Episode 60: What About Blessings?

Episode Transcript

Cynthia: Hello friends, this is Cynthia Winward. Welcome to today's podcast episode. I'm here with my good buddy, Susan Hinckley. How are you today, Susan?

Susan: Hi, Cynthia. I'm great.

C: You're great! Oh good. Let's just go ahead and say the title of our episode today and it is, "What about blessings?"

S: Hm. Hmm.

C: What about blessings?

S: Yeah, and some listeners are already thinking, "Well, what about blessings?"

C: Yeah.

S: And other listeners are thinking, "Yeah, but what about blessings?"

C: Right. Yeah. If you say it differently, then it comes across differently. But this—this is a hard one. I was up last night and I was telling my husband, this is what we're recording on tomorrow. And I don't know if I can do this! And honestly, Susan, I don't know if I've ever felt this way. I've never been sleepless the night before for any other topic.

S: I was sleepless too!

C: You were?

S: Yes, I had a terrible night! I'm not sure I slept at all! And I kept thinking, "Argh, what is bothering me?" And I think that this is it!

C: This has to be it.

S: This is a huge, huge angsty, itchy topic. And so I want to start right now by saying a lot of our listeners are also going, "Um, well, wait—what's problematic about blessings?"

C: Yeah. "What's wrong with you ladies?"

S: And then there's a bunch of other listeners who are going, "Oh my gosh, thank you! Because I cannot live with this. I can't come to peace with this topic!" And so whichever camp you're in, hopefully we're going to have a discussion that has something—that offers you some kind of insight. Well, actually, I'm not sure I'm going to offer anyone any insight except my own. That's the first thing I want to say, Cynthia, that this is our opinions, our thoughts, our ideas, and our wrestle. That's what is reflected in today's conversation. And it also might change! You know, I recorded a podcast about blessings—I don't know what, maybe two, three years ago, on another podcast—and I would be interested to listen to that one now and see how my ideas have morphed in the three years, because I think they have! These things continue to change as we change, and our circumstances change, and our lives change. And so right now, today, this is what you and I are thinking about blessings.

C: This is what we're thinking about.

S: Right now today, yeah. Okay, well, so here's the thing—here's why I first started wrestling with this topic. Two reasons: first, because I saw other people wrestling with it in some of the online spaces that I'm in. You know, people were coming and saying, "Well, what about blessings?" And I thought, "Well, what about blessings?" Because I hadn't really thought that much about it. So I started to see the wrestle a little bit. And then, when I was sort of deep in that wrestle myself, I got asked to teach a Relief Society lesson on a talk that—you've heard me describe it before, it's the talk that caused me to wrestle on the floor for five hours with it!

C: Yes.

S: Literally. I have never —

C: That visual is still in my head of Susan on the ground—

S: I was.

C: Papers everywhere—

S: Yeah. I've never fought so hard, ever, with the topic, but because it was such a deep wrestle for me, I really wanted to teach it. I wanted to succeed at that. And so I worked really hard. The talk—you know, I mean, it's not that important, except it is important because I'm going to use one line from it, to sort of kick this off— And this is where blessings, the topic of blessings, gets problematic for Latter-day Saints. Well, one of the places, right? And that is that we are, you know, specifically taught that our actions have something to do with the blessings that we enjoy in our lives, right?

C: Yup.

S: Our actions. And so this comes from Elder Renlund's talk in 2019 that was titled, Abound With Blessings. And this is just one tiny bit from his kind of intro to the talk. And he says, "Blessings from heaven are neither earned by frenetically accruing good deed coupons, nor by helplessly waiting to see if we win the blessing lottery. No, the truth is much more nuanced, but more appropriate for the relationship between a loving Heavenly Father and his potential heirs, Us. Restored truth reveals that blessings are never earned, but faith-inspired actions on our part, both initial and ongoing, are essential."

C: Hmm.

S: Grrr. So blessings are not earned, but actions are required? 

C: Uh huh.

S: What does that mean?

C: I don't know.

S: What does that mean? No wonder the concept of blessings causes a lot of people, um, confusion and even very real pain. I've seen a lot of people in pain over this topic. And that's not just in our church, it's kind of everywhere.

C: Yeah.

S: You know, there's a lot of bewilderment about the idea of this God who, you know, apparently finds lost car keys for some people, but then allows children to die of cancer. How do you reconcile those two things?

I think it's one of the oldest questions in human thought, actually, what to do the bad things that happen in the world. And how can we possibly make sense of that? How can we find peace with it? So that's what we're going to talk about today.

C: I think I would have less angsty-ness about this topic, and about that talk by Elder Renlund, if—I just wish I would hear him and other leaders, say, "We don't know how this works."

S: Yes! 

C: Because I feel like when he, and other church leaders, try to explain or define the formula—I mean, and how many times on this podcast have we said, “life isn't a formula” or, you know, whatever gospel topic, “this isn't a math formula”—but blessings definitely I don't think is a formula. And so it just makes me even more confused. And if I'm honest, um, angsty and maybe even angry.

S: Hm. Um hmm.

C: It's a hard one. And I remember a few years ago reading the definition of prayer in the Bible dictionary. And it says this: "The object of prayer is not to change the will of God, but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant, but that are made conditional on our asking for them. Blessings require some work or effort on our part before we can obtain them. Prayer is a form of work and is an appointed means for obtaining the highest of all blessings." Hmm. So maybe that's what elder Redland is trying to say, that, like, the act of prayer is the qualifying?

S: Right.

