Treasures in Heaven

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
-Matt. 6:19-21-

I don't know how many of you feel like those scriptures refer to good works. I used to anyway. I don't anymore though.

I don't know when or where or what the impetus was for the change but I now believe that those scriptures refer to those incidents in our lives which promote spiritual growth.

There is a favorite movie of mine. We've all played the game where you're to imagine being stranded alone on a desert island, and you could choose five movies. Which would you choose? First and foremost on my list would be, "To Kill a Mockingbird" I love this movie for so many reasons. Atticus Finch, for being someone who never forgot his manners. After the trial, when his world had crashed down upon him, as he was relating to his neighbor, Miss Maudy, his loss. Sheriff Tait came driving up and asked to speak with him. Under the circumstances, anyone would simply turn and start speaking to the Sheriff but Atticus first turned to Maudy and asked, "Would you excuse me for a moment?"

When his daugher and his son had been attacked and his son was laying in bed. When we first get a look at Boo Radley...anyone would excuse Atticus for not remembering the gentilities that were obviously ingrained within him but, even then, his first words were words of introduction that might be used at a cotillion, "Miss Jean Louis Finch? Mister Arthur Radley" I love how, of all the people in town, Atticus refused to call his neighbor, "Boo" but insisted upon granting him the dignity of his proper name.

Emily Post once said that manners are not meant to restrict us, but to free us. To let us know how we are to act in any situation so as to allow others to feel comfortable around us. Whenever I think of that quote, I think of Atticus Finch and how he always seemed comfortable in every situation..in command of himself and everything around him because he never forgot his manners.

One of the other things I like about the movie is the opening sequence...The one where the little boy takes out a cigar box of toys and trinkets and begins to look at and examine each and every one..a broken watch, a pen knife, a few marbles and crayons...as the sequence progesses, we come to realize that this is no mere box of trinkets, this is a casket of treasure. Each one of the items is important to the boy for some reason or other. We get the feeling that, by opening up and looking at and polishing his 'treasure', the boy becomes more grounded in his life.

I guess that opening sequence of that movie has had as much an impact as anything else in making me realize that Christ was not talking about good works, he was speaking of good experiences.

One of the things that life has taught me is that, while spiritual experiences might be strong and, for the moment, overwhelming, if we do not relive them through purposefully remembering and relating them to others, they soon fade and dull and lose thier significance in our lives altogether.

Spiritual experiences do not have much of a shelf life. Like hot house flowers, unless they are carefully tended, they will wilt and fade. Perhaps that's why we are asked to share our testimonies once a month.

Oddly, one of the things that made me come to realize this was a negative spiritual experience that I had on my mission. One that, for reasons which will become obvious, I did not often share with others. I only do so now to illustrate my point of spiritual experiences unshared and untended soon dull and vanish.

I had this experience while with with a companion and we went through it together. We lost touch after our mission. As the years progressed, whenever I thought about the experience, I would not dwell upon it and my mind would tell me that it couldn't really have happened...that I must have imagined it...that I must be embellishing in my mind what really happened.

When I reconnected with my companion after a couple of decades, I tentatively broached the subject of what happened to us on that night and quickly got a return email, "Oh thank goodness you remember it too! I thought I was going crazy and imagining things".

I have debated, in my mind, the wisdom of telling this story. At the risk of appearing melodramatic, let me warn anyone reading that this story, quite frankly, scares people. Probably more so because it is true. It is the story of the night when my companion, Elder Shrack, and I became certain that there was a God because we came face to face with his opposite number.

This story took place in the town of Sassari on the island of Sardegna. It was in one of the farthest reaches of the mission. Getting there required almost 24 hours of travel on a couple of trains and a boat. We did not have phones in our apatments. As such, the only contact we had with the mission office was a weekly call we made at the telephone exchange office to our Zone Leaders on the southern tip of the island and weekly reports mailed in.

