A Thin, Black Belt

When I go to church, I wear the same white shirt and tie combo that most guys wear. I don't wear a suit, like some men do, though I do wear a sweater sometimes. I wear black shoes and socks and a black belt, as you might expect from men's formal attire. What I wear that's different from most other men is tan pants. Most men wear dark pants, but I prefer khakis. The result is that, between my white shirt and my light-colored pants, my black belt stands in stark contrast. And this morning, that contrast started to take on a special meaning for me.

Black can symbolize a lot of things, most of which are negative. Black can represent darkness. The idea of having a black mark on one's record comes to mind. And having a black heart is certainly bad. As I looked at my belt in this light, it cam to represent something dark and evil. Fortunately, sandwiched as it was between my white shirt and my light brown pants, my black belt also looked fairly thin.

Life is short, eternally speaking. I've heard it said that if you took an infinitely long length of rope and tied a thin thread around one point on that rope, that rope could represent our entire eternal lifetime, and that tiny thread could be the time we spent in mortality. And if I had any say in it, that thread would be black.

Mortality has a lot of darkness in it. First, there's the darkness of ignorance. There's a lot we don't know our remember about the world we live in and our place in it. There's the darkness of imperfection. Compared to where we came from and where we're going, both of which as places of great light, the mortal world is horribly dark. And of course, there's the darkness of sin.

But none of that darkness has to last very long. We can slowly regain knowledge, and our knowledge will eventually be fully restored. The earth will be transformed into a heavenly paradise, before or after we leave it to return to ours. And sin doesn't need to stain our souls permanently, either. Everything that is dark about this world can some day be extinguished and turned into light, and then we can live in that light for an eternity, just like we did before.

That thin, black belt has, to me, come to represent our brief moment in mortality at one point in our eternal lifetimes. It's dark, but it's also short, and we can take comfort in knowing that it both was preceded by and may be followed by a glorious eternity of light.