C: Like if we don't earn the blessings, but we need to qualify. What that—please define qualify then. And so, I don't know. That's maybe one thing I can think that he's trying to say is, "You gotta do at least your part" kind of thing, whatever that means. 

S: And that's one thing I want to talk about a little more as we get in this conversation is kind of… Because I don't necessarily disagree that it requires some—that this whole concept of blessings requires some—work on our part. But I'm not sure that when he says "work on our part" and I say "work on our part" we're talking about the same thing. So I'd be interested to know.

C: Yeah. Well that definition of prayer in the Bible dictionary, because it sounds like— I've talked before on the podcast about how much I love word problems in math, and how different words meant different math symbols. And so when I read that definition of prayer, I think in my scriptures I even wrote, you know, "prayer equals this." And to someone who's kind of number-minded that made a lot of sense to me. And for many, many years, I found myself using that definition of prayer and blessings in numerous comments in lessons that I taught. And over the years it has become less satisfying to me. And the idea of like, "thy will be done." I mean, that's just one aspect of this that goes under the umbrella, I think, of blessings and we'll get into that, you know, that "thy will be done" is really tough. But anyway, we—like you were saying a few minutes ago—we kind of shift on this. And so I've shifted on this and I'm not sure where exactly I've shifted to.

S: Well, I mean, all I can say about that is I hope I never stop shifting. Please, you know, please make my mind elastic in ways that helps me increase and improve my understanding as I go along. Uh, so I'm not afraid of changing my mind about things. Even about big topics, like blessings.

C: But I'm lazy, so I—

S: We all are Cynthia. We all, are.

C: I just, yeah, I know. You're right.

S: I didn't say I wouldn't rather have a root canal than change my mind, but I'm willing to change it.

C: All right. All right, point taken.

S: Okay. Well, so let's just,—let's kind of start with some ground level ideas. So for people of faith, is the blessed life synonymous with the good life? That's a question I want to consider for a second. You know, a loving marriage, obedient children, a healthy body, a successful career, trusted friends, financial abundance. Wouldn't we consider those the characteristics of a blessed life? I mean, when someone stands up and says, “I'm so blessed,” don't you sort of think that's the total package that they're kind of talking about?

C: Yeah, right.

S: I mean, I know that I make that assumption.

C: I do.

S: And I see other Christians that I feel like that's the implication in what they're saying, when they say, you know, "I'm so blessed." And yet, one of my favorite lines to cherry pick from scripture—one of my favorite lines, because sometimes you come across a phrase in scripture that somehow speaks truth to your heart, or explains a lot of other things to you, and so you kind of adopt it to apply in other places in life, and this is one of those because Christ was speaking, you know, specifically, but I love this phrase. In his famous promise in John 14:27, there is that phrase, "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." So I take that phrase and I turn it over in my head and I think, you know, the world rewards us in all kinds of ways, but all these things that we get in the habit of associating with having blessings or being blessed, those all come to us as the world giveth.

C: Right.

S: There's nothing on that list that isn't as the world giveth. They're the kinds of things that sort of might tempt us to feel smug about how great we're doing. "Look at all my great fruits—my fruits are amazing." Right? Or self satisfied, or self-sufficient, or even proud, dare I say? You know, we might come to trust mostly in ourselves instead of in God, because our hard work is yielding so much goodness in our lives. But then, you know, sometimes in the blink of an eye, what the world giveth, it can also taketh away. The world is not your friend, Cynthia. It is always going to kick you when you're down. But then we wonder, what did we do wrong, right? Where are the blessings? Where are they? So that's kind of the ground level talking about blessings that I want to start with. And then we're going to build on that.

C: When I hear your list of what constitutes a blessed life—I'm using air quotes, "blessed life,"—I see a lot of overlap between what our church calls blessed and what our evangelical Christian friends call prosperity gospel. And we've started using that phrase as well in our own church, prosperity gospel. It's a great phrase.

S: It is.

C: And also what society at large—the world, you know—what the world calls blessed or the abundant life. So I think that's a great point, that we might be missing the mark or not understanding what Jesus is talking about when he says "giveth" to us. What's he giving us? Because we might be mistaking that for what the world is giving us.

S: This puts me in the mind of one of the great movie lines of all time, from The Princess Bride, most prized of all Mormon movies—

C: We're quoting The Princess Bride? Yes!

S: We're quoting The Princess Bride, which you know, I'm going to cherry pick lines from there too, and apply them broadly. And here it is: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." This is important to this conversation for me, because blessing is a word I want to talk about, or blessed actually more specifically, blessed. I'm so blessed. And if I'm ever remembered for saying anything in my life—which isn't likely, but if I ever am—it'll probably be this thing because people bring it back to me all the time. And that is—this happened for me when I had to teach that Relief Society lesson—I thought, "Oh, I'll start where most people start, let's look up blessed in the dictionary. What does it actually mean?" So I just casually looked up blessed in the dictionary and I had like the most gigantic simultaneous aha and duh moment, you know, that I've ever had! It turns out that the word blessed actually means "made holy, or consecrated." I know I've said that on this podcast before actually, but I want to point that out again.

C: You have—it's worth saying again.

S: Yeah. Blessed means "made holy." Well, who knew? Because in popular usage, we tend to use that word to mean, you know, like good fortune or a desired outcome or comfort. I mean, there are all kinds of things that we mean when we say "I'm blessed," but I don't think "made holy or consecrated" are the words that we're thinking of when we use that. "Made holy" is something else entirely. And to me that opened the first crack of light into this whole complicated conversation that started to bring me peace. Aha! I've been thinking about this wrong. Maybe.

