M. Catherine Thomas shares from her book of the above title:
When we are weighed down by the sorrows of a telestial world, we need some spiritual lightening. Spiritual lightening suggests spiritual principles and powers that can light up our minds and lighten our loads. It may be that it is possible to assume too great a burden, to take it all too seriously. This is possible even when the damages in our lives involve sex, drugs and other heavy sorrows—because virtually all damage innocently incurred or self-inflicted is ultimately reversible through the Lord, Jesus Christ. It is spiritual lightening to realize that, in most cases the actual details of the elements of our lives matter less than what we choose to become in the midst of them.
It helps to remember that we came down to a fallen world to experience deliverance from it. The crisis that grips us emotionally may carry a significant message for us. It may be a call from the eternal world to learn something we need to know. Events have a way of conspiring to draw our distracted minds to the voice of the Good Shepherd (see Alma 5:37-38), who may whisper through our distress a truth that we have resisted, but now must humbly face: “For behold, the Lord hath said: I will not succor my people in the day of their transgression; but I will hedge up their ways that they prosper not; and their doings shall be as a stumbling block before them. . . . But if ye will turn to the Lord with full purpose of heart, and put your trust in him and serve him with all diligence of mind, if ye will do this, he will, according to his own will and pleasure, deliver you out of bondage.” (Mosiah 7:29,33.)
This higher perspective teaches that we came down to earth to learn from our own experience the difference between good and evil. To make that judgment we had to come to know—that is, experience—some degree of evil.
The experience with truth that we gain here serves as a small-scale pattern for those very same principles that will be used on a grand scale in eternity—the temporal in likeness of the spiritual (see Moses 6:63; Matthew 25:23). “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will arise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:18-19.)
The acquiring of spiritual intelligence through experience in a fallen world is the treasure we’ve come for. Our most valuable gains in intelligence come from embracing the word of God until we can live by his every word (see Doctrine and Covenants 84:44). Thus the natural gives way to the spiritual, and the intelligence we so obtain will endure for ever.
It is also helpful to realize that much of what happens here in the temporal world will pass away into the black hole of eternity and find extinction there; damage we suffered from others will be healed, damage we inflicted on others will be mended, ignorance will give way to the full picture, tears will dry, shattered dreams will find new and eternal expression, lessons we thought we learned too late will find expression here and in the world to come. Perhaps this good news is what the Lord was telling an anguishing Joseph Smith when He says: “Know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, shall be for thy good. . . . Therefore, hold on thy way . . . fear not what man can do, for God shall be with you forever and ever.” (Doctrine and Covenants 122: 7-9.) ~M. Catherine Thomas, Spiritual Lightning (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1996) 7-9
