Some of you may be aware of Margaret Blair Young and Darius Gray and their work studying and explaining the issue of American-Americans and the LDS priesthood (they have just released an amazing DVD called “Nobody Knows:The Untold Story of Black Mormons” I highly recommend). Margaret’s husband, who hasn’t been in the spotlight as much is one of the two or three best professors I’ve ever had, teaching literature at Brigham Young University.

One of his many masterpieces if as essay he wrote called “The Miracle of Faith, the Miracle of Love: Some Personal Reflections.” I intend to do a series of posts on some of his best points as I feel it has nearly universal application whether you are married or not.

First, resisting our own happiness:

Would I marry the wrong person? Would she eventually–perhaps immediately–stop loving me? I found after falling in love with someone who, unaccountably, was also in love with me, that the fears and anxieties of at least two decades surfaced, and these played on my imagination and feelings with a terrifying intensity, suggesting to me, when I was able to think about it, that I had been resisting marriage, resisting intimacy and love, for years, despite my conscious and sincere protestations that I wanted to be married.

My thesis is that most people are putting up just this kind of resistance to their own happiness, to the possible transformation of their lives, and to their perception of the realities on which the gospel is based. And like me, most have somehow kept themselves from seeing that they are putting up this resistance. They honestly believe they would accept happiness and personal change and evidence for the existence and power of God if it were offered. And so they take the absence of these things from their lives as an indication that such things probably do not exist and that hope and faith directed toward them are futile and illusory.

How often are we guilty of saying, “If only this would happen I would be happy!” or, “If only he/she would do this I would be happy!” We place the foundation and impetus of our happiness outside of ourselves when most of us know, whether intellectually or from past experience, that we have to take the first steps within ourselves (usually steps involving seeing and believing in the possibility of good things in your life, as Dr. Young writes) and put in place the correct lenses from which we can see to take the action we need to realize our happiness.

The converse is true: how often do we take the absence of faith or love in our lives as a sign that such things do not exist for us, when we have merely shut out seeing the possibility of such things through believing others’ world view and our own discouragement?