S: So, you know, the big shift in mindset that accompanied that was that blessing is not an event. A blessing is not an event. A blessing is not something we receive in exchange for something that we do. Blessing is independent of circumstance. It is an internal state and not an external one, which sounds a lot to me like, "My peace I give to you, not as the world giveth...." We're talking about internal things that happen inside us. And for me, that's where blessed has come to reside.

C: Um, there's an author—maybe you have heard of her as well, and she's quite well known, her name is Kate Bowler—and she wrote the book, Everything Happens For a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved.

S: Oh, such a good title!

C: Which is the greatest title ever. And she actually did—I can't remember if it was her master's or PhD—on prosperity gospel. So she actually researched it for like 10 years.

S: Wow.

C: And then wrote several books about it. And so here is something that she says about blessings—about prosperity—in her book, Everything Happens For a Reason. She said: "What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American dream that says you are limitless? Everything is not possible. What if rich didn't have to mean wealthy and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of the gospel meant that we are simply people with good news.

God is here. We are loved. It is enough." So that really does sound like an internal state. If that's what you were saying just a minute ago, to be made holy or to be consecrated, that definitely goes along with what Kate Bowler is saying. We are loved. It is enough. God is here. And that that really resonated with me. I liked that as well.

S: I love that, but I think what it would mean for Christians would be to say, "Oh, we're not special."

C: Oh, we're not about to say that!

S: Oh, we're not special. So that is a hard leap for people to make, I think. But let's talk about this idea maybe, that blessings actually kind of exist in the mind and heart of the receiver rather than in any event that happens. I believe that blessings really exist in the ways that we create meaning from our experiences, and gain strength from them. You know, the things in our lives—good and bad—give us an opportunity to come into relationship with God through gratitude, and into relationship with other people through what we choose to do in the circumstances that we're presented with.

C: I like that.

S: So it's kind of about something that we're doing. It's on our—the blessing part is on our end, I guess, is the main thing that I'm trying to say. And so foundational to this idea is the idea that blessings actually have roots in gratitude rather than in expectation.

C: Yeah.

S: You know, they can't be neatly quantified. You can't break them down into individual, "These are my blessings." We can't draw lines around them because if you were to try to do that, I think you'd find they were all linked and connected to something else in your life.

C: Good point.

S: It's very hard to isolate, you know, a single blessing. Anne Lamott has a line that I just love. She says: "Small is how blessings, healing, progress, and increase occur." I think sometimes we're looking for big things, but you know, if I don't feel blessing in all of the mundane kind of minutiae of my life, but if I'm just focused on big events, then I'm setting myself up for disappointment when blessings don't come the way that I think they should, or that, you know, I've earned them or I deserve them. And I've also missed a big opportunity for ongoing relationship. And that means an opportunity missed for the change of heart that accompanies that relationship with God.

C: Change of heart.
I think most of life is pretty mundane. Would you agree with me on that?

S: Absolutely! Well, mine is. I can't speak for everyone.

C: Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say for most of us, life is pretty mundane. And so I absolutely agree that blessings have roots in gratitude. And one of the things I have started doing, and I'm sure many of us did during COVID, was ordering my groceries online. I've just decided every week when I place that order, I put a fresh pineapple in that shopping cart.

S: Mmm.

C: It's $3, Susan! It's $3 for a fresh pineapple.

S: Is that all?

C: I know! So for $3, I can buy a little bit of happiness. It makes me so—it fills me with gratitude. Something fresh, something tropical. I even like chopping it up. I'm pretty good at chopping up a fresh pineapple. And it's just one little thing. I know this is a silly example. It's a little blessing in my life. If we're going to use blessing as a noun, that's one thing. 

S: Fresh pineapple is one, right?

C: Yeah, fresh pineapple. It's the little things because we do live mundane lives—wonderful lives, but they're mundane. Most of our lives are filled with laundry and picking up the dry cleaning and you know, other boring stuff like that. And so I've tried to increase the little things in my life that give me happiness. So I'm going with fresh pineapple for that one.

S: It's a great example. You know, I'm thinking, as you're talking, we all have so many things in our lives. We all have access to fresh pine—well, many of us have access to fresh pineapple, if we want it, if we want to do what's required to get it. But so my question is, if we all have good things in our lives, if we all have some good things in our lives, what is the difference between people who recognize that and express gratitude for it, and people who don't? One side, I would say, feels blessed. And the other side doesn't really think about that, but does it change the nature of the gifts that are in our lives?

C: I think so.

S: Do you? I don't think so. I think it's something that happens inside you. I think, you know, feeling blessed is something that happens inside you, so when you feel gratitude, you're experiencing blessing. People who never feel gratitude don't really experience that feeling, which is, you know, fine. They're not looking to experience that feeling, but I think right there might be a key to something like qualifying.

C: Hmm, okay.

S: It's like saying grace on your food. Do I really believe that saying grace on your food is going to have any kind of, you know, like chemical reaction on the food that suddenly makes it nourish and strengthen? No, I don't believe that anything happens to the food through saying grace or not, but something happens in me.

C: Yeah.

S: Through saying grace, something happens in me and then suddenly, you know, my food is blessed because it changes my relationship to what I'm eating and to God. Suddenly there's a relationship there.

C: Yeah! That makes a lot of sense. I stopped years ago saying, "Please bless this food." And now I just say, "I am grateful for this food. Thank you. And I am grateful I have food to eat every day." I say those two things: grateful I have this food now, and grateful I have food every day. Because how many people have food every day? I need —that's the internal part you're talking about, right? And that changes something for me. I agree.

S: So I think it's okay for you to feel blessed for having food because you took it the moment to feel that way.

