Line upon Line

Why would King Benjamin say that we’re “nothing”? Why would prophets like Helaman and Moses say the same thing? Just when everyone is trying to feel better about themselves, that is a hard thing to hear. Or is it, ironically, just what we need to hear to stop that endless, heart-breaking wrestle to prop ourselves up or expand who we are in our own eyes?

Let’s step back and look at nothingness.

For millennia, much of humanity has sorrowed with the idea of being nothing. What follows is also that life itself has no meaning, purpose, or reason to draw our labored breaths. Our relentless efforts, day after day, dissolve before us, and, ultimately, we come to dust and are forgotten.

An ancient teacher in Ecclesiastes tells us “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.”

In the closing scenes of Macbeth, Shakespeare gives the forlorn and broken king these lines:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

People have fought this sense since ancient times, building enormous statues to themselves, that are now weathered by the ages and lie broken on the ground. They have clutched for power, schemed for attention, all to no avail. Nothing can squelch that sense of haunting barrenness of living in an empty universe.

The Sturdiness of a False Philosophy

In our own time, what is called existential nihilism seems to reign, which is the idea that life has no objective meaning and purpose, so what is left for us is to create our own sense of meaning, taking a leap into the darkness and confronting, with courage, that life will have only the meaning we give it. This is a terrifying idea that leads to depression, anxiety and forlornness as the project is too big for us and doomed to fail. You cannot create enough meaning in your life to compensate for the reality that you ultimately go the way of the all the world and die. The identity you seek to create on your own will fail and disappoint you in the end. The quest to impose your will on a vacant universe where there are no laws will leave a faint taste of ashes in your mouth.

If we think this grappling with being nothing, and leading a life that amounts to nothing, is only philosophical or only a problem with which others have wrestled, look around at our western culture where everyone struggles to be somebody distinguished or important or set apart as elite. Think of the temptation to keep yourself at the center of your every thought so you can be noticed, recognized, loved, accepted. Consider the calculations required to protect your dignity, your opinion, your point of view, your being right on every point.

Whether we know it or not, this fight to be important enough is a response to that whisper inside us that hints that we are nothing, we are shamed, we are too minuscule to be noticed.

Our friend has a t-shirt with a big pickle on it that says, “I’m kind of a big dill.” We laugh at it because we recognize just how much we wish to be a big deal.

Pride and humiliation are just two ends of that spectrum which is the battle against our own sense of nothingness. We respond with pride, which is that effort to be both regarded and always right or we respond with humiliation, crawling into a corner, feeling angry and alienated. All the time we are fighting that secret sensation that we are not enough, that we are unloved, that we are nothing.

Holocaust survivors tell us that when they entered a grim and terrifying place like Auschwitz, the first thing that happened was that their possessions were taken, they were stripped naked and humiliated, their hair was shaved, and they lost their name. From that point on, they were only a number, reminded of it because it was tattooed on their arm. One Holocaust survivor, who was in the camp when she was only 5, recently said that she was too little to even say or remember the big number on her arm that was supposed to be her name.

The purpose of this, of course, was to tear these Jewish prisoners from their last shred of identity, as if to shout at them, “You are nothing,” as if to coerce them to shout back, “I am nothing.”

Surely, feeding us the sense that we are nothing has been one of the adversary’s great tools and it is effective. If you learn, then, instead that you are an actual child of God, born in light, filled with light, destined for joy and love in dazzling heavenly courts, it is hard to comprehend. You want to believe it, but it is hard from the vantage of this dim earth where there is so much stumbling and frailty.

Why?

So that brings us back to the question of the hour, that we confront every time we read King Benjamin’s words in Mosiah. Why does he call us “nothing”? The Nephites have just won a series of epic battles against the Lamanites, and they are at last able to live in freedom and peace. It is the time for celebration and many pats on the back as if to say, “We are warriors. We are winners. We are unstoppable.” Yet that is not at all what King Benjamin tells them.

It is King Benjamin’s last moment to talk to them, as he is already old and ready to name a new king. He tells them in this important hour what they most need to know, and it is surprising. He tells them that they are “unprofitable servants”, that even the dust, of which they were created does not belong to them. He tells them that the “natural man is an enemy to God” and they must become as little children. He counseled them to “always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God and your own nothingness.”

Wait a minute. Haven’t we just mentioned that telling us we are nothing has been a tool of Satan, an idea that has driven humanity to pain, pride and a sense of desolation? We sense immediately the inadequacy of our language and our concepts, because it is clear that when King Benjamin tells us we are nothing, it is something starkly different than the nothingness that the Adversary prescribes to break our souls.

When King Benjamin tells us we are nothing, it is only to remind us of the greatness of God. It is not an invitation to grovel in fallenness but to see God’s goodness with better eyes. He says in fact that we are “to awaken to a sense of our nothingness, and our worthless and fallen state.”

Awaken

Awaken. What a wonderful word. We are to wake up and arise from our stupor. We are to have removed from us the painful idea that we are the measure of all things or there is something wrong with us if we cannot find our way alone. We are to awaken from the idea that nothing matters. We are to awaken from the notion that life is a do-it-yourself project, a relentless struggle to be something, at which we are bound to fail.

Before we truly awaken, we cannot know how much we are loved, protected, felt after, pursued and forgiven. King Benjamin’s idea of nothingness is to realize that the God, from whose presence all “light proceedeth” to fill “the immensity of space” makes quickening us his most important business. His glory is to bring to pass our immortality and eternal life. He attends to us more than he attends to stars or universes. Or said even better, he actually made the stars and universes and worlds without number for his children and their growth.

