When No Offense Is Meant

Good morning! Hope you are having an insight-full day. In other words, hope the light is as bright and clear inside as it is outside on this cloudless summer morning.

As I posted a few days ago, I’ve been reviewing my journal entries of 2002.  Doing this review work is by far the most exciting thing happening to me in my current (June 2016) days.  I keep finding thoughts and feelings recorded in 2002 that are actually even more pertinent for me to read today.  Here’s one I hope will be of worth to you as well.  ((hugs)) and much love . . .

October, 2002

Recently, someone felt she needed to be honest with me and admit that when she first met me, she was put off by me, but that now, after getting to know me, she really likes me (what I have to share) and is always glad to hear from me.

I told her I had noticed that she acted “stand-offish” when we had first met, but she didn’t need to apologize, because I’ve learned that if I can search my conscience and honestly say I did not mean to offend another–but they are still offended–then the “issue” is actually in them–between them and their own life (which is God trying to reach and teach them.)

One time I was reading the part of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s story where he said that he was going to Carthage Jail with a conscience free of offense toward any man, and I thought, “Give us a break.  How could he say that?  He had dozens of enemies.  He had offended ump-teen dozens of people.”

And the very plain and simple answer came into my mind:  “That’s true that many people took offense, but Joseph never deliberately gave offense.” For example, he didn’t mean anyone any offense when he came out of the grove as a 14 year old boy and started sharing that he had seen God.  But many people were extremely offended.  And in the eyes of my understanding I saw that Joseph was just doing the best with what the Lord had given him to know.  He was just trying to respond to what was going on, to the best of his ability, to discern between himself and God’s call to and will for him.

And so it has been with me.  I have never claimed to be anything but a fellow struggling mortal, . . . a housewife, a mother of troubled children, a divorcee, timidly remarried–trusting God, trusting God, and again trusting God (and now supremely happy); . . .

But when the Lord wanted the 12 Steps translated into Mormon-ese, coordinated with the principles of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, He called me through the Spirit that woke me up every morning for weeks and weeks on end at 3:00 a.m. and gave me what to write.

Sometimes I would sit in front of my computer screen and weep in amazement at the symphonic power of the thoughts and scriptures that flowed together like living water.  Truly, the Steps are artesian wells of truth and can be applied over and over to every challenge we face in life.  I was the beneficiary of that lived and living revelation.

The truth is, what ended up in He Did Deliver Me from Bondage is only a tithe of the counsel and comfort and wisdom available to us as we prayerfully ponder and slow ourselves down to (as Nephi) record the wisdom the Lord is waiting to open to us. There’s so much more for each of us to learn if we will allow writing journal entries guided by prayer and scripture study to become a routine, daily experience for us.  More and more, we each find ourselves drawing on the amazing sanity and wisdom of the Holy Spirit (and Heavenly Father and the Savior through the Holy Spirit).

I often listen to people share from the writings that they do guided by prayer and scripture study and I can hear the common voice in all of them.  I have learned to discern the “voice print,” of the Words of Christ in dozens and dozens of people’s writings besides my own.  I have learned by this that truly, He is no respecter of persons, but only of agency and our desires.  If this kind of life–one grounded deeply in the Spirit of Truth, in the Words of the Lord–what we really, really cherish and desire above all else (like the people in 3 Nephi 19:9 desired the Holy Ghost above everything else they could have asked for) then He is thrilled.  If we truly enjoy—love and long for—the gift of the Holy Ghost (and the attendant gifts of the Spirit) more than we enjoy mortality’s methods of comfort and counsel, then we will find Him gracious and just as liberal as James 1:5 testifies He is.