Living in the Light

In President Uchtdorf's most recent Priesthood Session General Conference talk, Bearers of Heavenly Light, he managed to slip in yet another lesson learned from aviation. Travelling high above the Earth, he saw how the Earth turned and rotated around the sun, creating day and night. He remarked that night is nothing more than a temporary shadow that always gives way to light again.

Even in the darkest of nights, the sun does not cease to radiate its light. It continues to shine as bright as ever. . . .

When the darkness of night falls, we do not despair and worry that the sun is extinguished. We do not postulate that the sun is not there or is dead. We understand that we are in a shadow, that the earth will continue to rotate, and that eventually the rays of the sun will reach us once again.

Darkness is not an indication that there is no light. Most often, it simply means we’re not in the right place to receive the light.

 There is a lot of darkness in the world these days, and we've been warned that it will probably get darker before it gets brighter. But that doesn't mean that the light is fading. God, our source of spiritual light, still shines as brightly as ever. The trouble is that much of the world is not in the right place, spiritually, to receive His light. Yet, that, too, is temporary. Each individual can repent and come back into the light. But regardless of whether we repent or not, we will all be brought into God's light to be judged for whether we accepted it, and eventually, the whole world will be purified and made into a world of light.

If we want to live on the Earth after that, we need to prepare ourselves now by living in the light. Much of the world is, arguably, bathed in shadow, but we can all bear heavenly light wherever we go, and, when appropriate, we can share it with others. We can all do our part to make the world a little bit less dark. More importantly, we can make our homes places of light and frequently visit places where spiritual light shines the brightest, like Sacrament Meetings and Temples. By doing so, we can ensure that we always have light to guide ourselves and others through the otherwise troubling darkness of life.

It's nice to put the darkness of the world into perspective sometimes, and it's even nicer to know that, even with the prevalent darkness around us, we can hold the darkness at bay and perpetually live in the light.