He is so much and we are so small, so how can he be so deeply involved with us? He loves us because that’s who he is. He encircles us with love because it is his very nature, and he cannot do otherwise. He loves us because we are, in fact, his very own child, with all of his attributes in embryo.

We awaken to understand how short our solutions are to the complex problems we face and find with astonishment that He who “comprehendeth all things, and all things are before him, and all things are round about him; and he is above all things, and in all things, and is through all things, and round about all things” wants to counsel us in our problems. You. Me. We can be taught by the One Who Knows, the most intelligent of them all, and the most personal of them all.

Your problems in life are often complex, complicated. You are lost in a very large, dark, trackless woods where you have no orientation for how to make your way through. With such tall trees, it is impossible to orient yourself by the sun, so however much and earnestly you walk, you cannot find your way through. With your best, relentless striving, you find that after days, you have only walked in a circle. There is no way out.

But the God, who knows all things, knows the way. If you begin to see your true and utter dependence on him, he will shine a light to show you the sure path. You are relieved. You are not your own savior. You can give away your pretenses that you are in charge. You can stop advising the Lord on what he should do for you. You can stop pretending that things are in your hands and you are the captain of your own ship. You can stop imagining that you know much.

Is this to belittle you or to unplug the power behind your efforts? No, anything but. God just invites you to see proportion clearly and turn to him with complete humility. He invites you to remove yourself and your safety from the center of your universe, where your mind runs at 1,000-3,000 words per minute, looking at the world through the filter of you.

Here is the irony

Here is the irony. Putting you as the filter through which you see all things, does not make you feel big. It makes you feel small. Putting God at the center of your mind and heart through which you see all things makes you swell with gratitude.

You’d never see a self-help book called 10 Lessons on Becoming Humble make it onto a best-sellers list, but it is the help we really need to be healed and begin to perceive to the edge of eternity.

It may be that heaven has no home for those who are big in their own eyes. They will have never have the necessary mental clearance to find God.

Thus, King Benjamin invites us to glorious humility, glorious because it makes room to be taught, expanded and purified by the Lord. He wants to give his people a sense of who God is when he notes, “that if you should render all the thanks and praise which your soul has power to possess to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you… I say unto you that if should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath… even supporting you from moment to another—I say if you should serve him with your whole souls, yet ye would be unprofitable servants.”

He is inviting us to live in gratitude, not worry. He, who is in charge, is focused on you, who is not in charge. The Lord has taken upon Him your sins and completely knows you, while you are still busy on earth wondering if you are suitable. Oh, the relief of that. We get to be learners, not finished products. We get to journey with others who are only just learning, too. We have more sympathy for each other. We can acknowledge our sins, our monstrous burdens, our bleeding wounds and know there is One who will take them from us if we are obedient and willing.

We are to arouse our faculties to know him, seek revelation, be taught and forgiven in this dusty arena called mortality, and when we begin to feel his spirit, “it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.” With him, we are expanded and enlarged. We are anything but shrunken.

Paradoxically we are invited to regard ourselves as nothing, because the Lord proposes to make us everything, through his consummate atoning gift.

Moses who had grown up amidst Egypt’s grand building projects and royal court, understood a new meaning of wonder and marvel when the Lord showed him “the world and the ends thereof.” “All of his natural strength left him” and Moses collapsed for the space of many hours. Then he acknowledged, “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.”

These words ring in his ears, “Behold, I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name; for I am without beginning of days or end of years; and is not this endless? And behold, thou art my son.”

The Creator of all acknowledges his own Almightiness, mainly to tell Moses, who this son praying on a mountain top is and what his nature can become.

We begin to see with the prophet Enoch: “Were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations.” Still, despite the vastness, the Lord is personal with you. So personal, in fact, that the Lord could, according to President Jeffrey R. Holland, “grasp us as we fall, hold us with His might, and through obedience to His commandments, lift us to eternal life.”

So how do King Benjamin’s people respond to learning that they are nothing and, as natural imperfect man, they must repent? It is not heavy or distasteful or uncomfortable. It is a cause for joy, to sing with the morning stars. They taste the love of the Savior and know of his goodness. Then when they feel a remission of their sins, it “causeth such exceedingly great joy” in their souls.

We have a God who died to know us. We have a God who remembers our sins no more, if we repent. That is joy. That is soul expansion.

I was once in a Relief Society class where our good-hearted teacher was trying help us with our self-worth, and she had us do an exercise. We were to write on one side of a paper the things we liked about ourselves—things we were proud of—and on the other side of the paper, we were write our flaws and failings. I just couldn’t participate because I thought the idea was flawed. I wasn’t trying to be resistant. I truly just couldn’t do it. Working on self-esteem did not seem scriptural. I couldn’t find a scripture that said, “Thou shalt work on thy worth daily.” It seemed we were pointing the lens in the wrong direction. Then, I noticed that my friend, Diane, also was not doing the exercise.

She said, “All I know is that I love the Lord and he loves me. That seems to take care of the issue.”

The Lord. Himself, gave this piercing scripture to His apostles at the last supper. He said, “I am the vine, ye are branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing.”

This implies that with him, through his atonement that offers grace, strength, forgiveness, new vision and power, we can do more than we ever supposed. Acknowledging our nothingness and utter dependance on the Lord to do anything, is a step forward that looks like a step backward, but it’s not. It’s the power of humility, the trust that though we are not enough, the Lord is perfect. It’s a reminder that when I must do or endure something that requires all of my strength, it’s not my strength alone that I have to rely on.

It’s an equation worth remembering when we’re feeling like nothing. Nothing plus the Lord is everything.