WEEK 26 - Follow The Light

“For thou art my lamp, O Lord: and the Lord will lighten my darkness.” (2 Samuel 22:29)

Follow the Light, the Light is your guide. We aren’t talking about controllers of Planet X and misinterpreted invitations of a lizard king, but of a psalm. A psalm, not the same one that King David once sung, but one of an intergalactic anti-hero that has seemingly been stuck in my head this entire week. If I were to tell you that “Fazers” by King Geedorah was going to be stuck in my head during one of the most spiritually fulfilling weeks of my entire mission (and life), you’d probably have laughed in my face. But, lemme break it down. 

So, from what I can recall, this song is about a famous rapper who builds a fanbase so big that he starts to become like a king. But, that fame doesn’t come without a price. He becomes an other-worldly king, becoming not even human, like something out of Godzilla, and he’s got the bars to back that title up. The song opens with a sample stating, “follow the light, the light is your guide” which then becomes a clever bookend when the song ends with a quote from William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, “set your fazers to stun” before fading off into nothing. While the song can be looked at as a braggadocious rap symphony, I’d offer that it has deeper meaning, especially given religious context. Jesus Christ, the Light of the World, can bring us to any height imaginable–we only just have to follow the Light. Here’s how I followed His guide this week.

When following the Light, sometimes all we have to do is look toward the horizon at the immovable Light of the lamp of God. This week, I felt as if I reached that lamp. I had the opportunity to baptize Anabel Garza just yesterday, on Sunday. We have been working with her and her family ever since I first got here and it has been incredible to see the blessings that we’ve seen just by doing everything in our power to get them to church. Countless prayers, visits, and lessons have been taught to help reactivate this family–and I love them like my own. I was beyond ecstatic to find out that Anabel was going to conquer her fears of water, rather her anxiety of making this first covenant with God, and that her mom was there to support her the entire way. Directly after she was baptized, I could see the Light of Christ in her eyes. As one of the members, Hermano Cano, said during his talk on the Holy Ghost, “[she is] the cleanest person in the entire world.” Her sins had washed away, and she was born again with the gift of the Holy Ghost. And I was fortunate enough to be a part of that. I was there to help guide her and her family, as Christ and Heavenly Father were guiding me, to make these decisions. No feelings could ever express nor encapsulate what joy I feel and have felt over this entire experience–that is not even close to being over–all because I followed the Light in this obscured world. 

Sometimes, like the light out of a fazer, the Light we must follow is fleeting. You could blink and miss the direction of where you might need to go. It passes by the fast whizzing past your head, lighting up everything around you, and you must be able to identify where it came from as well as where it is going, so you can orient yourself to its guidance. Such is my best attempt at describing spiritual impressions. We were impressed to go and visit a woman, even though we had a lesson with her for later in the day, and it ended up being the perfect time for us to come over. The lesson ended with her in tears telling us about her adult son who had just died. We were then able to follow the Light of the lasers and teach her about the plan of salvation. Directly after, we then were impressed to change schedule, once again, running into someone who we were supposed to see–someone who had left a criminal life behind–and we were able to be a Light for him, once again, praying together and setting up for another lesson this week. The Light coming out of Christ’s fazer didn’t stop there, coincidences (you know how I feel about coincidences but for lack of a better word and for the sake of your attention spans) did not stop happening. It got to the point where I turned to Elder Funk and told him that we would not be where we were during that week if we had not followed the Light of the lasers. I could liken it even more to the Holy Ghost and how Heavenly Father literally shoots lasers at us and those lasers are the Spirit of God, but I won’t. Bottom line is, follow those spiritual impressions and don’t let them go over your head. As I write this, a scene from Come and See (1985) comes to my mind. If you’re curious, look up “Come and See (1985) cow in a field scene”. Don’t let them whizz past your head.

Whether MF DOOM meant any of this when he wrote the song, we can never know, but this is the meaning I have attached to it especially after this week. I feel as if all of my emails of late have been about spiritual impressions, but I can say without the shadow of a doubt that my testimony is built upon the Spirit. Without the Holy Ghost, I don’t know where I would be. I would be wandering in the darkness, as I once was, lost. The Spirit brings us to the Light of the World, His Only Begotten, the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, and to our Father in Heaven. Without it, we would have nothing. If I can bear my testimony about it through an MF DOOM song, you know that it’s real. 

P.S. Stay tuned next week for when I connect the stories of King Saul and King David to Succession.