For the Living and the Dead

My mother said this to me today during our Sunday afternoon/evening phone call: "I am glad that in the scriptures what the Lord offers to us, what He invites us to enter, is His rest. The scriptures do not say, 'enter into my fire.' The scriptures say, 'enter into my rest.'"

We Mormons get excited about the promised productivity of the Spirit World. Revelations to the prophets and to individuals glimpsing through the veil indicate that the next life is much like this one in its bustle and energy and in its citizens' desires and efforts to get stuff done. It is a heaven that attracts me. A promise that the sociality we experience here, we will experience there. A knowledge that our godly propensities and desires to create, progress, and grow will be in effect there, especially if we live up here to the full measure of our covenants.

But I have spent today considering some of the vicissitudes of this, our living, and the pangs and reality of death, including the sudden deaths of those close to those I love.

And though I am only 27 and young, I have already lived long enough (on this earth, it doesn't take long) to be grateful for a God who promises that life with Him will bring us creativity and progression and growth yes, but it will also bring us rest. I am grateful for a God who understands that after this living, after (and while) here living, we might be ready to feel some measure of rest from whatever it is that makes us so often feel weary. Loneliness, uncertainty, goofiness, accidents, pride, ineptitude, malaria, hunger, unfulfilled desire. Even the listing makes me tired.

And so God extends His promises to us, for comfort and for hope, for growth and for rest, for the living and for the dead.

Having faith on the Lord; having a hope that ye shall receive eternal life; having the love of God always in your hearts, that ye may be lifted up at the last day and enter into his rest.
Alma 13:29