So I’m teaching a lesson about charity tomorrow. And I can’t pin anything down. It’s like I’ve been asked to teach a lesson about astrophysics or something; I have a general idea about the thing, but the more I get into it, the bigger it gets and I’m beginning to realize that everything in my whole world—everything—is tied in and through and around charity in the same way that my whole world is tied in and around and through the existence of the sun.
See because Moroni talks about faith and hope and charity as if those three things could be braided together into the prettiest braid anybody ever saw (Moroni 7). And then Paul says there’s nothing in all the wide world that can stop God loving us (Romans 8). And then John says that if we’re all full up with fear we can’t really know God because God is love and fear ninja-blocks all the love God is sending our way (1 John 4). And then Shakespeare throws in his two cents saying that "...Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark..." (Sonnet 116). Here that? Never shaken. An ever-fixed mark. A North Star for lost boats. Charity never faileth. It really can’t. It just isn’t possible. It’s not that it doesn’t faileth, it really can’t faileth. It’s like light (If light can behave as a particle… Max Planck, quantum mechanics) it can’t be destroyed or smashed or changed or anything. It just is. And this is the part where my brain starts to hurt a little.
It just is.
If my “eye be single to the glory of God” I get to be all full of light (Doctrine and Covenants 88:67). And if light and charity are of the same stuff, then I get to be all full of charity. And if I’m full of charity, full of light, “when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is… that we may be purified even as he is pure.” I get to be all clean. Purified even as He is pure.
Reconciliation. Redemption.
Someday, if I do my best to do His will, I will enter the mansions of my Father. He will say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” and I will enter into the mansions He’s prepared for me. But in order to qualify I must be found with perfect charity at the last day (insert gifts of the Atonement here). Know what that means? Someday I will be able to love so big that I will be unchanging and constant.
Someday I will be “an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken”. Someday I will be able to love my Father as much as He loves me.
Never faileth.
