Our Understanding Is Never Complete in this Life

Comment #21 by Thomas Parkin (emphasis added) on "The Hard History - is faith enough to get us through" - Margaret Young (By Common Consent)

I’ve just been visiting with my folks down in SLC. They have a swimming pool in their new digs, and my dad and I were in the pool till after midnight Saturday talking. Actually, he did most of the talking while I did most of the listening. He told me true things about his mission, about how he was before he went, how he felt while serving, who he was when he returned, and some experiences from jobs he held. Some of these things I’d heard him tell before, and some was new to me. I suppose you’d say these were unsanitized versions. There is nothing new about this. There has never been a subject that he hasn’t approached to me with this same candor – at least for the last 25 years.

I’m so grateful to have had a father that always valued truth, taught me that the truth will out and so we might as well embrace it, while at the same time he also taught me the gospel. It isn’t a brag, I’m deeply humble and grateful for this. Because of this it has been easier for me to see that the truth in all it’s shades and colors is so much richer and more beautiful than delicate and, if true, still incomplete histories and doctrines. As we learn more and more, while keeping our covenants and striving for the companionship of the Spirit, reality takes on a depth and dimension that echoes and calls to our soul in ways that make for us tepid the thinner, fraught with fear versions of history and doctrine that threaten believers with kitsch and worse, smallness of soul.

Faith is only a step for us. I know that knowledge is possible through direct experience of the powers of heaven, manifestations of the Spirit, having doctrine distill upon our souls and having visitations from beyond the veil. But we’ve got to take the plunge. Before we can know we have to admit that we don’t know. And then even after we know admit that we don’t know fully, that our understanding is never complete in this life. And press forward fearlessly into knowledge, holding to the Rod of Iron which is the word of God to the souls of those who love and serve Him.