Monday, June 16, 2014

Day 2 - Communication

Communication

"If you want to stay close with someone who has been dear to you, but from who you are separated, you know how to do it.  You would find a way to speak to them, you would listen to them, and you would discover ways to do things for each other.  The more often that happened, the longer it went on, the deeper would be the bond of affection.  If much time passed without the speaking, the listening, and the doing, the bond would weaken." 
- Henry B. Eyring
Think about one of your close friends.  You know their voice and could distinguish it in a crowd easily.  Why is that?  How did you learn to distinguish their voice from others?

What can you do to tune out voices of others and focus on Christ's voice?

What can we learn from Christ's example as He focuses on "the one"?

What does it take to recognize His voice?


Know His Voice


Ask for Advice & Give Frequent Updates

  • Think about your friends.  The people with whom you are close to are those with whom you talk about everything - friends, family, dreams, goals, experiences, etc.  You want to be updated on their life and tell them all of the new things happening in yours!  You ask them for advice when it comes to making decisions.
Christ is there for us in that exact same way.

  • Alma 37:37 - "Counsel with the Lord in all thy doings, and he will direct thee for good.  Yea, when thou liest down at night lie down unto the Lord, that he may watch over you in your sleep; and when thou risest in the morning let thy heart be full of thanks unto God; and if ye do these things, ye shall be lifted up at the last day."
  • "The Will of God" - Mormon Message Video - https://www.lds.org/pages/mormon-messages?lang=eng#the-will-of-god


    • Do you willingly accept the Lord's will?
       
    • Do you come to Christ seeking His guidance and advice on how to handle life's difficulties?
    • Christ is the expert at overcoming adversity...  Do you ask for His mentorship when you are experiencing trials?
  • "The Master Weaver's Plan"
  • Alma 7:23 - "And now I would that ye should be humble, and be submissive and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long-suffering; being temperate in all things; being diligent in keeping the commandments of God at all times; asking for whatsoever things ye stand in need, both spiritual and temporal; always returning thanks unto God for whatsoever things ye do receive."
    • Do you seek Christ's adivce?
    • When you receive revelation do we listen?  Do we act?
    • Are you humble enough to take Christ's advice and sometimes be chastised?  Or do you have to be compelled to be humble?
    • Are you humble enough to ask for His help?


Prayer

  • In the nineteenth section of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord says to you and me:

    "Pray always, and I will pour out my Spirit upon you, and great shall be your blessing - yea, even more than if you should obtain treasures of earth and corruptibleness to the extend thereof.

    Behold, canst thou read this without rejoicing and lifting up thy heart for gladness?

    Or canst thou run about longer as a blind guide?

    Or canst thou be humble and meek, and conduct thyself wisely before me?  Yea, come unto me thy Savior.  Amen." (D&C 19:38–41)
    In that scripture, and in others, it is clear how often we should speak to God: regularly in words, continually in feelings.  When the Savior appeared among the people on this continent, after his resurrection, he taught them how to pray.  He used the words, "Pray always."  That doesn't mean now and then.  It doesn't mean to pray only when you feel like it."


Invitation 

Read through the following excerpts from the book, Face to Face by Michael Wilcox (or just ponder scriptures, talks, and other resources about prayer).   In his book, Face to Face, Brother Wilcox discusses several ways to reach out to our Father in prayer.  Read the following excerpts (or other scriptures, talks, and resources about prayer) and ponder your personal communication with our Father.

Choose one or two things that you will do each day in your personal prayers with the Lord - work on doing those things throughout the rest of the walk with Christ.

Communicating with our Father Face to Face

  • "I believe our lives are, in a sense, a constant reaching upward toward God.  We must talk with him as did Moses, face to face.  This is not only what we long for, but what God also ardently desires.  For Moses, that may have meant an actual physical encounter.  For most of us, it is an expression that suggests friendship, open communication, honesty, and familiar conversations."
  • "Sometimes simple prayer is not enough: we need a face-to-face finding.  We also need to learn how God speaks to us individually, for he comes to us as we are.  What do we do?  How to we commence?  What paths do we climb?  How do we feel after God?  How do we find him? ... [The word] reached gives us a wonderful visual image.  We reach with our voices, with our desires, with our pouring outs, with our wrestlings, with our asking and seeking and knocking, and with our feeling mind until heaven responds and we meet face to face.
Reaching Through Pouring Out