C: Sure.

S: It's not that we don't all have food and it's not that some people don't have food, right? It's not that God blessed you with food and didn't bless someone else with food, because that's a whole other thorny issue that we're going to talk more about. But there's something that happened in you in offering that blessing. And to me, that sits at the heart of what has brought me peace about this topic. So right there, I want to pause and posit, you know, my bottom line thing, which is: in my opinion, being blessed is the realization or, you know, manifestation in our lives, of a relationship with God. So I believe that the whole point of all of this is to put us into relationship with God and with other people. Because, you know, how else are we made holy than through the enlargement of our selfish focus, which sometimes only happens in a split-second, like stopping to say grace? I stopped to think for a minute, "Oh yeah, I'm so hungry. But please let me pause and think about something larger." And it may be thinking about the fact that other people don't have food. You know, I mean, whatever it is that can stop, reset my mind for a second, shift my focus, put me in relationship with God and then, you know, hopefully over time that leads to a transformation of my heart. How else are our experiences made holy than by feeling connected to God through them? I think that's what we're meant to be doing here.

S: But back to Elder Renlund for a second, because he muddied the water later in that talk for us again, by making us add the word "qualify," which is what you brought up earlier: qualify. He said, "God has revealed that there is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world upon which all blessings are predicated.

And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law, upon which it is predicated. That being said, you do not earn a blessing. That notion is false, but you do have to qualify for it."

C: Whew!

S: Again and again, I get peace on this and then...and then they do that! They do that. So I like to take that and I like to shoot back by complicating it, by layering other scriptures on top of it.

And in this case, I chose Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: It is the gift of God: Not of works lest any man should boast."

C: Goodness, Susan. It's like you're taking the pencil and putting it in the spokes of the spinning wheel!

S: I have to, to keep from flying off the earth, Cynthia! I do, I need something to hold onto, and that scripture in Ephesians gives me something!

C: Oh, talk about a paradox.

S: It is! It is.

C: That's really interesting. I'm going to have to think more about that Ephesians scripture compared to those itchy ones that Elder Renlund read in his talk from the Doctrine & Covenants.

S: Yeah. How can those things coexist?

C: I know. Well, when you use words like law, decree, predicated, and those are all the words in that Doctrine & Covenants scripture, is it any wonder we do think we can earn blessings.?

S: No, we're being told to think of it that way.

C: Right. Yeah. It's pretty explicit.

S: Unless we can expand the definition of those words, then we are being—

C: Well, yeah.

S: —totally instructed to.

C: Right. We're going to have to nuance quite a bit to figure that one out. It absolutely feels like a math problem to me—that scripture to me is a math problem. And so contrast those transactional words in that Doctrine & Covenants scripture, with the ones, uh, with your pencil throwing into the spokes of the tire, reading those Ephesians words, like grace, faith and gift. And I can tell you, the latter is what fills me with hope and gratitude. And the former scripture feels like a hundred pound brick on my head pushing down.

S: Same. Absolutely the same.

C: I don't know what to do about that, other than just I'll focus more on that Ephesians scripture, about grace and faith and...gifts.

S: And let's be honest, Cynthia. I mean, there are a lot of things that you and I have both—we've talked about this before—had to just sort of set down by the side of the road, and walk on.

C: And walk on.

S: There are some things that—we can't carry everything. We can't carry everything. We're all making choices all the time. And those words are words that I've chosen to set down, because the others are lighter and easier for me to carry. The Ephesians words are easier for me to carry. They buoy me up instead of weighing me down. But let's talk for one second about, you know, what would the difference even be between earning something and qualifying for it? It seems like he's drawing all of these kinds of arbitrary distinctions between words that I would love to be able to sit down with him and say, "Could you explain a little more to me, you know, how those words are different for you and what are the kind of nuances that you're pointing to here?"

There's a phrase at the end of my patriarchal blessing that says, "These blessings are yours if you live for them." And I got my blessing when I was 16 and I've spent pretty much every day since wondering what on earth that means, chewing on those words. Because interestingly, they mean something that my heart understands, even though my head has never really been able to define it, if that makes sense.

C: Really?

S: Yeah. Um, it sort of speaks truth and peace to me that when I apply it here, blessings can't be earned, but maybe I can position myself to receive them?

C: Okay.

S: I can live for my blessings, right? And how do we do that?

C: Well, I don't know what that phrase from your blessing means either, but it sounds doable—living for them. I can live!

S: Yes, yes.

C: Sounds doable?

S: And for me it means, you know, living in hope. And living in faith.

C: Your favorite word, hope.

S: Then I'm living for them. My favorite word, hope. Yep. Because you know, the relationship with God that lies at the heart of being blessed is something that I develop in exchange for seeking and asking, for trying to love God, trying to love my fellow man, you know, trusting in grace, that there will be forgiveness for the many ways that I fall short (because I do) and allowing those gifts of grace and atonement to work in my life. I grow the relationship by turning toward the source. So, you know, I believe what happens to us­—our transformation, our change of heart, whatever you want to call it—happens as a result of the turning itself. It's the turning to God itself that results in the transformation, I believe. And it's the turning then, it's in that turning, that we become blessed.

C: Now we're getting deep, Susan.

S: Now we're getting deep. If I'm not willing to turn, I'm not qualified, maybe, is what that means. I didn't do the work. I don't know. It goes to another word— willingness—which I know is one of your favorite words.

