Episode #126 - How Do You Hear Him?

One of the most difficult spiritual skills we must acquire is to be able to hear and respond to the Spirit of the Lord, while we work through our mental illness.  It is important as we do so to understand just how the Spirit works in our lives and avoid some of the more common misconceptions.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #126 – How Do You Hear Him.  I am your host Damon Socha.  There is a frequently used quote from our current prophet, President Nelson which states the following, “In the coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.”  The Spirit of the Lord or the Holy Ghost is a topic well known to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ.  It is rare that we do not speak of it weekly in some form or another.  It is so critical to the personal salvation and family exaltation that as President Nelson states, it will be impossible to survive spiritually.  While we speak of its need regularly and understand that personal revelation is critical to our survival in a world filled to the brim with every temptation imaginable, there are times when we don’t fully understand the nature of this personage of the Godhead, his purposes, design and function within our lives.  This is incredibly important to all members of the church but even greater understanding is needed when you face trials of mental illness.  Because mental illness influences feelings, desires, motivations and creates alternate emotional states through which we see the world, it can have serios effects upon our ability to hear and respond to the feelings, impressions and internal voices we hear.  Understanding the function, purpose and methods of how the Spirit works in our lives can aid in overcoming the barriers brought about by the influences of the illness.  Now I am not going to be able to walk through every scenario, concern, and difficulty brought about by mental illness as that list is far too long for a podcast.  I am going to talk about three general misconceptions regarding hearing the Spirit of the Lord.

The Spirit is not a celestial pharmacist.  When I was much younger, I was in a Sunday School class studying about the various functions and purposes of the Spirit of the Lord.  The lesson was fairly standard and I admit to be content just listening.  Someone spoke up during the exercise of writing down all of the many things the Spirit does.  They said something that has always stuck with me.  The Spirit of the Lord is not a drug or a happy pill.  That might be an obvious statement but upon contemplating it, I realized how profound the statement was.  I have pondered it every since.  There could be many meanings to the idea.  But there are a couple I have found important.  The first important concept that comes from this idea is the following.  The Spirit of the Lord is not intended to be a happiness drug.  Meaning that even if we keep all the commandments and listen and respond to every prompting, we will still have difficult days, sorrow, troubles and emotional difficulty.  And that has nothing to do with being disobedient, or not listening to the Spirit or the Spirit simply leaving our lives.  We need sorrow, pain, suffering and even unhappiness in our lives.  They are an important part of our mortal experience.  Could you imagine if the Spirit were like a drug and we could ask at any moment for it to change our sorrow to happiness?  What a disaster we would be as members of his church.  We would not be obedient because we loved the Lord, or see value in his commandments or even because we have passed through the change of heart. We would be spiritual addicts to the drug of happiness and everything we do would be dependent upon keeping that happy drug in our lives.  It would distort our mortal experience and cause mortal learning to be interrupted and make the Spirit of the Lord no more than a bad pharmacist.  We would not learn the necessary lessons from our fiery trials and we would not learn to become spiritually mature and independent.  We would reach for the Spirit drug any time things became even the slightest difficult and we would miss much of what mortality has to offer.  Now having said all of that, yes the Spirit of the Lord based on eternal laws and omniscience can provide healing, peace, comfort and even joy and happiness.  But the outcome and the intervention in our lives depends upon more than our desire to be happy and removed from our trials.  The Spirit is the extension of the Lord and his designs and purposes in our lives.  The design of the Spirit is to lead us to life eternal not be our celestial pharmacist.  And so while we can ask for relief, the Spirit of the Lord knows when best to intervene so that we learn the necessary lessons of life and obtain that celestial change of heart.  This is not going to be achieved passing out spiritual happy pills.  So what should we expect from the Spirit when we talk about joy and comfort?  Our first expectation should be that the Spirit will remove anything in our lives that does not provide value.  That of course requires that we remain vigilant and conversant in prayer with our Father in Heaven and true to our covenants.  If we do so we will be protected from events, difficulties, and problems that would not provide eternal value.  The second expectation should be that from time to time and as the Lord views valuable to our education, the Spirit will heal us and provide comfort to our troubled soul.  We should also expect that as life becomes increasingly difficult, the Spirit will not allow anything to come upon us that would be beyond we can bear spiritually.  This is what I refer to as the umbrella of the Lord or his protections based on our covenants.  Third, we can expect that the Lord will give us those profound moments of peace and happiness, and we know that they are profound because we have experienced troubled souls, pain and suffering.  The degree to which we can withstand, understand and experience pain and suffering will determine the extend of our happiness and joy.  The more we understand about the depths of suffering, the more we will understand about the heights of pure joy.  Fourth, while the Spirit is not a spiritual pharmacist, we can expect that in difficult moments, like a loving parent, the spirit will come upon us and truly support us in our trials and tribulations but not removed them.  Yes there will be learning moments when we need to work through the mires of mortal life.  But understand that we are learning to become like our Father in Heaven and that means that we must truly learn to do things on our own without significant aid and intervention of the Spirit.  I like to think of this as the Spirit taking his hand off the back of the bike while we are maturing in our bike riding ability.  He is still there but we need to learn to be professional riders and we can’t do that with the Spirit of the Lord constantly providing for our balance.  Yes he will be there beside us but truly we need to learn to become Gods and to stand on our own in celestial life.

