Line upon Line

Several years ago, while my husband, our youngest son Matthew, and I lived in Argentina, we eagerly seized unassigned hours to acquaint ourselves with the marvels of that fascinating, unfamiliar culture. One of the local sites we felt drawn to again and again was the Lujan Zoo located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

That zoo was a place unlike any we had ever seen before or since. Rather than inviting visitors to wander past cages of sleepy animals and admire them from afar, that remarkable zoo invited visitors to actually enter the pens and pet and feed the animals. Even the most notoriously dangerous ones were available to pose with for selfies!

At first, we scoffed at the idea of cozying up to the zoo’s carnivores, no matter how once-in-a-lifetime the opportunity seemed, but on each of our many visits, we inevitably couldn’t resist the tantalizing invitation. Following the trainer, we made our way into the enclosure prepared for the very large, very intimidating lions. My husband and I sheepishly petted them, ready to make a fast getaway if those big animals moved a muscle. To our repeated surprise, those massive, powerful lions seemed to ignore us completely.

Once we had safely left the enclosure, we turned to admire the elegant, fierce-looking beasts from a reassuring perspective outside the cage. Still hyperventilating from the exhilaration of that improbable experience, I asked one of the trainers how in the world they could have persuaded those giant beasts not to eat us.

With obvious nonchalance, the trainer called my attention to several little dogs that inhabited the pens with the cubs. He told me that those unremarkable dogs were the secret to the zoo’s success. The zookeepers, he explained, raised the lions with those dogs constantly at their sides. When the lions were cubs, those scrappy dogs were bigger than the lion cubs. I suppose that because dogs typically chase cats, those dogs believed that they were in charge, so they chased the lion cubs mercilessly and nipped unkindly at their heels every time a lion took the initiative to stretch or try to move to another place in the cage. The small lion cubs became accustomed to cowering in the corners and behaving governed by their fear of the pesky dogs. The lion cubs thought they were small and weak, so they allowed pesky, persistent little dogs to continue to control and intimidate them.

When the lions grew, they continued to cower in the corners and be motivated by fear even after the small dogs were no longer at their sides in the cages. In reality those lions could have sent the troublesome dogs flying with a simple flick of their paws. Any onlooker knew that lions simply need not be subject to small dogs, but the lions didn’t see themselves as they really were.

Even fully grown, the lions were still painfully unaware of their regal identity. They were stuck and limited by a mistaken, incomplete concept of their strength and potential. The behavior of others, their recollections of former vulnerabilities, and a limited, inaccurate sense of their actual grandeur crippled them. Their sense of self was persistently informed by the past and a mistaken, diminished sense of who they actually were.

I wondered then and sometimes wonder still, in the eyes of our own Heavenly Parents, are we, like the Lujan lions, at risk of allowing the pesky little dogs of mortality, figuratively speaking, to cloud our recollection of who and Whose we really are? Do we ever allow the confidence and responsibilities that are among the implicit blessings and opportunities of our regal birthright to be compromised by lesser things and inferior influences? Do we unnecessarily cower in corners rather than rise to the level of our noble birthright as Children of God? Do we neglect to take empowering heart in a certainty of the eternal love of our perfect Eternal Parents?

We all have our own customized “pesky little dogs” that occasionally cause us to cower in the corners of our lives rather than to stand tall as the regal Children of God that we forever are. The variety of potential offenses to our confidence and accurate sense of self is limitless.

One pesky little dog that seems to nip ruthlessly at vulnerable heels is one that tells us that we are imperfect, falling short, failures, and even unacceptable to God. Every seeking disciple of Jesus Christ would love to honor God by achieving immediately and with exactness the scriptural injunction to be perfect found in the New Testament (Matthew 5:48). Not one of us does. The unrealistic plague of a near-paralyzing quest for perfection seems to be especially acute among women. That little dog seems to yap most frequently and loudly at females.

My husband and I attended a meeting for a large group of missionaries serving for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a country plagued by traffic congestion that caused unpredictable travel times. Just after the opening hymn, a pair of sister missionaries slipped discreetly into the back of the chapel and took their seats on the last row near the door. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the one missionary who seemed to be suffering from something that caused her eyes to water and her nose to run. She suffered for nearly two hours until we took a break. I quickly made my way to where she was eating her lunch to assure myself that she was okay. She was and she wasn’t. She had no bad cold or miserable allergies, but she did have a terrible sense of shame for having arrived at that conference late. She explained that she and her companion had missed their bus, then the traffic had been heavy, and, to their mutual horror, they had arrived after the conference had begun. She was mortified.

Some disappointment over missing the opening hymn made sense, and a resolve to leave a little earlier the next time might also have been appropriate, but shame that compromised her sense of worth as well as her ability to delight in the meeting was disproportionate to the mistake. A simple mistake is not always, or even ever, a moral sin.

Similarly, I recently attended an excellent Relief Society class where the well-prepared teacher was leading a discussion about personal growth and progress. At one point, she asked the group of attentive, engaged sisters if there was anyone in the room who felt she was burdened and compromised by a personal habit that weighed her down and made her less than she would desire to be.

To my surprise, in that room full of disciple-like sister saints, almost every hand in the room went up. Feeling blessedly safe in each other’s company and eager to de-burden themselves, those marvelous sisters began to share with humble candor their dissatisfaction with themselves. One by one, those seeking sisters opened their hearts with expressions of specific simple behaviors and habits about which they felt embarrassed or even ashamed.

Finally, one saintly widowed sister confessed that, try as she might, she simply could not control her fondness for Korean soap operas. Happily, another sister offered an alternative point of view. She suggested that watching Korean soap operas at the end of the day for that single sister who sought a change of pace and relief from her quiet life and the too-constant company of her own thoughts occasionally (or even often!) was not a sin. In fact, one might appropriately call it a healthy and harmless act of self-care. Maybe her indulgence could appropriately be called a simple personal pleasure, not a moral wrong.

The whole roomful of sisters erupted in communal applause. Perhaps the Spirit was affirming to those wonderful sisters the appropriateness of occasional personal allowance, assuring them that they needn’t be held hostage by that yappy dog that was convincing them that they were somehow unacceptable. Modest personal indulgence (like a scoop of ice cream, an afternoon nap, or a Korean soap opera) is not always, or even ever, a sin.

I suspect that yappy little dogs who nip unkindly at our heels will always inhabit some of the spaces we inhabit, but if we understand and remember who and Whose we are, those pesky distractions need not compromise our confidence or cripple our forward motion. We are in very fact divine children of divine parentage on our way home via earth. If we keep that fact firmly fixed in our minds and persistently informing our vision, we will be perpetually empowered by the perfect love of God, a generous love of each other, and a reassuring love of ourselves.