  • "I did pour out my whole soul unto God." - Enos 1:9
  • "Prayer to me seems to imply only words or ideas.  Pour out encompasses the world of emotions and feelings... I believe what the Father wants from us is the contents of our souls.  I sense that unless we pour out, he cannot pour in.  We want to make sure we empty everything out to make room for what he will give us in return.  In deep communication with our Father in Heaven, this pouring out and pouring in binds us to one another."
  • "Whatever we find within ourselves we may pour out, and we should do so with the most open honesty - fears, disappointments, hoped-for fulfillments and dreams, wounds, frustrations, everything.  Sometimes I visualize the human heart as something like a racetrack.  At the center is the magnetic pull of our deepest needs, desires, anxieties, or questions.  But for whatever reason, we spin rapidly around the track in our thoughts and communications with our Father without ever going to those tender center points.  The speed of our prayers tries somehow to keep us out of those sensitive places.... Suffice it to say here that inevitably people harbor these thoughts [complaint, frustration, doubt, fear, anxiety, desires, hopes, bitterness, confusion, hopelessness, etc.] in their souls often without taking them to God, not just in simple prayer, but in pouring out prayer which speaks honestly and lays everything before their Maker... Frank sincerity is always a part of pouring out."
  • "Sometimes we pour out not because we are going to change God's mind, or because we expect God to make things different, or even because we expect an answer.  Our pouring out arises out of our own need.  We pray because we must pray, and prayer becomes its own answer.  God's listening is the simple restorative for our spiritual health... The pouring in given by God [consists of] feelings of comfort, peace, forgiveness, acceptance, hope, words of consoling intimacy, and [even] in the form of truth or insight."
  • "We do not always pour out our spiritual and emotional needs, but also our adorations, gratitudes, and loves!  Are these not also needs, in truth? ...  At times the heart is so full of love it spills over...  This kind of pouring out focuses not so much on gifts given us by our Father in Heaven, but on the giver of those gifts... These pouring outs to each other are needed, perhaps not for us who do the pouring out as much as those into whose ears the love and appreciation flow.  If this is true of our interpersonal relationships, how much more true is it with our Eternal Father in Heaven?"


Reaching Through Wrestling


  • "Nevertheless Alma labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer." - Alma 8:10
  • "And I will tell you of the wrestle which I had before the Lord..." - Enos 1:2
  • "When I wrestle... I'm "feeling after" something to hold tightly to, to lock firmly into my heart."
  • "We all want to advance from belief to affirmation to certainty, and we will as we feel after, reach for, and in time meet God face to face.  We all will wrestle... For those who wrestle - from the deepest doubts to how to best raise a child; from rising through hope and forgiveness to the approach of an uncertain, perhaps even fearful futures - the Spirit seems to testify, "Don't give up.  At the end of your labors the answers come and the pillars erected are stronger for having wrestled them into position."

Reaching Through Believing



  • "For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end." - Hebrews 3:14
  • "Sometimes we wrestle and reach to obtain - and sometimes we reach and wrestle to keep or hold fast to what we have already received and may lose without constant vigilance." (this could be having confidence in yourself, making progress with a certain goal, or even continuing to have faith in an answer you've already received).
  • "Ten-piece promises (promises the Lord has made with us but not yet fulfilled or might be hard for us to believe will be fulfilled) may come to us in patriarchal blessings, or in words spoken at general conference, or in the scriptures, or to our open, receptive minds when in righteousness we stand in the field to receive them.  But ten-piece promises, though compelling, desired, and given in the most faith-promoting of environment and form the most trusted of sources, still often require wrestling and reaching to hold them tightly in our hands... Believing in ten-piece promises may be our highest reach of all."
    • I even think that ten-piece promises can be the knowledge that we have obtained about the nature of God and our divine worth.  A lot of times we are told that we are daughters of God.  And we are - that is true.  But sometimes that can be hard to consistently believe and hold fast to when we begin to feel self-conscious or down about our looks, personalities, talents, etc. and compare ourselves to those around us.  I would encourage us all to think about how we can strengthen our faith in these ten-piece promises as well.
  • "I have the utmost faith in ten-piece promises, but they sometimes demand that we reach beyond the earthly evidence that tells us otherwise.  We have to live the "if."  Yet as we feel after our Father in Heaven, he will provide experiences to strengthen our belief, experiences where we can slide the rent bits of cloth across our hands and believe again, and again, and again, until fulfillment comes."



