All right, folks. You asked for it, you got it. Installment number four of what may yet come to be known as the most significant series of emetic posts and mental waste yet to grace your face. That might not be true, but I offer a challenge up to anyone on the Internet to supply more meaningful regular posts than are to be found here. Go ahead. I defy you.
Back when I was on my mission in Albania (for the LDS Church), I spent a lot of time every day just walking from place to place, trying to talk to people. Sometimes it was harder for me to open my mouth than others; those are the times when I would get lost in a cyclone of thought, bouncing from one idea to another as I tried to calm down my sense of the world, think about what I should be teaching and focusing on, and figuring out where we ought to go to look for more people.
Whenever I did this, I found myself doing the same thing: I would find myself imagining myself on my first Sunday home from my mission, giving a talk in church as a report of the things I learned on my mission, and how I learned them. My journal is full of these moments, I think. I would always be saying in my mind, "If I learned one thing on my mission, it would be the following." I probably summarized the whole of my mortal experience into a couple concise phrases a dozen times a day. It wasn't that I purposely set out to prepare for my homecoming talk like that, just that I kept finding myself standing at the pulpit in my imagination trying to summarize the most fundamental principles of existence. I guess I wanted to make my mission worthwhile for the people at home when I got back as well as to make it worthwhile to myself and the individuals I was teaching at the time.
I don't know why my mind always went there, but I'm glad it did. There was probably too much going on for me to list it all off, so I always thought, "If I can just get the right way to phrase the right thing, then I can be let off the hook and just always refer to that when I need to." Turns out, though, there seems to be a reason the Church is built on the principle of continuing revelation. Building your body of knowledge "line upon line, precept on precept" like this would refresh my understanding and make old principles new to me. In particular, I always found myself coming up with a phrase that closely mirrored a song we sang in primary or a scripture we had focused on studying in seminary, or that I had read that morning in my personal study.
A lot of people talk about "deep" doctrine as something to be avoided, but I always felt like the "deepest" doctrines I was privy to from the Holy Ghost were those that were the simplest and the easiest to miss or forget in a time of struggle. "Love one another," or "For God so loved the world that he gave his Only Begotten Son." Stuff that you feel like, since it's not a complicated principle, you need to advance forward or branch out from. Actually, I found it the other way around: they're deep in moment and meaning, not in phrasing or relative obscurity.
Maybe "the course of the Lord is one eternal round" because it keeps bringing you back to the same doctrines over and over again, but not in a stale or repetitive way—in a way that makes you feel like you've never heard the right things properly before, even the last time that you read or heard the exact same thing. Somehow, when you're stepping forward and leaving your home, you end up appreciating what you left that much more when the road leads you right back where you came from. Usually when you thought you were farthest from where you started and weren't even paying attention.
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