I know I haven’t written a blog post for a while. Last summer I joined an online writing community called Writers’ Village University (writersvillage.com), which I love, and a lot of my writing time has been spent doing writing assignments for the creative nonfiction classes I’ve been taking through WVU. The most recent piece I wrote for one of my classes I thought would be worth sharing here on my blog. I hope you enjoy!
Feeling the Spirit
“Did you feel the Spirit?” Dianna asked me. I stared at her like a deer caught in the headlights. It was my baptism day. I was eight years old and had just been baptized by my father. Following my baptism, my father and several other brethren from my church had stood in a circle around me with their hands on my head and given me the gift of the Holy Ghost. Apparently I was supposed to have felt something special during these ceremonies. But I just felt normal. I didn’t know how to tell Dianna that though. I dropped my eyes to the floor, mumbled something, and then ran off to play with my friends who had come to see my baptism. But her question continued to trouble me.
This idea of “feeling the Spirit” is emphasized a lot in my church. It seemed very important to learn how to do this, but I was at a loss. A lot of people seemed to cry when they got up in church to share their beliefs and feelings about God with everyone. I thought crying must have something to do with feeling the Spirit. But I never cried when I talked about God. A lot of people claimed to feel the Spirit when they went to the temple. I just felt anxious when I went there, terrified of forgetting what I was supposed to do and looking stupid. Some people talked about a warm feeling in their chest when they felt the Spirit. That had never happened to me. I got goosebumps sometimes. Was that the same thing?
These concerns about my apparent lack of feeling the Spirit followed me through all my growing up years. I felt like some sort of sham church member, doing all the things I was supposed to do, but never achieving this magical experience called feeling the Spirit. It wasn’t until I became a full-time missionary for my church for a season that I began to unravel this mystery of feeling the Spirit.
It turned out that, for me, the key to feeling the Spirit was recognizing when I was not feeling the Spirit. All this time I had been so worried about what the Spirit felt like, when, in reality, what I should have been focusing on was what the Spirit did not feel like.
It all started to click for me one day during a quarterly gathering of the missionaries in my area. My mission president’s wife spoke at this gathering, and one of the things she said was that, as missionaries, we didn’t have room in our hearts for feelings like self-doubt, self-blame, discouragement, etc.; all we had room for was faith, hope, and charity.
Something clicked for me in that moment. I realized that feelings like discouragement and frustration with myself did not make me feel motivated to try harder to be a better representative of Jesus Christ. Those feelings just made me want to shrink inside myself and give up. That’s not what God wanted me to do, and that meant those feelings were not from God or from His Spirit. Feeling faith and hope that Jesus Christ could help me overcome my weaknesses and that I could succeed in doing His work if I kept trying, those were feelings that motivated me to continue to work hard and reach out to others with love and be patient with myself; those were feelings that came from God and His Spirit.
It was like a brilliant light of understanding had suddenly burst upon my consciousness. My mind had been enlightened, joy and peace filled my soul—I had felt the Spirit. And it felt good. And I could see the way it was a contrast to the darkness of despair at my imperfections that I had been struggling with. And I began to see what Paul meant in his letter to the Galatians when he said “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22-23, KJV).
I had been feeling the Spirit all along, but until I contrasted it with the darkness that accompanies feelings that are not from God, I couldn’t see it. I was looking for something magical and exotic, outside the realm of normal emotions. What I discovered is that being able to recognize your emotions and their source and which emotions are helpful to you and which ones are not is its own kind of magic. The magic of feeling the Spirit, both its presence and its absence. I can now look someone in the eye and say with confidence that I have felt the Spirit, and it has changed my life.
