Moonbeams: An Easter Svithe

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"Testimony isn't something you have today,
and you are going to have always.
A testimony is fragile.
It is as hard to hold as a moonbeam.
It is something you have to recapture
every day of your life."
---Harold B Lee

Today is Easter. Why is today Easter and not some other day? I wish I could tell your, but the folks who designed and carry out the Easter-figuring machinery for the Western World only speak Urdu and have never been able to sufficiently explain their methodology to us speakers of Indo-European tongues. But it has something to do with the full moon.

The full moon makes a great symbol for Easter. The moon waxes and wanes, dying and returning to life on a regular schedule to remind us of the death and resurrection of the Savior.

Every halfway worthwhile religion in the history of the world has had a spring festival to remind its followers of the return of life--nothing like bouncing baby goats to get a lad's mind on the really important things in life. Resurrection and fertility is what spring has always been about. Aussies should seriously considereschedulingng their Easter to October. If those Urdu calendar men will let them.

My religion is itself a symbol of death and resurrection. And I don't mean the LDS faith, I mean my own personal inner life of faith. It too, like the moon, waxes and wanes. At times I am a man of faith. Other times I am a spiritual pauper.

But that's to be expected. Like I talked about in my last post, entropy is an inescapable fact of mortality--without the expenditure of energy, things break down. So it is with faith. Without my diligence and effort, my faith breaks down.

Christ's diligence of two thousand years ago, on the other hand, was not a mortal effort and is not subject to entropy. And his gift is not just to raise my body and save my soul, but relying on him also allows me to daily recapture the moonbeam of my own faith. For he is the author and the finisher of my faith. My source of moonbeams.





Last week's svithe