We shared a massive apartment with another companionship. It was huge. One of our favorite things about the apartment was a huge salon with ornate deorations and painted ceilings. There were a few dozen mattresses in that room that we arranged on the floor every P-Day and had tag-team wrestling matches.

Another reason we loved this apartment so much was that it was so huge, you could literally go and be alone with your thoughts for a while...a rare commodity while being a missionary. Most apartments were so small that you were literally in each others face 24/7.

My companion and I had been concentrating upon reactivating people in the branch. In every italian city, there is an area that missionaries referred to as "the gut" It was the oldest part of the city with buildings that looked like they were designed for a movie featuring Romeo and Juliette.

We were in such a building, calling upon an inactive member when the groundwork of our experience was laid.

When we knocked on the door, the mans wife answered. When she saw who we were, her eyes got wide and she reached out and practically dragged us into the apartment. I must say, it was quite a different experience than we were used to in door approaches.

When we got into the apartment, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rising. I was terrified and a quick look at my companion and our hostess let me know that they were just as terrified.

The lady of the house spoke up asking us if we were missionaries. We told her we were.

She then related to us that her husband no longer considered himself a member of our church and, in fact, no longer was a Christian. She said that he had started dabbling in Satanism and was now practicing that religion.

When we expressed a measure of incredulity, she pointed to some evidence in the corner..an area that looked like a shrine with an marble alter. There was some evidence on the alter that small animals had been sacrificed. (I know...I had trouble believing it myself and I was looking at it) The lady of the house asked us if we could cast the spirits from her home.

Casting out demons isn't really a lesson that they teach you at the MTC (LTM in my day) We had no idea what to do and so we thought we would offer a prayer.

Have you ever been swimming underwater in a river and heard rocks click together? You know how you don't really "hear" the sound with your ears but it seems like you hear it at the stem of your brain? Both my companion and I, during that prayer, heard voices in that same way...not in our ears but at the stem of our brain.

Trust me, I am fully aware of the rammifications that might come if I admit to "hearing voices in my head" but there's no getting around the fact that such was the case.

There is a scripture in The Book of Mormon that describes Christ praying:

And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father
3 Nephi 17:17

A lot of people have trouble fathoming that a person could hear words and yet not write them. I don't. Because, at the opposite end of the spectrum, even though I heard the words in my head, I really don't have a way to describe to you how horrible and threatening and frightening they were.

My companion finished our prayer and returned home for the evening..too frightened to even discuss what had happened to us.

For several days afterwards, I began to notice a phenomenon in our apartment. Where previously we all loved being able to be alone, I noticed that nobody would be alone anywhere for any reason. As a matter of fact, nobody went anywhere except their own bedrooms, the kitchen, or the bathroom.

One night, I snapped awake. One moment I was deep asleep and the next I was wide awake. Even thoughI was awake and in my bed, I had the sensation that I was moving..it was if I were in a roller coaster, some open air means of transport and I was travelling through a tunnel at a tremendous rate of speed.

The feeling was not unpleasant but the strangeness of the situation terrified me. I tried to imagine what was going on and I caught hold of a single thought...either my spirit was leaving my body, or another spirit was trying to get in.

Once I got hold of that thought, I began to concentrate, very hard, on trying to make the feeling stop. I prayed inwardly and concentrated so hard that I literally sweat through my bedclothes.

Eventually, the feeling stopped. Actually, what happened was that the "ride" I was on slowed until it stopped and then started "moving" again in the opposite direction. At one point, the feeling of movement stopped altogether and I had a settling or a "whompff" type of feeling.

I was terrified beyond all reason. I eventually got up the nerve to roll over. When I did, I saw that the room was dark but there was something even more dark right beside my bed. I screamed and my companion awoke and turned on the light.

"Did you see it?" He asked.

I nodded that I did.

"I've seen it three nights in a row"

We left the apartment and went to call our zone leaders to tell them our situation. In an almost cavalier manner, they said, "Cast them out"

"Hey! we TRIED that buddy!" I screamed into the phone, "They just followed us home! If you wanna come take a crack at them, be my guest!"

