I HEAR YOUR VOICE

 

I hear Your voice in empty silence

When loneliness envelops me;

I hear Your voice in violent storms

That plague Me in mortality;

I hear Your voice in my struggles

That never let me be;

I hear Your voice when You pilot me

On dangerous journeys of earthly seas;

I hear Your voice beckoning me

To stay the course because

You will never abandon me.

I hear Your voice getting closer

And more distinct on the narrow path

That leads me home to Thee.

I see Your arms wide open

Waiting to welcome me.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Be Not Afraid by LDS Book Store)

THE COURAGE TO GO HOME

 

Sometimes we make such a mess of our lives that we have to admit it. The parable of the Prodigal Son is the best example of this (see Luke 15). I see in this parable an analogy that could apply to all of us.

To recap, a man had two sons. Imagine you are the younger and you wanted to leave home and make your own way in the world and perhaps sow some wild oats.  You plan to part ways with your family so you ask your father for your inheritance. The plan was to have some fun and even gamble and maybe make some speculative investments to double your money. You are sure there is an easier way to make it than your father tilling his fields.

The father obliges and sends you out into the world. No doubt he can see that you could learn a few lessons. Much like our Father in Heaven who had sent us down to earth not just to learn a few lessons but to eventually become like Him and enjoy the riches of eternity.

The older brother in the Parable, the heir of all his father had, was pretty much of the opinion that his brother deserved all the misfortune he got. This brother never sought him who was lost, despite the kinship, despite the brotherhood, despite the father's sorrow over his loss.

Our older brother, on the other hand, knowing from the beginning that He alone would inherit all the Father has, had a very different approach to the situation. Knowing that none of us could come back home by our own efforts, in essence said: ‘I will pave the way, I will seek them and I will bring them back.

So you the prodigal, with your inheritance spent are now reduced to the lowest form of poverty and misery that the world can offer. You find yourself sleeping and eating the husks with the pigs in your service. Imagine such degradation and suffering as eating and sleeping with pigs, especially for one of an honorable parentage who was raised in wealth and was attended to by servants.

Your suffering is extreme, you can sink no lower. You reflect on the home of your youth and the security and safety you had there and how well you were provided for. If only you could go home to the Father who loved you!  But you have no means to make your way back. And you are in agony of remorse for what you have done. The guilt and shame is consuming you.

And then, the unthinkable happens. Your older brother finds you and tells you he will pay for your way home and he will redeem you from all your debts and he will even share his inheritance with you. There are some conditions that will have to be met to ensure your return but you will be saved from the failure your life has become. It is almost too good to be true and you hesitate in your weakness.

And then the hope and courage is born to follow your brother home! You would go home to the father who loved you and would surely forgive you and allow you to serve him. You would go home to the father who would lift you out of the misery and hopelessness you had fallen into. You would go home because there was a path of return, with a price paid to cover all your debts.

What exquisite hope his father was to the prodigal! How that hope would have lifted him out of the mire he was in and propelled him to return home! And what courage was given him by his brother who sought him to bring him home! He was not forgotten and he was wanted!

So here some of us are, like the prodigal, eating husks with the swine for this is not much more that this world has to offer. What hope our Father must have had when He sent us out into the world that we would remember the splendour we came from, that we would want to run home.

 

And so a great sacrifice was made for our return. The Son who came to guide and to seek us to bring us home climbed the hill of Calvary so that we could in our lowest earthly moments say:

For me Your body was broken,

For me Your blood was spilt,

For me Your death was offered

That I might live with You still.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Modern Prodigal Son by Liz Lemon Swindle)

The Official Website of Liz Lemon Swindle – Lizlemonswindle

A STEP OF FAITH

 

Never before had a fisherman stepped

Onto the waves of the sea.

He knew how quickly they could

Take him into the depths of the deep.

But the Master had bid him come

And he ached to be with Him.

 

Like Peter of old, I fear to step

Out of the rocking boat,

I fear losing the ground beneath my feet.

 

I see Him in the distance,

His hand outstretched waiting for me,

I too long to be with Him

But the waves try so eagerly to swallow me.

 

The boat rocks and seeks to destroy me,

I cry my tears of daily pain

And I wonder if anything of me will remain.

 

I wait for Him to come to me to rescue me

And like Peter deliver me from the depths

Of the raging sea;

I hear Him say:

“To know yourself,

YOU have to come to ME.”

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Step of Faith by Michael Malm)

 

TO KNOW YOURSELF

 

“Why did the Lord ask such things of Abraham? Because, knowing what his future would be and that he would be the father of an innumerable posterity, He was determined to test him. God did not do this for His own sake for He knew by His foreknowledge what Abraham would do; but the purpose was to impress upon Abraham a lesson to enable him to attain unto knowledge that he could not obtain in any other way.

“That is why God tries all of us. It is not for his own knowledge for He knows all things beforehand. He knows all your lives and everything you will do. But He tries us for our own good that WE MAY KNOW OURSELVES; for it most important that a man should know himself.”

-          George Q. Cannon, (Gospel Truth, comp. Jerreld L. Newquist, 2 Vols [1974] 1:113)

I am beginning to see the truth of this. Just as God wanted Abraham to know what Abraham would do in the most severe of circumstances, he desires this for us too. We can only know what we will do if we are placed in a situation that requires our response. To know our commitment to God, we have to be asked to show it under adverse conditions.  To know our strength, we have to be asked to flex our muscles.

