The Voice that Lies

 You know your personal dialogue, that inner voice in your head that influences your perspective, that makes judgments about your desires, what you think you're worth, how you think you look, how you feel you are being treated and how you feel others should treat you. That inner voice that people tell you you should find and need to listen to, it is your compass and directer. Now I don't mean the Holy Ghost, He will always tell us the truth and is always an excellent guide and we should strive to help our inner voice learn from his voice. What I'm talking about is our spirit and inner self, that voice in our head that we recognize as us, that colors all of our perspective, that makes us who we are and supposedly has our best interest at heart. Well I am here tonight to say that sometimes that voice is wrong, sometimes our inner selves were fed the wrong information. We each have a choice everyday of our lives to choose the good, that which is uplifting, encouraging, hope filled, peaceful and that which brings stillness or to choose the not so good, that which gratifies the natural man inside of us, the side that seeks for that which we think we deserve, that which focuses on what we don't have and that which stirs up hurt and frustration in our relationships. Often these decisions happen in a blink of an eye, we are faced with something we didn't expect, the plans we made and looked forward to fell through without fault on anyone's part, you are browsing Facebook and see that someone you grew up with is really "going places" and in that moment you feel like you aren't, you say something at church that didn't come out right and you instantly feel embarrassed, you react angrily to someone you love and feel ashamed. These are all incredibly human emotions, they come to all of us and are just part of this life we call mortality, but it is what we choose after that instant that determines which voice we feed, are we feeding our inner spirit that longs to commune with the Holy Ghost and receive light and truth or are we feeding that voice that sounds a lot like our voice, but feeds on our insecurities and seems to multiply the injustices and frustrations in our lives, that takes us farther from the Holy Ghost, farther from our divine attributes and deeper down a well of self-pity.


I think a large part of the Lord giving us His Sabbath day every seven days is because it is so easy to listen to that other voice that sounds so much like our own, but takes us so far away from who we truly are.  The Sacrament can strip away the lies we've heard all week and sometimes told ourselves, it can strip away our pain and frustration and help us see with clearer eyes. Because as we come before the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ and remember His example and the gift He gave to each of us, as we remember that before we came to this life we lived in His presence and in the presence of our Heavenly Father and we chose them, we chose to have faith in their plan, a plan that would involve growing pains, feeling lost, feeling frustrated and ultimately becoming like them. The more we spend time in their spirit we learn to hear more of the divine nature of our spirit. We learn to say no to the voice that sounds like our voice, but isn't quite us, it appeals to us because that voice is the adversary and he knows us very well, he was there with us as we learned and grew in the spirit world, he knows our weaknesses and our desires, both righteous and slightly less righteous, he knows how keenly we feel our inadequacies and where we feel we fall short he knows all of these things and he knows how to play upon them, that's why those voices inside us can sound so similar. But there is a third voice in the mix, the voice of the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, inviting us to look past the limitations that loom so large before us and remind us that we are bought with a price, that we are loved beyond measure, that we are beautiful to Him, that the very people here that can cause so much pain or frustration are also so very loved. The Sabbath day is a day apart, where we can be tutored by the love of our Savior Jesus Christ, where our spirits can be renewed and reminded of the powerful beings we are inside, that we are divine spirit children of the most high, we are in fact children of the creator of the universe and that our lives are purchased with the blood of the Son of God because He thinks we're worth it, mothers think of what you would do for child and the love that drives that desire, then remember Christ did that for you because of love even greater than that.

There is a voice that sometimes sneaks up inside us, that wants us to feed our frustration, our anger, our self pity, that tries to convince us that we are vindicated in our spite and sadness; these emotions are part of being human, but it is one thing to feel them, it is another to get a hotel room and stay a long while. The Sabbath day can anchor us to the light, can anchor us to truth, to who we are and who purchased us with a price. It can help us shun the voice that would drown out the light and instead help us find the divine voice that tells us we matter, we are worth it and we have power. I hope we can use the Sabbath and daily devotion to learn to heed the voice that helps us focus on the light, that we will choose to heed the voice that shuns the natural man and helps us look past what is holding us back and see instead who we can be.

this post is for my sister, whose quote and post earlier in the week got me thinking