We left the apartment and spent the night at the church. We only returned for our things. We were never bothered again.

I related this story to a sister in one of my wards who had ten years later served in the same mission, in the same town, and, as it turns out, had lived in the same apartment. Her eyes grew wide as she heard my story and related a similar instance that had occured to her companion and she.

Beleieve it or not, I don't relate the story to scare people. I do so because, despite the intensity of the experience (and the negative nature of the experience notwithstanding...it was the most POWERFUL experience of a spiritual nature, I had ever encountered)

But the fact remains that, despite the power of that experience, because I did not cause myself to remember and relive it, I soon began to doubt its veracity and wondered if I had not imagined the whole thing. It was only wehen asking people who shared the same or similar experiences that I realized what a short shelf life spiritual experiences of any nature have.

Perhaps that's what the veil of forgetfulness is...simply time without the means of remembering and sharing the experience of heaven. I don't know.

What I DO know is that positive spiritual experiences are to be shared, and shared often. Both for the benefit of the hearer and, more importantly, for the benefit of the teller

Thank You

This letter has been a long time coming. I want to thank you for the part you played in helping my daughter become the amazing young woman that she is today. Maybe you won't have occasion to read this blog but I want to thank you nevertheless.

When we first moved into your town, you and my daughter were just starting high school. You became friends and were close all thoughout the summer. Then a boy you had a crush on since grade school started to date my daughter.

We didn't know you had a crush on the boy. Perhaps, if we had known, steps might have been taken to avert what happened next but by the time we found out, it was too late.

It started with rumors and innuendo. Concerned parents in the ward began to call us and tell us that they had heard our daughter was behaving unseemly in public with the boy. When we asked our daughter, she denied that anything of the kind was taking place. We took our concerns to a sister in the ward who also taught at the school. She told us that nothing of the kind was happening. But by the time we found out the truth, a lot of damage was already done. People like to believe anything juicy they hear about someone else. On more than one occasion, my wife and I entered a room in the chapel where my daughter was the topic of discussion only to see the talk come to a quick and embarrased halt.

It would have been bad enough had it just been the youth engaged in this gossip but, sadly, adults were often present as well.

We narrowly avoided disaster when a friend of the boy who was dating our daughter told us of plans you had made to purposefully place our daughter in a compromising position with the boy during a party you were all to attend. It appears you wanted to find some way...any way you could make all the things you had said about her true.

At first, my wife and I did not want to believe that another member of the church could be capable of something like that but then the boy showed us the emails you sent him where you outlined your plans. We were heartbroken.

In an effort to put a stop to all of this, we encouraged our daughter to not see the boy anymore. We had no idea at the time but that was probably the worst thing. When she broke up with the boy, he was hurt and that gave you license to unleash hell upon my daughter. You wrote viscious and disgusting things on her Bebo account page. When she blocked you, you went on as your sister, then apparently you stole or finagled the account passwords of mutual friends and did the same thing under the guise of being someone else...but we knew who it was. Did you really think that we would not notice the same misspelled words and sentence structure? Eventually, she shut down her page altogether.

During this ordeal, her mother and I tried to make some sense of this madness. I was reticent to imagine that the only motive for such behavior was simple jealousy. In a brutish effort to get to the bottom of it all, I accused my daughter of not telling me the whole truth. I demanded that she tell me what had really occured to cause all of this vitriol and poison being directed at her. She broke down crying and told me that she didn't know. One minute you were friends and the next minute you were enemies and she had no idea what she had done wrong.

I wasn't satisfied and so I went through all of the hate mail you directed at her. There was nothing in there that I could see of any kind of an accusation from you. Just invectives and declarations of your hatred. All she had done was be the object of your crush's affection.

I went back to my daughter and begged her forgiveness for not believing her.

It would have been okay if just leaving you alone had been the end of it but what happened next was some sort of weirdness that I thought could only happen in a Hollywood movie. You began a campaign of alienation. You let all of you mutual friend know that, if they were friends with my daughter, they could not be your friends.