C: Yeah. I've talked about my favorite word before—willing—and ungrudging, gladly given, you know, to be disposed or inclined—all these kinds of synonyms for what willing is. And we hear it every week in our sacrament prayer: "Willing to take upon us the name of Thy Son," or in the scripture, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." That's another one of my favorite scriptures. I'm like, that's me, right here. I'm weak, but I am willing.

S: I am willing.

C: Yeah. And so being willing, to me, is the mustard seed of our lives. And it means that I'm leaning towards something. It shows my desire, I think. My desire coupled with the tiniest bit of mustard seed effort. And for me, that has been deeply meaningful. It's given me something to focus on.

S: I love­­—I absolutely love—the idea that being willing is the "mustard seed" of our lives. I would like that on a t-shirt please. Uh, I was listening to Rob Wright last week, kind of talking about some of this on his podcast, and he was talking about willingness to enter into relationship with God. And I had this little light bulb moment where I thought, well, maybe qualifying is really just about being willing, right? And it has nothing at all to do with the specifics of what happens. Just like, are we willing to show up in our desperation and, as he reminded me in that podcast, pray Anne Lamott's famous one-word prayer. Do you remember what that is? HELP.

C: Help!

S: Her famous one-word prayer is, "Help." Are we willing to show up and say, "Help!?" And then—but this part gets tricky again—cede control of whatever happens next after we do that? Ouch. Because guess what? Here we go, next point: Being blessed does not grant magical control over our life events. Dang it!

C: Does not.

S: I wish that it did! I think some people think it might. I—in my observation, maybe there are people out there who think that we may be able to control outcomes through praying and asking for them. (I just said that out loud. I just said that!)

C: I was just going to say, just—now we're getting into the weeds, Susan, 

S: We're into the weeds! We're into the weeds, but I can't have this conversation and not go here, right? We don't control God, consequences, or other people or their choices or responses. I feel like that's a law irrevocably decreed in heaven, that we don't control other people's agency. And we don't control what happens in the world, right? Our spiritual lives are a process of giving away control and acknowledging that we're not in charge. Give it up Susan. Offer it up—the famous words, offer it up, Susan—and that's been really hard for me to do, but I've had to learn to do it and then, you know, try to keep living in hope in the somewhat terrifying face of having offered it up. Because living with hope anyway is the essence of faith.

C: Haven't you said before on the podcast, something about the word "anyway," like if you were to get a tattoo, wouldn't it be "anyway" or something?

S: Yes. It's like "get up and get dressed anyway." Like, "love other people anyway, no matter how big a jerk they're being." There are lots of anyways that I—yes, anyway is like the foundational word in my life because I always feel like I'm having to do things anyway, Cynthia. But you know, this would be another one. "Keep on in hope and faith anyway, Susan." I think that's the essence of it.

Pema Chodron has this quote that I love and I return to, again and again—she's a Buddhist teacher, of course. And she says, "Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem. But the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together, and they fall apart. Then they come together again, and they fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen. Room for grief, room for relief, room for misery, for joy."

C: I want that read in a conference talk about blessings.

S: It's a gorgeous, gorgeous quote, because it kind of puts it into that context of "stuff is going to happen, and it's going to keep happening. And you are blessed anyway." There's room for all of it. There's room for all of it, Cynthia.

S: The way to personal peace, which is the only thing I have any shot of controlling in this life, even though I keep trying to control everything else, and...yeah—it's to cede control to God in all of the details of life, but keep on in hope. And that implies that I need to be willing to receive the blessing that Heavenly Parents send, rather than, you know, always pursuing my version of what I want. I think I know best—it's my version that I want. I think praying and asking is for us, and not for the benefit of God and—

C: Wow.

S: —you know, turning to them influences us more than it influences the outcome. So the real blessing is the way that we're transformed by the experience of whatever happens to us. And I've had bad stuff in my life that has made me better, you know. Was the bad stuff a blessing? Well, I can't really quite get to thinking about it that way, if you don't mind. Is it okay if I don't think of some of the bad things that have happened to me as a blessing? And I don't think I have to accept that, but instead I think that the blessing is what I make of it and, you know, how it changes the next decision that I make, and the one after that, and the one after that, Because in developing the relationship with God, then I'm changed, and I'm made holy, and I'm consecrated. The things in my life go up on the altar, you know, and I become blessed.

C: So that's your definition again. There, there you go. The definition, "being made holy." I like that. I like that. It reminds me of, uh—I heard Kelly Corrigan say recently on a podcast, "Prayer is not a formula. It is a lifeline to each other."

S: Ohhhh! Even better!

S: And that goes with what you're saying!

S: That's even better! Because that puts us into the idea of relationship with God, but also to other people. And I really do think that there's a key, you know, to the whole thing, in the idea of relationship.

C: Me too.

S: How does it change how we relate to the things in our lives, the people around us and God. But, you know, here's the problem, and so let's get right back to the—we're just going to say it right out loud—

C: Just say it.

S: Latter-day Saints, we are particularly prone to slipping into a transactional view of blessings, you know? And I think it's part of our emphasis on doing and on covenants and on obedience, and kind of our lack of emphasis on grace, that can lead us to think that, you know, somehow we have managed to put God in our debt.

C: Absolutely. This—this is the part Susan, where I'm starting to sweat a little bit.

S: Okay, lay it on me.

C: Because I just know—I just know that maybe some of our...anyway, let's just move on and I'll tell you why it's making me sweat in a minute. Okay. King Benjamin, right—In the Book of Mormon—he says that no matter what we do, we are still nothing. It doesn't mean that we're pieces of garbage, you know, compared to God, it means that we can't take credit for grace. And we can't even take credit for the air we breathe, right? He says in Mosiah 2:21, "I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants." I feel like we constantly quote that last half, "unprofitable servants." And we don't always quote the first half about lending us breath about giving us movement, about our will. And to me, that is—that's the grace part.

