understand exactly what’s happening to our bodies when we sin, We’re going to do a magical interchanging trick that we discussed in the post Attracting Light + Synonyms (I’ll link to that video below, but I recommend watching it before you continue on or this discussion might be confusing). We’re referencing D&C 84:45 that lists the synonyms of light and inserting them into D&C 1:33. Interchanging words is an effective study tool, and today will broaden our understanding of what happens to our bodies when we make a mistake:
And he that repents not, from him shall be taken even the [word of the Lord, the truth, the light, the spirit of Jesus Christ] which he has received; for my [word, my truth, my light, and my spirit] shall not always strive with man.
Disobedience is a loss of light (optimism + confidence), truth (we’re getting dumber), AND the Spirit of the Lord. No wonder we feel less than gourmet afterwards, but LET'S BE CLEAR that these feelings are not God being mean or punishing us. It’s not him withholding love or having favorites. It IS God allowing an eternal law to take effect: The Law of Attraction, for light cleaveth to light. Disobedience simply results in a loss of light. As light leaves us, we feel differently, we feel worse, because we are distanced from our creator. And as we feel this distance of God’s word, truth, light, and spirit each of us react in a different way. Perhaps you feel hardened: blame others, get angry, withdraw. Perhaps you blame yourself too harshly, with a big 44 oz. gulp of shame and emotional or physical self-abuse, but the silver lining is, we are the author of the story we tell about the light we’ve just lost and the feelings it created.
Let me share an example. I sometimes lose my temper with my kids. (nodding) Yep. I grew up with one sister, 7 years older than me. She slept in the basement, my parents slept on the main level of our little home, and I had the loft… all to myself. Until my LDS mission, I never experienced sharing, literally, which now means, I’m now faced with more opportunities than the average person to practice patience and prepare myself for the Law of Consecration, which genuinely freaks me out!
On more days than I can list, I have yelled or snipped at family members for an unjustified reason… I stack my negative feelings, like Jenga, and eventually these unresolved negative feelings tumble over and I explode. However, now that I understand this principle that when I make a mistake, light is leaving my soul, I simply recommit to restore it. I no longer tell myself a story about how awful I am (I used to), or blame my husband, kids, dog, and the mailman that I blew up (I used to do that too, I get it!).
But no more. The story you tell yourself now is that light left and immediately it can be restored. Easy-peasy! That changes things!
Okay, sip on that for a week and I’ll be back so we can take a deeper dive into understanding light and it’s significant, significant impact on YOUR life.
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