False Positives and False Negatives.  This particular area of misconception is not necessarily a misconception about the Spirit and its purposes but more of a misreading of the impressions of the spirit.  One of the many difficulties we will face, especially with mental illness is the idea of false positives and false negatives when it comes to our feelings and what is the spirit and what is not.  Because the Spirit most often works through feelings and thoughts, and because our illness also tends to change and alter feelings and thoughts, we are susceptible to incorrect feelings of both the positive and negative nature.  We can feel that something is right when it is not and we can feel just the opposite.  And because mental illness often amplifies feelings and thoughts, those feelings can be powerful within us.  We can strongly feel as though we need to do something or to act in a particular way and feel that the Spirit is directing us, when it is really just our illness.  We can also feel as though we are in sin and struggling to listen to the Lord, when we are doing just fine and the Lord is pleased with us.  For me this has been one of the most difficult problems of mental illness, when am I hearing the Spirit of the Lord and when is my illness talking.  Adding to this difficulty is the notion that Lucifer does not always influence us in outright sinful ways, he can appear as an angel of light mixing doctrines and peddling half-truths that can feel very true to our illness but in reality are leading us away from the truth and the Lord.  So it is here that we face one of our greatest obstacles in life.  Learning to hear and respond to the Spirit while we suffer with an illness that directly affects our ability to do so.  

I wish that I could say there is an easy solution to this difficulty but anyone who deals with mental illness can tell you that it is a process.  There are some helpful things to understand that allow for some filtering of these false positives and false negatives.  The first is that the Spirit of the Lord testifies of truth, not half-truths, partial truths or outright falsehoods.  Meaning that if you are feeling that you need to act in a way contrary to the doctrines of the church or the counsel of the prophet, then your feeling is not of the Spirit of the Lord.  As President Woodruff states in the Doctrine and Covenants in Official Declaration 1, “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as the President of this Church to lead you astray.  It is not in the programme.”  So no matter how you feel about certain doctrines of the church, the Spirit will never testify against them in any manner.  The second is that time is an important element.  The Lord knows that we struggle feeling and hearing the Spirit, especially a one-time feeling or thought.  I have found that if I wait a day or two or sometimes a week, any feelings brought about by my mental illness tend to shift or be lessened and or removed.  If the spiritual feeling persists in the same way as before, I can often trust it.  If it diminishes or goes away then I know that it is not likely the Spirit.  Now this doesn’t always work because of the interference of mental illness and it doesn’t work in the sense of an immediate prompting that needs to be acted upon.  But for the most part, it has been very helpful to me.  Because the Lord knows that when I suffered in an episode I would struggle to hear the promptings of the Spirit, he often made accommodations such as allowing the prompting to remain for several days and speaking in ways that were not the same feelings as my illness.  The third is that the Lord can speak in many ways and often discussing our feelings and promptings with someone close to us and allowing them to confirm the prompting can be very beneficial.  I have found that because mental illness alters the very same feelings and emotions that mental illness does, the Lord will speak to me in more than one way and by more than one person.  What I have found is that when I receive a prompting and I don’t know if it is the Lord, if I wait and ponder it, the Lord will have other individuals talk about it or he will “light up a phrase” in sometimes dialog for me to hear.  Interestingly enough it is not always someone close to me and I have even had someone I didn’t even know say something that I knew the Lord had prompted, even when they were not members of the church.  What is important about all of this is that the Lord knows your difficulties and he can work around it to allow for you to receive the promptings and counsel that you need.  I have noted some ways I have been able to work through the process and I am sure that there exist others but it is important to not give up.  Find the way or the ways that the Lord speaks to you and understand it will be a process not a moment.