And that's when we're living in grace mode. I feel like when we can do that, that's the "made holy-ness" that we're talking about, is recognizing every moment, every breath, every movement is a grace moment. And it just goes back to what we were talking about earlier about gratitude.

S: Oh my gosh. That is beautiful, and I love layering it in there on top of those words like, you know, "earning" and "qualifying" and "rewards" and all those things.

C: Yes. So there we go—we have two scriptures now we completely agree on: the Ephesians one and our Mosiah one about God lending us breath and the grace of that.

S: I'm going to go right out on a limb and say that living in grace mode equals being blessed.

C: Okay! That's great. I like that. Yeah.

S: I mean, that's just a really simple—we could have done the whole podcast in one line. We could have just said that.

C: There you go.

S: That scripture is so great, but you know, prosperity gospel is so real! And it's real in our church, and it's really kind of codified in our scriptures. The Book of Mormon to me—sometimes I read it and I read about how the people were good and they prospered, right? And then they were bad and everything fell apart. And then they were good and they prospered again. And then everything, you know, fell apart again, because they were bad. That's hard for me. I think that it tempts us to focus on, not the grace of the situation—

C: No, no.

S: —but, you know, the actions of the people in the situation.

C: Do you remember all those books, "such-and-such for dummies," you know, Sewing for Dummies, Bread Making for Dummies. Like maybe—sometimes I think the Book of Mormon should be titled something else. I don't know what it is. Like people—I don't know, see, I'm just saying this off of the top of my head—but there's something in there about dummies.

S: I agree.

C: Yeah. Come on people. How often do you have to get this over and over and over that your pride leads to your downfall? So try living in humility and grace.

S: And grace! Living in grace. Yeah.

C: It makes me think of the scripture in Corinthians about being puffed up, right? When we—when we talk about the prosperity gospel and it really is kind of codified in our scriptures, like you said, I think about being puffed up. And there's another quote by Kate Bowler, and it was in her famous—if you haven't read it, we'll provide a link to it—her op-ed in the New York Times, several years ago, when she was diagnosed at just age 35 with stage four colon cancer.

S: Wow.

C: And it's a really, really good opinion article that we'll link to. And she had this line in it. She said, "Prosperity gospel is the belief that God grants health and wealth to those with the right kind of faith." And I would—I would say that, I don't know, I can only speak for myself, I don't know that Mormons would necessarily actually say that. But I think underneath our breath we might kind of, like, "Well, yeah."

S: I think most people that you asked would say, "Well, no, not exactly. It's more complicated than that." But then when it got down to actually like praying for things and trying to connect dots in their lives, then they would see that, well, you sort of act like you kind of do believe in that.

C: Yeah. And Kate Bowler in her book, again, Everything Happens For a Reason, she says this: "The prosperity gospel is a theodicy, an explanation for the problem of evil. It is an answer to the questions that take our lives apart. Why do some people get healed and some people don't? Why do some people leap and land on their feet while others tumble all the way down? Why do some babies die in their cribs, and some bitter souls live to see their great grandchildren? The prosperity gospel looks at the world as it is, and promises a solution. It guarantees that faith will always make a way. I could curate my life, minimize my losses and stand on my successes." Ouch.

S: Heady stuff right there, because I think that that is a really attractive promise. 

C: It is attractive, ooh, yeah.

S: It's an attractive promise and easy to fall into, right? But why does anyone fall into that, Cynthia? Because all you have to do is be alive and look around for about five minutes to realize that life actually doesn't really seem to work that way. So, you know, this is what confuses me, like how anyone finds comfort—real comfort—in a prosperity gospel worldview?

C: We talk about it with tithing right? That if you pay your tithing, you will always have, you know—you'll be able to have food on your table and you'll always be blessed in certain ways. And that always makes me itchy and I'm like, "that's not why I'm paying my tithing." I don't know that I can buy into that, but I mean, that's just one example. I think we have numerous examples in our church of prosperity gospel, where we're taught, "If you do this, you will get this."

S: We absolutely do.

C: Yeah. You know, like Kate Bowler said, it guarantees faith will always make a way. And it's like, "Uh...I don't know about that." I'm not so sure.

S: Not always, or not in concrete ways that we can see, right? And that we can measure.

S: I often wonder, when does connecting these dots between specific events—or, you know, circumstances that happen in our lives—and our own righteousness, become problematic? When does that become sign seeking? You know, at some point, when we're doing that, aren't we looking for validation, or for proof of our own worthiness? In our blessings? Like we use our blessings to measure how great we're doing? I don't know.

C: This is the part, Susan. This is the part where I'm just going to say it—

S: This is the part!

C: —where I'm a little bit sweaty in my pits right now—

S: Well, me too.

C: —but I'm just going to say that I have to admit when I hear friends and family organize, like, family fasts, or people get numerous priesthood blessings, or, you know, putting names on temple prayer rolls, etc., I think, "Well, this could go badly." And by that I mean, either it doesn't work, and it crushes the faith of potentially many, or we will blame ourselves, I think, for not having enough faith. I've seen that one the most, actually.

S: Absolutely. Yeah.

C: I didn't have enough faith—

S: I didn't have enough faith.

C: —yeah. To get this miracle. Or another one is we weren't worthy of this blessing, you know, I must not be living worthy to get this. I mean, boy, talk about that hundred pound brick, right? That's settling deeper and deeper onto our head. Or if it does work, then you know, speaking of sign seeking—

S: Even more dangerous, in my opinion.

