Speaking with God: Brief Personal Essays

Inner Struggle Essay

Photo by Natalie Cherie Campbell

Standing on a sidewalk I was stopped at a fork in the path. Instinctively I looked down the right path to my apartment window. My friends would be waiting, including the man I was dating. Without hesitation, I began to walk down the left path. Soon enough, as I’d felt to be true, Spencer ran up behind me, holding my hand. Through his eyes, I saw his soul sigh, and we kept walking.

Opening my eyes, I waited for the dreams to seep from my memory. I was accustomed to feeling forgotten dreams flee the daylight because I never remembered my dreams. But this morning was different: the dream didn’t leave. I had known Spencer for six months. We were folk dancers, and I lived for the moments when we danced together, talked together, laughed together, my feet burning with energy. But I also knew that he loved me and that I could easily love him if I let myself. So I didn’t let myself, instead choosing to spare with my conscious in an endless dance of self-denial as I remembered a priesthood blessing that told me "I'd know my future husband when I met him." Sometimes I decided that if Spencer was "the one" then he’d just have to wait. Sometimes I decided that God would have to fix my fear of marriage before I did anything. And sometimes I would dream. In the quiet moments of the night, when fear had gone to sleep, I began to dream honestly and refusing to let me forget, my dreams started to become a reality.

Scripture Essay

Photo by Dee West

In the summer of 2012, I would often sit on my roof, gazing up at God through speckled sunlight and leafy boughs. We would often talk, God and I; I would ask the questions and He would give answers. One day I climbed up onto roof from the side porch gap and lowered my head, shoulders sagging with repetitive weariness. I felt inadequate, frightened. I had received an email from Jerusalem, it was Spencer’s day to write, and he’s told me of his plans to work for the CIA. So I’d fled to my roof instead of arguing with mom over the wisdom of me loving a boy with such dangerous career goals. Feeling the warm shingles with my toes, I laid on my back, stared at God and began to speak:

“How is it done?” I paused as a bird flew from its nest. “God, how is it done, that you take such small people, move us so far, and use only those two actions to fuel your work? How?”

I sat quietly, waited, and began to speak. True to form, His answer emerged, simultaneous with the sound of my vocal cords. “By small and simple things, are great things brought to pass . . .”

Bombs bloom and poppies litter,

In realities where children shiver

From breath of hate and strain of woe

To such places my trusted go.

The small and simple are infinite,

When bringing with them the Omnipotent.

Wilderness Essay

Photo by Natalie Cherie Campbell

We were lost and it was my fault. I had gotten 25 people lost in a lush green wilderness of English footpaths. I’d spent the past month hiking through different parts of the United Kingdom with my study abroad group. On this particular day, we were trying to get to the London Temple because having gotten my endowments a month earlier, I had requested we go. Doing my best to book rail tickets, plan bus trips, and minimize walking, since my director didn’t want to, I thought I’d done a pretty good job until the bus didn’t arrive and we were left stranded in a small town a few miles away from the temple, ignorant of which way the temple even was.

“We could have been visiting tourist spots.”

“This is such a waste.”

“I didn’t want to come anyway.”

“So much for that plan.”

The words swirled around me like bee stings. Tears began to coat the stingers as each drop slid down my chin. “Heavenly Father,” I prayed, “please just help me find the Temple.” The gravel near my feet crunched as a tire filled my peripheral vision. Looking up, a silver passenger van had filled the road in front of our pathetic band of walkers, and a man in a white shirt and tie with silver tipped hair got out.

“Are you people looking for the temple?” he asked casually.

I was dumbfounded. As our director arranged to have our group driven to the temple in shifts, I got into the car. I was silent as everyone filled the air with thanks. The gentleman simply replied,

              

“Don’t thank me, I was just working in the temple when I was prompted that a group of lost brothers and sisters was looking for our temple and wouldn’t find it if I didn’t go and find them.”

As we drove away from our wilderness of English footpaths, I bowed my head once again, “Thank you for finding me Heavenly Father.”

~Natalie Cherie

Only let me be something: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Photo by Erin M

There have been many moments whilst reading literature that I have stopped, stunned at a phrase that seems so simple but writes truth so perfectly. One such moment was while I was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Following the childhood of Francie, a studious young girl who escapes her alcoholic, poverty-stricken home life through books, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would often move me with small, profound ideas. While sitting in the passenger seat of my car on a hot day, I was reading while my husband was driving, waiting for me to tell him the next passage that was too good to be left unspoken. 

Currently suffering from a bout of depression, I look up at Spencer and say, "Listen to this: 'Dear God,' she prayed, 'let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry . . . have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost." 

When I finished Spencer, who has also suffered from depression, breathed deeply, saying nothing. It had been said. We were glad in that moment to live any moment because at least that moment included life itself. 


Other spiritual experiences with literature include:

• Understanding happiness while reading the first lines of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
•  Feeling the vast intricacies of nature, and the lonely fullness of my identity within nature while reading The Rings of Saturn. I may be an individual, and I may even be alone sometimes, but I exist within the far expanses of a beautiful eternity.
• Experiencing the palpable reality of sin and redemption in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
• Listening to the voice of Death as the narrator of The Book Thief.
• Reading the accounts of Elie Wiesel's Night and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, in comparison to each other as a study of suffering and either losing or finding God when there is no balm in Gilead. 
• Listening to my husband stand up and recite the poem "I Don't Care".
• Reading "Rabbi Ben Ezra" by Robert Browning with my husband the night he proposed to me

~Natalie Cherie

Discovering God in Narnia

Photo by Davemc500hats

I received my first copy of The Chronicles of Narnia when I was eight years old. The black cover held a stunning gold lion, who lived in the embossed cover, and while staring at its eyes I knew that The Chronicles of Narnia was going to be memorable. 

Looking back on those Narnian hours, I can now say that, outside of scripture, Narnia was the first place I had discovered God within literature. Beginning with The Magician's Nephew I found a creation story; moving to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe I found the atonement and resurrection. The Last Battle is eschatology in a children's story, and the allegories continue. 

As a child, these allegorical connections were thrilling and enchanting. I felt I had discovered a secret tale of a bygone land, woven with truths that must make God real. So I kept reading. To my young self, reading became the chance to unlock ideas and unseen realities that helped me understand the abstraction of divinity and the dichotomy of good and evil. When placed within the fantastic realm of lions, children, fauns, and witches, my faith became simple: God was real because if he wasn't then we couldn't have stories like The Chronicles of Narnia.

And Aslan is just one example of how literature can help us come to know God. As Edmund asked, "Are-are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.

"I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." 

How lucky that I discovered God in Narnia because it is true—by knowing Aslan there, I came to know God better here. 

~Natalie Cherie