A message to my wonderful 7th grade English teacher

I am sorry it has taken so many days for me to send this to you.

There is some humor and maybe a lesson to be learned for myself in my writing to you. Here is my 7^th grade English teacher that I have long looked up to and admired for so long. I wanted to write the perfect "thing". I went to work right away and I wrote a lot-- like several pages. Then I read over it and didn’t like it at all. It wasn't good enough. So I started over and I wrote the pages again. When I read over it again, I didnt like it either. So, once again, I started over. This happened a few times until finally the idea of starting over became so daunting that I put it off for a few days. I think this is what happens when we try to write the perfect thing. That is why this took so long. I haven't even tried to work on it for a while. It was too daunting. But its been at the back of my mind and I just need to get it out. So I’m going to write you something, and I warn you upfront that it's not going to be perfect.  I’m just going to get right down to it and then I am going to send it. Here it is.

In seventh grade, I thought I knew most everything about God and I thought I was absolutely certain about everything that I thought I knew.

In eighth grade, my brother Doug challenged me to read my scriptures and pray every day. He told me that God would bless my life if I did. I trusted my brother, so I did it.

After I started praying and reading my scriptures every day, I started having these feelings—I’ll call them “invitations” to change.  They were invitations to be a better person than I was. I wasn’t a bad a person or anything by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I didn’t really do anything "wrong" per se, and at the time, I would have told you that I was a very good person.

But at this point, I felt like God was inviting me to be better-- to do and think certain things differently. One of the invitations was to direct my thoughts away from lasciviousness and worldly things and towards God. This was much, much harder than I thought it would be. When I tried to focus my teenage brain on God, it would drift into the gutter more often than not. But I didn't give up. I sometimes would plead with God until I fell asleep, asking for God to help me keep my thoughts pure. I poured my whole being towards God in these prayers. After several days of praying in this manner every night, I one day realized my thoughts had in fact changed as I had prayed that they would. They no longer were constantly drawn towards lasciviousness. I kept on reading and kept on praying.

After several months of doing this, I was soon to be a ninth grader. As I did every year, I headed up to Alaska on my dads fishing boat. One night while alone on my bunk, I was reading my scriptures as usual, when I had a very unique kind of experience. It was a different kind of invitation. It is hard for me to describe this, so I will try use an analogy that kind of fits. I guess I was kind of like, previously in my life it was like God would send me invitations via “text messages”, and now suddenly something was happening that had never happened before—something that I did not even know was possible…. it was as if my phone was ringing. It is very hard for me to put this into words. But praying as I normally did, did not feel appropriate at this moment. It was like before I was addressing God in the Heavens, and now I felt that I was addressing someone standing right beside me who was attentively listening to me. I meekly started speaking as if God were right beside me. I told God how much I loved Him. I wasn't praying at God ,I was speaking with God. 

The experience that followed is completely beyond my ability to relate in words. Regardless, I will try to describe it, knowing that giving a proper description is impossible. The first thing I felt was love-- thats not even the right or sufficient word, but it wasn’t love from me to towards someone else, it was the feeling of being loved. It was being loved so much more completely than I had the ability to take in. Saying, “my cup runneth over” seems fitting to say here.

Accompanied with this, somehow, I became aware of aspects of the existence and character of God. It was as if something had been lifted from my mind and I could know without seeing. I do not know how such a thing is possible and had never understood or could have even been able to understand what this experience could be like from any description that could possibly ever be given.

There is no visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or tactile sensation that in any way related to what I was experiencing. There is no word that I have ever heard that could have meant anything that could have prepared or primed my mind for this experience. I was completely overwhelmed with peace, love and joy which I perceived emanated from God into me—but these words, when compared to what I experienced, come so ridiculously short, that they almost have no meaning compared to what I experienced. The experience was so far beyond and above anything that I could have ever imagined. While this was occurring, I perceived a sensation that seemed to me as light, though again, that word doesn’t quite fit right—light is something that you see and I could not see it-- it was as if I could in some other way detect it and it began at the top of my head, and slowly permeated into my body. I felt it as it went down into my hands and as it did so, I looked down at my fingers, fully expecting them to be giving off a bright light, but no light was visible to my eyes.

The light slowly filled my entire body all the way to my feet and as it did, I more fully understood the personage and character of God and was filled with this feeling beyond love that transcended all capacity of description. Though it is beyond anything a tongue could possibly even come close to capturing, the dominant emotional “fruits” that hung from the vast tree of this experience were love, power, peace, and joy.

With my tiny cup, I perceived Gods power which passed over and through all things-- and as I perceived it, my awareness expanded across and over and through everything, as if God was helping me to understand that His power was over and in all things-- but Gods power was not the kind of power we think of on earth, it transcended it—it was not an earthly violent kind of raw or destructive sort force, but rather a creative and sustaining power that upheld and maintained everything in existence.

This experience dwarfed any prior experience I had ever before had, like a speck of dust is dwarfed by the earth itself. Even the most beautiful thing I had ever seen-- which at the time was the beautiful sunrises on the Alaskan ocean, were like a single grain of sand on an endless shore when compared to the majesty that I comprehended in the being and character of God. My eyes filled with tears which ran down my cheeks. I knew, beyond knowing, that God existed—and not only that He existed, but I *knew* Him, as if I had always known Him and that He had always known me. The love I was filled with was not the same kind of love I had ever known before. It was an infinite love that felt like a wind that rushed through me at a million miles a second and took my breath away and lifted me above the universe and showed me eternity itself.

Then, the experience ended and I was laying on my bunk. Just a teenager again. The scriptures which I had been reading daily for months lay beside me. My face was soaked with tears that were running down my cheeks. Everything had changed, but it was exactly the same as it had always been. I had changed, but I was still the same person. I could never deny what I had experienced. I knew there was a God as surely as I knew that I existed. I knew it more than I trusted any of my senses.

I knew that God was powerful beyond comprehension, knowledgeable beyond measure, and most of all, God was loving and benevolent to a degree that I could not have even imagined.

In the seventh grade I knew that I knew everything about God. Now I knew that I had always known absolutely nothing about God. I was incapable of knowing anything at that time-- everyone was. There were no words that existed that could have communicated God to me. God was painted in colors that eyes could not see, and written with words that could not be spoken-- much less heard.

But I now knew something about God. Perhaps a short few somethings even. But the funny thing about what I knew now compared to what I thought I knew then, was that before I had a head full of words that I could use to describe God, and now I had a heart full of experience and not a single word which captured a capacity to rightly express it. 

Wouldn't it be simpler if my story ended there?

Yes it would, but, it didn't. There is so much more. It happened years later. 

I will write the rest soon.
with love and admiration, ever a student, Richard Wadsworth

P.S. I have finished the second part. Here is the Link
https://truthprocess.blogspot.com/2020/04/letter-to-my-wonderful-english-teacher.html?fbclid=IwAR1HsDD5lYdyphST4ccelU73yriSrQf1T0XPJQYdGli4b9G9ZNkrh0m1fSc