Finally, I am not sure that I can call this a misconception but it is an important concept.  If we are doing our best to be obedient to gospel commands, repent and seeking divine guidance we will have the Spirit to be with us.  What is interesting about this idea is that we can get accustomed to the Spirit in our lives and we might mistakenly think that the Spirit is not present with us because we do not feel a powerful witness.  We will at times feel the Spirit in very powerful ways and we can then come to the conclusion that this is how the Spirit works.  However, for the most part, the Spirit does not work by these powerful feelings all the time.  In fact, you will find that the Spirit most often works in more subtle ways to teach us and he can use many means to do so.  Because he works in subtle ways and by small means, we can feel as though the Spirit is not always with us.  However, this is not true.  We can actually become accustomed to those subtle nudges and promptings and we sometimes follow them without even understanding that it is the Spirit.  We can also become accustomed to the happiness and joy of the gospel, not seeing it in our lives.  We tend to look for those moments that stand out and cause us to feel things outside of our normal range but our normal range may just be the joy we are seeking.  I was speaking to someone the other day that helped me to see this in my life.  She said that she was trying to explain what it felt like to have the Spirit in our lives consistently to her daughter.  Because of this problem that we tend to look for those outstanding moments, the normal feelings of joy and spiritual peace may not be as visible because feelings of joy and peace is our normal reality.  She asked her daughter what it felt like to have the Spirit removed from her life.  We can all relate to these moments in time as part of our learning process.  Contrasting what it feels like to have the Spirit removed against our normal feelings helps us to see that the Spirit is often continuously in our lives.  In fact, the Spirit of the Lord is likely more present than you realize when you consider what life would be like with only Lucifer at the helm.  When I have truthfully considered this idea, I realized just how powerful an influence the Spirit is for me, even when I don’t always recognize it.  We can become accustomed to the joy in our lives and look beyond the mark for those powerful moments of witness as spiritual evidence of the Holy Ghost in our lives.  When in reality we are already feeling, listening to and interacting with the Spirit on a regular basis.

It is important to note that the Spirit of the Lord is intended to provide guidance and direction to aid us in our journey to eternal life.  There are many preference choices that really do not need to be directed by the Spirit.  Our choice of color for our clothing, house or car; what we like to eat, as long as it is healthy and in moderation, if we like sports or band or drama or all three are not really choices with eternal consequences and blessings.  When we do go to the Lord in prayer and ask questions, we should be cognizant that the Lord is not going to tell us what type of soup to buy, what clothes we should wear tomorrow, what color we should paint our house.  The guidance of the spirit should not be concerned with trivial matters that have no bearing on eternal things.  We should carefully consider our questions brought to the attention of the Lord.

In addition to the idea of guidance, is the idea of preparedness and timing.  Just because we don’t get an answer from the Lord immediately, doesn’t mean that one does not exist.  Preparation of the soul to hear and obey the answer and timing of the answer can be just as critical as the answer itself.  I would liken it to a toddler trying to understand a detailed lecture on DNA.  Sometimes we don’t have the capacity for the answer and we must wait and learn before we can be taught.  And that learning might be both experiential and book learning.  We should do our best to find the answer on our side while asking the Lord for his.  Often in our impatience we skip this step of searching for answers, taking the easy road to just ask the Lord.  I have found that rarely has the Lord answered me before I have done my reading and homework on the subject.

Finally, if you suffer from mental illness then you understand how powerful our emotions can be and how influential in our lives.  It can be very difficult to place those emotional desires to the side and to seek what the Lord desires in our lives.  Seeking the Lord’s will in the chaos of an episode can be one of the most difficult things you will do.  We should take note when we are in these chaotic states and understand that seeking our answer when we are under tremendous emotional pressures may not be feasible or the best for us.  We should wait until we are less dominated by our disease, more often than not answers are wanted immediately but not needed immediately.  There is nothing more difficult than being patient when you are in the middle of your symptoms but it might just be the best for you.

What we come to understand about the Spirit of the Lord is that he is far more active in our lives than most of us recognize and that we are more often in the path of righteousness than we think.  It is Lucifer that wants us to think that the Spirit interacts in our lives only sparsely and once in a great while with powerful force and then just leaves us to ourselves.  The truth is that the Spirit is communicating with us consistently and regularly to keep us within the pathway to eternal life.  We may just not recognize all that he is doing for us.  May the Lord bless you this week and do your part so that the Lord can do his.  Until next week.