Tonight

Tonight we went for a drive. We often like to drive to new places. Tonight it was a church parking lot up the hill from our house. We got out of the car and ran around, burning off some energy and playing in the decorative rocks before bedtime.

I took my shoes off. It was cool and windy, and the asphalt still had a pleasant warmth from before the clouds had rolled in. So, with warm bare feet and cold wind whipping my hair, my husband and I chased our kids around, and "ate" rocks. (They were strawberry cakes. For Jesus' birthday, per my oldest.)

The weather was my kind of perfect. I have always loved the wind. I love the rain. I love me a good storm. I know that storms often depress people, but for me there's something about that thick storm air that is invigorating. So taking my shoes off, getting in some good "grounding" time there, I felt close to God. 

But also so very very sad.

Just across a field from our parking lot was the Saratoga Springs Temple construction site. It absolutely looks like an Orthanc on a dead plain. No insult to construction. I know building buildings takes time, but this is also one temple I'm not happy to see go up. It feels so unnecessary, with eventually no fewer than ELEVEN temples within a one hour drive from our home. That's not an exaggeration. When the construction is done on the next two, there will be ELEVEN. ELEVEN in one hour.

Seeing this temple makes me feel that we've lost the vision of what temples are supposed to be for, so now they're status and power symbols, rather than ascension symbols. They're symbols of prosperity rather than an Axis Mundi. To me, the hypocrisy level is high as the Church continues to build more temples where no more are needed, and we still have a grossly unfathomable slush fund of wealth. While there are still poor Mormon kids starving to death in third world countries, while their parents are told to pay their tithing instead of feeding their children. To me it seems wrong. It seems like the Church is trying to help their own image instead of God's own children. In these tithes and offerings they have robbed God - taking meat from the house for themselves, so to speak.

Feeling the wind, feeling the warm asphalt, hearing my children laugh, I was close to God. 

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." John 3:8

The wind can bring hurricanes. It brings life-giving rain. It destroys in tornadoes. It parted the Red Sea. The wind can sweep your feet out from under you. It can dry a tear. 

The work of the Spirit isn't something we can completely understand. It's giving reassurances and peace, while simultaneously giving dark, honest truths - things which seem to contradict one another, and yet it is manageable. THAT is knowledge of both good and evil. 

"As we bow to His leading and guiding, promptings and training, so the indiscernible, unfathomable movement of the Spirit of God can be observed in the man or woman whose life is yielded to the Lord." (Knowing Jesus.com) 

It is hard to be a nuanced Mormon. But it makes me grateful for stormy nights.