Things We Don't Know

It is getting to that point in the semester where my capacity to think of things to write has begun to wain.  Between a presentation on the Puritans, a paper on the origins of the Utah War, and another on how historians have written about women in Latin America, I am pretty well out of thoughts for the rest of the day.  So hopefully this post won't be too poorly written.  :)

Even though there is a lot of work left to do, I am very excited for the end of this semester to come.  It is the last time I will ever take a college course for credit, which is an interesting and exciting landmark for me.  It feels like I've been a college student forever, and now things are winding down (except for my comps and the dissertation, but I don't want to think about that right now) and it feels good.  This summer I get the opportunity to teach my first college class: Church History to 1844 at BYU.  The Lord blessed me with this opportunity when one of the professors who had been scheduled to teach couldn't teach and a good friend advocated my cause.

As is often the case, after the excitement of hearing about this position came the fear of wondering if I know enough and am qualified to do the job.  I decided a long time ago that there was less competition and more room to make a contribution in studying Church history after 1850, meaning that much of my reading has been on the Utah and modern periods of Church history rather than the early period.  I have been blessed with research opportunities that helped me to learn a lot about Brigham Young, Church education, and several other aspects of these later periods of Church history.  So I must confess a sense of fear about teaching a less familiar subject.  But if there is one thing I've learned in 11 years of college, it is that it is a good thing to identify the areas we don't know as much about because that allows us to grow.

So of necessity I have been thinking a lot about the things that I don't know.  Along these lines, I had to give a presentation on the Puritans on Wednesday.  It was an interesting exercise.  The professor specifically assigned us topics outside of our time periods and expertise to teach us how to get through a lecture about a subject we are unfamiliar with.  In preparation I read 3 books on Puritanism and threw together some basic information into a lecture.  In the lecture, I opted to talk about some of the popular perceptions of the Puritans like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and George Miller's play The Crucible.  It was evident to me that we don't always have the most positive view of these people.  But as I studied them, I found a lot of common ground.  They were a religious people who wanted to be a part of English society without partaking of the sins they saw around them.  Their goal was to become "a city on a hill," an example to friends and family of Christian faith and virtue.  Yes, sometimes their devotion got out of hand and the result was a terrible event like the Salem witch trials, but such things were anomalies in the lives of a a people whose highest desire was to serve God.  The Puritans were not perfect, but neither were they completely horrible either.

I realized that I had let the anomalies define my views of these people, rather than taking the time to actually know who they were.  How often do we do this?  We learn one small detail about a person (whether living or from the past) and we decide that that detail defines the man or woman.  But the more I have studied Church history, the more I have realized how many things I do not know.  There is almost always more to the story and more to the man or woman than what we know, including details recorded only in heaven.

I believe that none of us would wish to be defined by our moments of greatest weakness, even though such moments are important in our individual growth and development.  What a tragedy it is, then, when we do this very thing to others: both living and dead.  I believe we must do as Elder Jeffrey R. Holland suggested and "Let people repent.  Let people grow.  Believe that people can change and improve.  Is that faith?  Yes!  Is that hope?  Yes!  Is it charity?  Yes!  Above all, it is charity, the pure love of Christ."  Some day I expect that we will no longer "see through a glass, darkly" but "face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12), seeing and comprehending "things as they really are" (Jacob 4:13).  At that day, none of us will regret having been too charitable or having forgiven too much.

Brett