Sand of the Sea

I was sitting in the temple today and the sheer vastness of humanity swept over me. Here we were hoping to make some small dent in the world of ordinance work when I don't think any living person can possibly comprehend how much 6 billion really is--and when you consider how many people have lived since the beginning of time...well, it's daunting.

As I was thinking about the mighty sea of names that regularly rushes through temples around the world, I had an insight about Moses 1. After being transfigured so that he can be in the presence of God and comprehend a portion of His glory, Moses is given a vision that only a handful of prophets have been privileged to see:

And it came to pass that Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created; and Moses beheld the world and the ends thereof, and all the children of men which are, and which were created; of the same he greatly marveled and wondered. --Moses 1:8

He literally saw everyone--I can't even begin to understand how that happened or what it must have been like, but I imagine it was severely overwhelming. A few verses later, after the vision closes and God withdraws His physical presence, Moses is exhausted for several hours. When he recovers, he says to himself: "Now...I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed" (Moses 1:10). Whenever I've read that verse before, I always linked Moses's amazement about man being nothing to the fact that he understood how infinite and powerful God is. But I think there's more to it than that.

School just started at BYU, and I've been feeling overwhelmed by how many people have flooded the campus. I always get comfortable over spring and summer when the population is reduced by 3/4, and I can peacefully go about my business. Fall semester feels like drowning for more reasons than a tough schedule. And I think that's part of what Moses felt: he suddenly realized that with so many people from the beginning until the end, one person is almost as nothing. They are a drop in a bucket; they are a grain of sand on the seashore.

Now, this is all sounding a little depressing--but that's not the point at all. Because the amazing and even more incomprehensible thing is that in spite of the mind-blowing masses of people that God has created, the fact remains that He created them. And He knows them.

I've also been feeling overwhelmed by the influx of new faces in my own ward--it's a tremendous challenge to try to remember everyone and to try to make connections with them and learn to care for them. But here is where the real power from this insight comes: although we really are as the sand of the sea, God has numbered us--and He has sounded the depths of our hearts. And because He knows us and loves us and wants to help us,
He moves those grains of sand around so that they bump against each other, so that they eternally impact one another, so that they become refined.

And so what do all of these metaphors mean? Well, as overwhelming as the vastness of creation can be, we don't need to feel buried or inundated. Because in touching just one life, both lives--ours and theirs--will never be the same.

Why do we fall?

A few weeks ago, I was walking towards a parking lot and was startled to hear a tremendous scraping noise right behind me. I quickly turned around and saw the tail end of a teenage skateboarder's 90 degree stopping turn. Both because of the abrupt awkwardness of the turn and because he was no more than four feet behind me, I assumed he'd turned to avoid crashing into me. Glad that we'd escaped a collision and that he hadn't fallen over, I kept walking as he rolled past. But the interesting thing is that he kept making those 90 degree turns as he went through the parking lot and down a hill. Watching him make one awkward turn after another and nearly falling a few times, I of course realized that he hadn't been swerving to avoid me but was actually practicing a skill.

Skateboarding honestly makes me nervous, because I imagine you have to be okay with falling multiple times in order to perfect balance, turning, braking, etc. And, even as I watched this kid rolling around and skidding through awkward stops, it occurred to me that he'd probably fallen a lot before polishing the skill as much as he had. I couldn't help but admire his fearlessness.

I've been reflecting a lot lately about failure. It's not that I consider myself a huge failure at anything or that I'm wallowing in despair, but as a perfectionist, it's hard for me to accept small failures or shortcomings in myself. Interestingly, this failure avoidance has sometimes kept me from progressing--almost as if I'd rather stay in the safety zone of my known capacity rather than risk drifting out into the unknown where I might be exposed to things I can't yet accomplish. Failure and falling short aren't problems, but fear of failure is a crippling thing. If that kid had been afraid of falling, he probably would never have taken up skateboarding at all, and the only way we learn is if we allow ourselves to fall a little bit--to recognize the gap between what we want to do and what we can do. Because in that falling, as Bruce Wayne's father so memorably stated, we learn to pick ourselves up.