I don’t think you are necessarily awaiting some great shift in your thinking. All change is painful. Gradual and sudden.

I do think that we all have to become more Christian, though. We all need to use the church more accurately. The difficulty of this transition has to do with how hard we hold onto our old selves – not the nature of the change itself.

I agree with Hawkgrrrl, who says it wonderfully. One can certainly ease into wisdom, but mostly it’s earned through the painful process of admitting and shedding our ‘old’ selves.

It would be sad to me if that were not possible?

I will just move along…

There should be a warning label on this device: Use of this device for purposes other than those originally intended may damage the testimony of the user.

Also, I was glad to see you include a massage in your list of solutions. Amen.

I’m tired of thinking about what the salespeople said that influenced me to buy the tool. That is a waste of time. I should be looking for the button and places to shine my light.

I love the church more accurately now that I feel I’m using it more correctly.

I had a similar experience with my father. He was the hero of my youth, but as I grew up I realized that he was just a man. How disappointed I felt, and how lonely. Well, the more this new truth settled, I started seeing that yes, he is a man, but he a great man, even a wonderful man. I love him today with a more accurate love. I love him for who he is and not for who I want him to be. Same with the church.

I sometimes have a hard time explaining to others how my beliefs can change, but I still find things in the Church so real and practical. You explained a way of looking at it. The mastery was saying it so simply, without an excess of words.

– some people would like their “old testimony” back. I remember times when I wanted that old testimony back so badly. It’s like I wanted that world back where my tool worked for everything. –

I really like this part. I feel this a lot, even though there has been no major crisis in my life. On my mission the church seemed to be the solution for every problem in my life, and every doubt would easily dissipate. I find it harder these days to find all the answers from “the flashlight”. I hope don’t come off overly critical of the church, because I’m not. I’m an active member and enjoy many aspects of the gospel in my life. I just feel that it can’t fix everything like the analogy indicates.

Great post.

For me, the church is like a group of old friends, the oldest friends I have (sometimes in terms of age as well as in length of time I’ve known them!) I have gained a lot of new friends through the years, but I still associate with the old friends, even though some of them don’t vote the way I do, dress the way I do, or think the same way I do in more fundamental ways. So because I like my old friends I still invite them to Christmas parties, and they still invite me to barbecues on the Fourth of July.

Some of my new friends hit it off with my old friends, and some don’t. My newer friends and I have more in common in terms of the way we vote, dress, and think, but they don’t know me the same way my old friends do. My new friends weren’t there the first time I biffed it on my bike and scraped my knees. My old friends were. They were the ones who put Bactine on my cuts and wiped away my tears.

Implicit in the idea of the church as a tool is that it is manmade. Since we made it, we can remake it, destroy it, abandon it, if we feel it is no longer useful to us.

Great analogy.