There are tests of faith where we have to reach back past our earthly lives and into our pre-mortal lives to discover who we truly are and have always been. Mortal life is a state of weakness. It’s also a state of inheritance of intergenerational habits and teachings we have be programmed to follow. That is not to say that because one of our parents was weak with something, we have to be weak too but sometimes breaking the cycle of weakness is a daunting task.

Many of us do not believe in ourselves. Either we have been taught to feel that way since birth or we have had a particularly adverse experience that has caused us to mistrust ourselves. The biggest disadvantage, however, is that we do not remember how brilliant we were before we came to this earth. Consider this thought:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…it is our light, not our darkness, which most frightens us. You may ask yourself, “Who am I to be brilliant, talented and fabulous?”  Actually, who are you NOT to be? You were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within you. It is not just some of us…. It is all of us. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. “ (Marianne Williamson, “A Return To Love – Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles”)

We of the second estate were brave enough to fight the Son of the Morning and his angels for our turn on earth and our eternal destiny (Revelation 12:7-9; D&C 76:25-26; Moses 4:1-4; Isaiah 14:12-15; Abraham 3:27-28). This is the strength and this is the power which we need to reach back for when we are tested to be proven worthy of that which we wanted before we were born –  eternal life with God – our eternal destiny.

Right now I am going through the testing ground I did not expect. I feel like God has put me in a jail and said to me: “You will not be able to do anything unaided. I will bring you down to the depths of humility and show you your weakness and your strength. I will make you lose the you that you have become in this mortal shell and I will reveal to you who you have always been, who you were when you were with Me. To get to know yourself, you have to lose yourself.”

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory

Do we come from God, who is our home.

(William Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality)

 

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Enlightenment by Judy Cooley)

Judy Cooley Art – Uplifting & Joyful LDS Paintings – Altus Fine Art

BE STILL MY SOUL

 

Be still my soul

And know that He leads you

By the voice of His heart.

He beckons and He calls

Your spirit to ignite

To truth and godly path.

 

His love will find you,

He will lead you and save your soul,

He is the Shepherd

Who will answer your call.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art by AI)

IDEALISM VS REALITY

 

I am a chronic idealist. I came to understand this about myself at a deeper level one year when I discovered the definition of different existent personalities. I found myself in the key characteristics of one of the rarest personality types called the INFJ personality, also known as the Advocate. INFJs are insightful, driven by a strong moral compass, intuitive and idealistic to a fault.

It sounds good but all that idealism has one huge drawback. Strong idealism can lead to unrealistic expectations and difficulty in handling life. A friend I made some years ago found it difficult to understand why such strong optimism would come out of my mouth when I was teaching lessons at Church but then would dissolve into tears in my private life. She said: “I don’t understand. This is not you”. She thought it was just a matter of maintaining positivity and I was failing. I couldn’t understand it either. I thought I was just weak. When I came across the definition of the INFJ personality some time later, it was like staring in the mirror.

I have tried since then not to let many people into my private world to see my vulnerabilities because even though I long to be understood, I feel constantly judged and yes my personality also struggles with judgment. Sometimes I feel like I am Jekyl and Hyde.

Because of my idealistic nature, I live in a cloud of faith. Pragmatic approach to problems is difficult. My intuitive trait focuses on the big picture and possibilities rather than concrete details. This has been the hardest trial of my last two years of bad health. My faith in everything I have ever believed in has been tested to the limit.

This is the difficulty: faith is believing in the unseen. It is idealism at its finest because it rarely manifests itself in reality. Things of the spirit are difficult to see, touch and deal with yet they are acutely real to the person who feels it in their soul. That’s me.

One of my favourite stories from the life of Jesus is when He and His disciples travelled toward Jerusalem and found themselves hungry. When He saw a fig tree in the way, He approached it and finding nothing on it but leaves, He cursed the tree that it would not bear fruit ever again. The fig tree withered away as He spoke (Matthew 21:17-20).

When His disciples marveled, Jesus delivered the greatest discourse on faith but at the same time the ultimate idealistic achievement ever: “Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith, and doubt  not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.” (v 21)

Now, when you think of a mountain, its density, its size, its weight, its evolvement through time, it makes the mountain the most concrete and impossible thing ever to be subject to the power of faith. Yet a man called the Brother of Jared did this very thing in ancient America when “he said to the mount Zerin, remove – and it was removed” (Ether 12:30). As we know, this man also saw the pre-mortal Christ as a result of his undaunting faith (Ether 3:9)

I have studied a lot about faith over the years and especially about its role in healing since I have suffered from bad health. I have been told in the scriptures that if I have faith I can be healed of anything (D&C 42:49-51). So strong is the power of faith that people in the meridian of time brought their sick into the streets and laid them on beds and couches so that a shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow them and heal them (Acts 5:12-15). Special miracles were also performed by the hands of Paul: “From his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them.” (Acts 19:12)

This is what I call manifesting faith and it’s the kind of faith that I want and feel I should have as a Christian. Is it any wonder that my faith is being tested through the mountain called ‘pain’ that is obstructing my view? Some would call this mountain reality. To me it is an ideal to strive for.

Stay tuned. Perhaps this ideal will one day turn into reality. 

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: No Man Knoweth the Hour by Liz Lemon Swindle)

LIVING WATER

 

Thou art the source of all my blessings,

Thou art the source of all my joy,

Thou art the living water

I drink with haste

And savour each and every drop

So careful of tragic waste.

Feed me Saviour ever more

The love that flows with every cup

Grant me my fill each day

That keeps me living and bears me up. 

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art by AI)