This was my second Sunday of being active again in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. I am two Sundays into a year I promised to give this church, to see whether the marks of the early faith are still on it. Last week I arrived thirty minutes late, beaten by a toddler.
This week I made it to the sacrament on time. That sounds small. It is not. A man with a newborn daughter at home, running on four hours of sleep, learns to measure grace in small arrivals.
A girl of thirteen stood at the pulpit and spoke about her experience with the gospel. She said we should encourage people to follow Jesus. She said Jesus loves us no matter what, even when we feel like we are not doing our best. That was her whole theology. It was enough.
More wisdom moved through that girl in middle school than through most of the professionally trained preachers in Gilbert. She was not performing the gospel. She was reporting it, the way a child reports the weather.
Then a woman played the violin. A piano joined her, and another woman sang, and it was the most beautiful thing I have met in worship in a very long time. Maybe it was the lack of sleep.
Beauty waits for our defenses to fail, and mine failed somewhere around the third night feeding. I wept, and I did not fight it. I believe in a God who weeps. It would be strange to sit there more composed than heaven.
There is a kind of attention so complete that it becomes prayer without ever asking permission, and beauty is the bait God sets in the trap. The whole time she played, one sentence kept sounding in me, steady as the bow. 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden. My yoke is easy. My burden is light.' He was reaching out to me. Not to my arguments. To me. And a yoke, I remembered, is built for two. He was not offering to watch me carry it. He was offering to pull.
Only later did I notice the morning had one text. The eleventh chapter of Matthew was preached to me twice before noon. Once by a child. Once by a violin.
Afterward I told the bishop what the music had done to me. He said he believes her playing is her testimony to God. I think there is a great deal of truth in that. Some testimonies are borne with the body. The church has never won its deepest arguments with syllogisms anyway. It has won them with saints and songs.
You can argue with a proposition. You cannot argue with a woman playing the violin to her God.
I also watched the young men administer the sacrament. The tearing of the bread. The praying. The way they were dressed. The unhurried seriousness of it. The whole meeting was filled with reverence, more reverence, I confess, than you would find in many a Catholic Novus Ordo Mass, and I say that as a man who has knelt in the old liturgies and loved them.
The comparison startled me even as I made it. But there is a reason the risen Lord chose to be known in the breaking of bread. Something happens in the tearing. Attention becomes bodily. Boys become deacons of a mystery. A room of tired families becomes, for an hour, a sanctuary in time.
I did not stop having problems on the way in the door. I have a problem with tithing. I have a problem with leadership. I have a problem with the historicity of the Book of Mormon. I will not pretend otherwise, least of all to God, who has read my notes.
But a difficulty is not a doubt. They are different creatures. I can carry a hundred difficulties in the same hands that hold one certainty, and the certainty does not spill. Beneath the problems there is something that does not move. Deep down, I know that this church is true.
Here is the thing I keep circling. The meeting opened with the bishop asking the ward to fast for the missionaries serving here. Not to admire fasting. To fast.
Go to a ward and you will find people actually practicing Christianity. Not discussing it. Doing it. Real orthopraxy is happening in that building.
Be ye doers of the word, the apostle said, and not hearers only, and these people took him at his word before they analyzed him. A living tradition is not a display case of claims. It is an argument the generations keep having with their lives, and the only scale that can weigh it is a life lived inside it. By their fruits, He said. Not by their words.
I have always believed that if you want to know who still carries the torch of the apostolic faith, look for whose hands are warm. I am not saying other folks have dropped it. The torch has many bearers, thank God. I am saying these folks have not.
They are still living it.
They follow Christ.
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This touched me deeply…thank you. As a very wayward convert of almost five decades, I am now back in the fold and my wife and I are enroute (layover in Nashville) to the MTC for a week of training before serving a year as Military Relations Missionaries in the southeast US. Even two years ago, I could never have envisioned our lives at this place 
.
.Thank you, Brother Rollins. This is one of the best pieces of prose I've read in awhile. In a similar vein, Leonard Ravenhill said once that never is a man with an experience of God at the mercy of a man with an argument.
I love following your journey!You are a gifted writer with a remarkable intellect. Your self-awareness is stunning! I became a member of the Church fifty-two years ago. Your gifts are needed by so many lost or confused souls. Stay the course. You’re home!
Brother, I had missionaries visit me and I tried to offend them and drive them off. But I started feeling a call in my heart I couldn't deny. Jesus was calling me and I knew The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was where I had to go. Now I know exactly where I stand.
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