I spoke stout against thee?

Malachi 3:

13 Your words have been stout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say: What have we spoken against thee?

14 Ye have ^asaid: It is ^bvain to serve God, and what doth it profit that we have kept his ^cordinances and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of Hosts?

15 And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.

I was writing an email to my best friend the other day; she is having a bit of a hard time, so I was trying to cheer her up. This is what I wrote (sorry about quoting myself, but then I'll comment):

Did God raise up Moses, save him as a baby, send him to the desert to learn from his father in law, send him back to Egypt, do gabillions of miracles, get the Children of Israel out, lead them to the Red Sea, put a pillar of fire between them and the armies of Pharoah, and then say, "Oh, well. There's a body of water between my people and safety. I guess I'll just have to give up now." I submit to you that God may be dumb, but he isn't that stupid. He has not brought you this far in your life with the intention of letting you fail. Suffer a little, worry a little, yes, probably; but complete and utter failure is not in the plan.

I was thinking about that "God may be dumb, but he isn't that stupid," and wondering if it wasn't a little strong, but then I thought: isn't that what we do when we doubt Him like that? When we forget the miracles He has done, and assume that there is no way He can help us again? That he doesn't WANT to help us? That we are somehow unworthy of help?

I love that scripture in Malachi, partly because of how it ends:

16 Then they that feared the Lord ^aspake often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard; and a book of ^bremembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.

17 And they shall be ^amine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I ^bmake up my jewels; and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

18 Then shall ye return and ^adiscern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.

I particularly love the part about how the Lord hearkened and heard. I also love how it says that he will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. Believing that this applies to me does not mean that I should feel a right to be cocky, arrogant, prideful, etc; it means that when the chips are down and it looks like the bad guys are going to win, I am actually speaking against God when I choose to despair.

(But Cornelia, what do you mean by the bad guys? Do you lead a secret life as a superhero that we didn't know about? No, in fact, I do not. However, doesn't it just seem sometimes like mean people end up with better things in life? Not that you should hate the people themselves, but REALLY there comes a time when love or no love, sometimes a person is just mean. However. I remind myself that I am nice not for external rewards, but because I like to be. I am a Holy-Ghost-Led-Utilitarian, and I believe that God is an Eternal-Perspective-Utilitarian, but that is another explanation for another day.)

P.S. I am older than I look, but I am still pretty young. Notwithstanding my relative youth, I strongly affirm that in my short life, I have still seen multiple occasions when persons who have done wickedly have gotten their just rewards. Again, this is no occassion for feeling holier-than-thou, but when someone has done something unkind to me and I feel the need for vengance, I can take a deep breath and think: God did a very good job of giving that last person their just reward. In fact, He did such a good job that I am now feeling sorry for that person and feel a need to pray that their life will go better. I wouldn't trade places with that person. Speaking of which, Dear God, please, if there is anything I forgot to repent of, please help me do so now, please forgive me, because I would rather repent now than suffer later.

And that is what I often think.

The Gift of Tongues

Note: For anyone who is not familiar with my situation as I write this (like me, reading this five years from now), I happen to be in Germany at the moment.

On Sunday, one of the counsellors in the bishopric handed me a card asking me to say the closing prayer on February first. He told me that I could say it in English. I adamantly refused.

And that's when a light went off.

I didn't want to say it in English because doing so seemed like a wasted opportunity to speak in German. And what I realized is that wanting to do something is a part of the gift for actually doing that thing.

I then realized a whole bunch of stuff that I had known for a long time but had never quite put together this way. A talk, of sorts, began to form in my mind, so that is what I've written below.

We know, or we should know, that spiritual gifts are given for the building up of the kingdom of God. Heavenly Father wants us to all help one another, like we were all parts of the same body, so he gave each a gift which the others need. (On a side note, I believe that we all have opportunities to be part of the liver, meaning that we have chances to take poison out of the whole system by processing it properly and not passing it on. That is a gift of the Savior's, which I believe He expects each of us to develop.)

The gift of tongues could be compared to an enzyme; it allows ínteractions which would happen anyway to happen faster, and it allows some interactions to happen which would not have otherwise.

There is, of course, the highest level of the gift of tongues such as was exhibited in ancient times on he day of Pentecost: a day when all who were gathered had the Holy Ghost to such a strong degree that they could every one of them understand the speaker without translation, and without having to study the language he was speaking in. This sort of event, as I'm sure you have noticed, is cool, fancy, and extremely rare.

The much more common gift is a gift for learning quickly. That's the one I've got, and that's the one I got an insight in to on Sunday. Here are the parts of it that I know about so far:

1. Lack of physical or mental impairments, such as a hearing problem, language delay, processing problems, and so on. These are not hard to imagine. If one works on such a weakness, however, it can become a great strength, particularly when it comes to teaching others.
2. Desire to learn, which for me pans out as enjoyment in learning. I believe that this can come in different ways. I had a truly great German teacher in Jr. High and High School, who sparked my love of language learning; later, at BYU, I ended up with an Arabic teacher who fed the fire, causing me to spend about twice as much time studying for Arabic class than I had for anything else in my life so far. Whenever someone asks me if learning Arabic was hard (though I do not mean to imply that I am done learning it), I always say "It was lots of hard work, but it was fun work."
3. Meta-knowledge in the realm of language learning. Meta-knowledge means knowledge about knowledge. I took my first language-teaching class when I was still taking Arabic, and while it made me a pretty bratty student (I was critical of almost everything my teacher was doing-- different teacher, by the way), it really did help me learn the language faster to think about how to apply research on language learning. Now that I have, myself, taught English as a Second Language for a year, I find that my ability to analyze my own weaknesses in speaking and writing German is strengthened.
4. Willingness and ability to put all of this to work. I knew how to study languages before I got here, but at the moment I am learning much faster than I have in the past eight years at least, because I am truly in an immersion environment.

So. Sorry this is such a long post. I was reading the Sunday School lesson yesterday (Monday), and thinking about spritual gifts, and this is what I came up with:

1. Joseph Smith was born into a family which was open-minded on religious matters. His father wouldn't join a church because he didn't feel right about it. Religion was an open topic in their home.
2. Nonetheless, his family was very interested in religion. (A certain portion of what gifts we have does come from environment, though of course as we get older we can exercise influence over that environment.) They lived in a generally religious community, and they themselves read the Bible as a family every day. And, of course, Joseph was very concerned about the things he heard; he wanted to be saved, but he wasn't sure how that would happen.
3. Joseph's spark came from a bit of meta-knowledge from the book of James about spiritual knowledge.
4. He was both willing and able to put the knowledge he gained to use.

Ta-da! That's it. I haven't had much time to think about other gifts (maybe scripture study today...) but I would love to have comments on this one.

SAC