C: This one's more dangerous, see?

S: If it does work, even more dangerous—

C:  We can say, see? We are favored of God. And we have whatever—the healing power, or it's my keeping my covenants, or being righteous—made this happen. And I do think that is probably the most dangerous one. And then another hard one is people—you know, and I alluded to this earlier—people can also say, "Well, it wasn't God's will. It wasn't God's will." But that's always been really tough for me to swallow as well because in preparing for this episode, I re-read the book, God Can't, by Thomas Jay Oord, and I've read it twice now. And he has this line in there that says, "If it's not God's will to heal or cure, then our prayer seems futile. We are wasting our time. If God doesn't want to do something because it's not loving, then why should we try to twist God's arm? Over time, I came to believe the phrase, 'If it's your will,' to be a cover-your-butt phrase, uttered to avoid the tough questions we all ask when healing prayer fails. 'If it's your will' makes no sense. We need a plausible explanation why sometimes healing happens, but often does not." And we don't have time to go into all his reasons. If you want to, you can read his book. He has some really interesting kind of theories where he talks about, uh, you know, "If it's your will." And anyway— But I thought that was really interesting, because that's the one maybe I hear the most. And we say that, right, in our prayers and blessings—

S: In the prayer—we put it right in the prayer.

C: We put it right in the prayer, "If it's your will."

S: Leave ourselves an out.

C: Yeah. We give ourselves an out and I just—I don't know, like Thomas Jay Oord said, you know, it feels like we're twisting, kind of twisting God's arm to try and, you know—please, please make this happen. And I'm not even totally settled on exactly what about it is so, so hard for me, except that I feel like anytime you—if you feel like you're trying to convince someone to change your mind, you're already on the losing side of the equation.

S: I like the way that you put that, because that puts it just, like, in stark relief for me that it's about trying to change the outcome.

C: Yes!

S: At that point, right? You're trying to change the outcome.

C: Well, let's be honest. We are!

S: We are, but I feel like that's not what this—this can't be about that for me, Cynthia! For me, this just can't be about trying to change the outcome. It can't, if what I’m meant to be doing in my life is giving away control of outcomes. I don't know, I think that the problem here really goes right back to that idea of looking for proof of God, right? Versus looking for relationship with God and, you know—

C: Yes!

S: —in my own experiences, because I've had some gnarly stuff in my life, things like family fasts, and getting your name on the temple roll and priesthood blessings—those things for me have been kind of like a comforting signifier of relationship. With people. I love the idea that, you know, we're unified. That I have people around me who come together in community and in trying to lift, and petition God on my behalf, right? And those things are a concrete way that people have shown that. And it's been hugely lifting for me, in those times. You know, it really has. And there've been all kinds of, of scientific studies—I was looking at some trying to prepare for this episode—people who've tried to prove a scientific connection, you know, between prayer and healing, right? And there's data on all sides. Some shows improved outcomes and some shows, you know, no improvement. Some shows actual detrimental outcomes.

C: Oh dear.

S: So, you know, I'm not sure we can draw any of those lines reliably, but—and this is a huge, huge, but—when it comes to healing, I think we have to be willing to give away all the power over God's side of it. What would make us think that we have power over God's side of it? We can't think we're going to somehow control the outcome just because we want what we want, and we want it so bad that we're willing to do, you know, _______. Because where else does life work that way?

C: Nowhere.

S: Nowhere. So I look at it as, you know, we can offer love, our support, our words, our desires, our faith, our hope, our hearts, and there is real good for both people involved, that comes out of the relationship that creates for us. You know, that act in itself is teaching us and healing us and transforming us. But it doesn't bind God, because—I'm with Thomas Oord on this—God can't. We can't. It can't. How can we bind something as big as God?

C: Exactly. Okay, so if prayer, fasting, whatever is for us—if it's for us, Susan, and it's not to change God's mind—then I'd like to pick a different tradition, if I'm honest, to facilitate healing. I mean, instead of fasting alone in my house for someone, I would rather we all, say, gather with the ill person and take turns reading them, like, their favorite poetry book. Or—to me that would seem more healing to me than my hunger pangs that the ill person can't feel. And I'm not saying you can't do both, but I'm just saying— I mean, I asked my husband recently as he fasted for an ill family member, and I'll be honest, I chose not to, because I'm having this angsty-ness around fasting. I asked him, you know, whether he believed his hunger pangs would actually change an outcome. And he said, "Well, it can't hurt." And duh, Susan, he's right! I mean, his hunger pangs won't hurt the person, of course, but the frustrating thoughts in my head do bother me. There's so much frustration around fasting for me.

And you used the word "bind" a minute ago, that we can't "bind God." Um, but hello, we have a famous scripture that uses that word! And we use it over and over. We absolutely are taught that the Lord is bound when we do what he says. And that's what makes this subject so itchy for me, is that I was explicitly taught that God blesses his "covenant people"—and I'm putting covenant people there in air quotes, just because I don't think we are God's only covenant people, that's ludicrous to me. And guess what? I lead a very—air quotes again—"blessed," rich, abundant life. And some might say I have been given so many blessings because I have bound God by keeping my covenants. But the angsty part for me is the suffering of those around the world. It haunts me, Susan, if I'm being honest, it really does haunt me. And it makes me push back really hard against what I was taught. Because I have not lived a holier life—covenants or not, Mormon or not—compared to, I don't know, any other middle-aged 40-something woman on this planet. I just don't—I don't believe—speaking of not being special, right, if we're talking about the King Benjamin scripture again, about being unprofitable servants. So, I mean, I can get on board 100%—100%—with what you're talking about, believing that like prayer or fasting, priesthood, blessings, whatever are about relationship. But I think you and I are swimming upstream. If we're going to try and—convince isn't the word, but maybe share our thoughts on that with others—that we're swimming upstream, because that's not what we're taught.