Reaching Through Acting



  • "Wherefore the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself." - 2 Nephi 2:16
  • "I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man." - Ether 3:4
  • There is, in a way of speaking, a restraining force in God's relationship with his children.  he will only do what benefits them.  This is what he was telling me as I stood on the doorstep wrestling with his counsels and trying to find the courage to act on that inspiration while at the same time trying to [make myself believe] they were not the right course to pursue.  It is critically important for us in our reaching that we realize and hold this truth in the very core of our souls."
  • "I think that sometimes our highest reaching is contained in how we respond to a question God might ask us about our petitions... 'If I answer, will you act?  Will you believe?  Will you testify?  Will you live it?'"

Reaching Through Desire
  • "I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.  My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord." - Psalm 104:33-34
  • "The mind is always busy, wishing to speak, but the soul may need quiet, wanting to feel.  Most of our reaching will probably be of the uttered kind, but there is an equal potential in the unexpressed kind.  In fact it may be a higher reaching.  Here desire may not mean those things I want or need, but simply love. .. That love carries naturally within it the desire to be a better person, on of the truest qualities of love.  So it is with God.  being filled with desire of this type lifts one to want intensely to live in such a manner that the Father would say of us, "this is my dear child, in whom I delight."
  • Saint Teresa spoke of the soul as a garden that needed watering; the water could be supplied in different ways.  In the garden grew the flowers, shrubs, and trees of human virtues.  Each soul would want his or her garden to be beautiful so the Lord would walk in it.  "With God's help, we have to make these plants grow, as good gardeners do, "she wrote, "watering them carefully so that they don't die but begin producing flowers, which give off an appealing scent, to delight this Lord of ours.  Then He will come frequently to take pleasure in these virtues.  "This metaphor gave teresa a great deal of comfort and helped her convey her own experiences to others.  "It used to please me enormously to think of my soul as a garden, and imagine that the Lord was walking in it.  I begged Him to increase the fragrance of those little flowers of virtue that were, it seemed, just starting to bloom... I didn't want anything for myself." (Medwick, Teresa of Avila, 99, 104)... For Teresa, desire meant love, not requests."
  • "There are persons - and I have been one of them - to whom the Lord gives tenderness of devotion and holy inspirations and light on everything.  He bestows this Kingdom on them and brings them to the Prayer of Quiet, and yet they deafen their ears to His voice.  For they are so fond of talking and of repeating a large number of vocal prayers in a great hurry, as though they were anxious to finish their task of repeating them daily, that when the Lord, as I say, puts His kingdom into their very hands, by giving them this Prayer of Quiet and this inward peace, they do not accept it, but think they will do better to go on reciting their prayers, which only distracts them from their purpose..." (Saint Teresa)
  • "Perhaps desire... may mean we are so united in oneness with the Father that our hearts, minds, and wills are the same.  We think, feel, love, share, request - the very things God wishes for us to have or do because of this oneness."


Reaching Through Knocking
  • "The keeper of the gate is the Holy One of Israel; and he employeth no servant there... And whoso knocketh, to him will he open." - 2 Nephi 9:41-42
  • "We might consider that a type of knocking is the approach to the Lord's door we call pondering.  We could call this the serene knock of inquiry.  Wrestling, which we discussed earlier, is a more vigorous knocking.  The knocking of familiarity is developed over time and with a mutual sharing of common purpose and love, of moments spent together in the soul's garden.  It is often followed by and demonstrated through actions of obedience and uncommanded goodness.  Pondering is more solitary... Pondering may be a search for all the possible courses from which we can choose...  Pondering is also a calming of the mind...  When we still our minds, thus inviting the Lord's reflections to reveal themselves, we are saying to God, "I am ready to receive."
  • "If we wish to meet God face to face, we must learn to knock and recognize in our own lives the Lord's knocking in return.  We feel after him, but he also feels after us.  We want to find him, but he also wants to find us.  Friendship always flows in both direction.  There must be two faces for face-to-face relationships."
  • "Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you; seek me diligently and ye shall find me; ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (D&C 88:36) -- not only are we seeking knowledge and understanding, but also those face-to-face encounters with the Lord himself.
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