Maybe it was because they had been friends with you for so long, maybe it was because they knew what you were capable of and were afraid, or perhaps it was as simple as the fact that my daughter did not demand a decision from them, but for a while, your plan worked. Sarah was completely cut off from all friends at school and at church.

Eventually, she made new friends at school. The kids at church would only speak to her as long as you weren't around. In truth, I find their cowardice almost more disgusting.

If Sarah had a class at school that you were also in, you would have one of your croanies call her and encourage her to change. When she was accepted at BYU-I, you had one of them call even then and encourage her to go to another school because "you've always wanted to attend there". We heard rumors that our daughter was suicidal; that she "hated life"; that she was a lesbian. Almost weekly a new form of hate would be directed at her. When we looked into it, they all had a common epicenter, you. It was as if you were trying to throw anything you could at her to see what would stick. I still can't quite wrap my mind around how full of hatred a person has to be in order to do some of the things that were done.

I think that the hardest part was the alienation at church and seminary. It's especially difficult to get up for class early every morning and force yourself to go when you can tell that the kids who are supposed to be closest to you either hated you or were uncomfortable around you because of that hatred.

She made new friends at school and tried to go on in spite of all of what was happening. But, even though she was a cheerleader and in all of the school plays, because she would not drink or engage in the kind of behavior that you accused her of, she did not attend many parties.

I can't tell you how many times I would pass my daughter's room and hear her crying inside....how many times I would see her seeking solace in prayer or in reading the scriptures...the many times when she would come to her mother and I in tears and wonder when Heavenly Father would answer her prayers and make it all right...all the times when the only advice we could give her was to hang on...to not give in to the hatred...to go on as best as she could and, the answer that always seems trite, "The Lord would answer her prayers in his own due time"

The one bright spot was when a few of the kids that had been your mutual friends decided that they could no longer stand to hear the daily rants against our daughter and came to her asking forgiveness and seeking her friendship once again.

When it was announced that we were moving to a new town, we heard from these two that you went around asking everyone if they were as excited as you were that we were leaving.

I once heard a story about Houdini. How he claimed that he could escape from any jail. Scotland Yard took him up on his challenge and, in a much publicized event, took him into one of their cells, daring him to escape. After checking him and taking all of his clothes as a precaution, they locked him naked in the cell.

But, what nobody knew at the time, was that Houdini had trained himself to be able to halfway swallow and bring up again, a strand of wire. Once alone in the cell, he brought up that strand of wire, formed it into a lock pick, and went to work on the lock.

He worked at it for hours to no avail. Here was a man who could get out of handcuffs as quickly as a person could lock them; who could pick locks and tie knots in string with his toes, who had devoted his very life to understanding the mechanism to virtually every lock in the world so that he could defeat it and yet, despite his best efforts, he could not best the lock in that jail cell.

After hours of trying, Houdini fell exhausted and slumped against the door of his cell, which swung open. It seems that the cell door had been locked only in his own mind.

When I think of you and my daughter, I think of that story. I think of how much each of you missed out on in High School. How she missed out on a lot, but how you missed out on even more. How, if that door to friendship had not been locked in your mind, you could have been friends with one of the finest persons I know; someone who is pretty and kind and sweet and funny and loyal.

I realize that a lot of those qualities were forged in the crucible that you created for her in high school. She came out of the ordeal with her dross burned away, bright and shiny and beautiful. Someone whose testimony was formed when the only friend...the only person she could turn to for comfort and solace besides her parents was her Savior...a much better person than when she went in and, strangely, we have you to thank for it all.

Already, in just a few short weeks, the girls in our new ward have become the kind of friends with my daughter that you two could have been all throughout high school. We see her having fun and smiling and we can see how quickly what you put her through can vanish, and how The Lord does answer prayers and make things better.

The saying "that which does not destroy me, only makes me stronger" seems trite but, nevertheless, I want to thank you for making my daughter strong.