My last post about Alma and all things testifying of God contained a second part to it when I wrote it in my scripture journal. It was one of those things that I felt was more of a private thing and not meant for a blog, but I feel now that I should share it.
I wrote:
Even those who walked by Jesus' side needed the Holy Ghost as a testimony. A personal manifestation of the Spirit is so essential to our faith.
At times, I have wondered if it was not just me, in my own mind and with my own emotions, creating that warm feeling in my chest that I have for years recognized as the Spirit. It is a feeling of an expanding heart. (Perhaps that is what Dr. Seuss was trying to describe in the final pages of the Grinch That Stole Christmas. "The Grinch's small heart grew threw sizes that day" could have read--the Grinch gained a testimony of Jesus Christ that day.)
I have an experience that I don't quite know how to write about. Words seem to lend no real explanation to it but I'll try to pin it down with words, for my mind might someday let it slip away, and I don't want it to slip away.
There was one particular morning about a year ago when I was very much wondering if I created these swelling-in-my-chest/burning-in-my-bosom answers to prayers. Logically, I knew that when I thought about my experience with getting answers to my prayers that it simply couldn't be me because I have been guided too often to places I NEVER would have thought to go and learned things I never in a million years could have figured out on my own. In other words, I had experience as my proof that these feelings were coming from the Lord through the Holy Ghost and yet...on this particular morning my niggling doubts about answers to prayers were gaining strength. I wasn't just sort of wondering, I was doubting.
As I knelt to be the voice of our family prayer that morning, I sought the Spirit to help me know who needed special prayers that day but instead of feeling the Spirit of prayer, a sudden blackness seemed to have landed inside my chest. My heart felt very heavy, and the more I willed my heart to swell and feel peace or light, the more it felt cold and hard. I tried to shove the feeling aside and reach for guidance, but the blackness just seemed to deepen.
I stopped for just a moment, but then continued, spouting some platitudes in my prayer so as not to let my children know of the distress I was feeling. I finished the prayer, worried that I had offended God with my doubting heart and that light would not return to me easily. I figured I had some repenting to do and felt very anxious to do whatever it was I needed to so that I could feel the Spirit again. Almost instantly, as I thought these things, my heart began to swell with light. I recognized immediately that the blackness had been an answer to my unspoken prayer about my doubts. While the blackness had taken over my heart, I had reached inside myself and tried to rid myself of it. I had breathed deeply trying to diffuse it, but I could not accomplish it. I knew I had been shown that the feelings given my by the Spirit were not created by me.
Now, if ever a doubt tries to creep into my mind, I think of that morning and the empty blackness I felt compared to the light, peaceful feeling I was given after and that memory chases my doubts away.