S: Let me start by saying, you are not wrong. You are absolutely right in every single thing that you just said, and you make compelling—you offer compelling arguments there. There is absolutely no question. I think you put your finger right on what sits at the heart of the angst around this for me, and you, and pretty much everyone who struggles with it. As you were talking about your husband fasting, and you choosing not to, I was thinking, "Well, I think probably he was getting some benefit from it then." He chose to do it. So for—like, he was getting something from it.

C: I agree.

S: For you, it doesn't do anything for you. And I was thinking next time something really horrible happens in my life, I want to call you and have you come over and read poetry to me. That would be like the most wonderful offering that I can imagine! And I think there are other cultures that have developed other ways of coming together in community to support people. And so, what I would say to you, Cynthia, is we maybe all choose our own way to express our willingness to God. Fasting seems to work for your husband to show some kind of connection there, or he wouldn't—I shouldn't speak for him, maybe it doesn't—but I mean, he chooses to continue doing it, so I would think he finds something in it. For you, it doesn't. But God speaks your language. God speaks all of our languages. I would think that God is willing to accept your willingness, however you are willing to show it. I never knew I could put willing in a sentence three times. But if that's reading poetry to someone you love, yes! Yes. I think God will absolutely step into that place with you in the same way that God might step into someone else fasting.

I looked up the D&C scripture with bound in it, because it is a tricky one. And it's D&C 82:8-10. And here's what it actually says: "And again, I say unto you, I give unto you a new commandment, that you may understand my will concerning you; Or, in other words, I given unto you directions how you may act before me, that it may turn to you for your salvation. I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise." I love how putting that in the context of the two verses on either side of it—stepping one step to the left and one to the right, as you said in our episode on nuance, and I just loved that description—doing that with that scripture puts it into, drops it right into, the framework of the new commandment, which is what? To love God, and love one another. Relationship! Relationship. But if we get to the idea of binding, you know, in a vending-machine-God kind of way, that vending-machine-God is going to break down as often as the vending machine does. And life's vending machine is on tilt most of the time, as near as I can tell. It breaks down.

C: On tilt!

S: I know, I'm dating myself because that is a pinball reference.

C: I know, I get it.

S: Hopefully people know what I mean. But isn't life's—doesn't life's vending machine kind of feel like it's on tilt...a lot?

C: Uh, yeah. 

S: It does to me, but you know, I believe that being a covenant people is about transformation for us, right? It's about how we think and act and what we desire from God. And to me, it would be a very small God that could be bound by man, according to earthly circumstances, because we're inherently imperfect. We will never, ever, ever on this earth—zero of us—do everything that God says. There's not one of us that's going to clear that bar.

C: Newsflash!

S: So, you know, I don't believe—Exactly. I don't believe the things that I have on this earth are a result of my goodness. They're a result of a huge combination of factors that makes up every one of our lives. You know, many of which, if not most, are completely outside my control. So if I had to believe in a God, Cynthia, who gave me everything in my life, I could not believe in that God, I'm just going to tell you. I believe in a God who gave me my life, which is not the same thing as giving me everything in my life. It comes right back to this one: not as the world giveth. So on the day that you and I go out to get tattoos, I want to also get one that says, "Not as the world giveth." "Anway" on one arm, "not as the world giveth" on the other arm. And I might actually have some peace for the rest of my life, if I could read those two phrases every day.

C: I love it, Susan.

S: I guess all I can really say to you about this topic is, you know, that I don't think I'm really meant to understand how it all works. And I realize that may offer no comfort to you or anyone else. It just does to me. It's okay for me to just say, "I don't get it. My brain can't really get itself to a perfect place with this." And I think I'm just meant to operate from a position of faith. I'm meant to go along anyway, Cynthia. And so that's what I'm trying to do. Keep the hope anyway. What's important to me is, you know, that I remain in awe of the blessings that I feel and find and encounter in my daily walk in this world. Am I feeling gratitude? Do I recognize God's hand in my life? Even in the times that my prayers do seem to be falling on deaf ears, you know? Can I see it somewhere? And nothing happens the way I think that it should, can I still find God? And in the times when nothing is changed but me…which is all the time, right?

C: All the time.

S: Because I'm never going to change God. It's important for me just to be willing to receive. And in receiving that means keeping my focus on the relationship, rather than on the specific gift that's coming, because that doesn't matter. And that I always remember that, you know, my blessings are mine if I live for them, and try to do that. That's where I've landed. And that is as much about being a way as it is about doing anything.

C: Susan, thank you. I feel that hundred pound brick on my head sliding off. I really do. This has really been helpful. And maybe I'm just saying that because I'm sleep deprived, because like I said, I couldn't sleep last night thinking about this—

S: Me too, me too!

C: —thinking about this topic, but I feel like our discussion today has just let a little bit more fresh air into the room.

S: I'm so glad. Part of what was scary, I think, about talking about this with you, is that I know about the struggle and how real it is around this. I've been in that place. And I see you, my friend, in that wrestle, and I think, man, is there anything? Is there anything that I can offer that can just help you feel some peace about it? And that felt like a big order to me, that I might fail. So I'm thrilled, if there's been anything in this conversation. I love talking to you, Cynthia, about pretty much everything.

C: Thank you, Susan. Same, same, same.