Spiritual A.D.D.

Reading that title, I'm guessing you immediately thought this would be a post about not paying attention during the Sacrament, or something. It isn't. It's something much more complicated.

I had a dear roommate (one of my favorite people in the universe) diagnosed with Adult ADD. She explained to me that one of the symptoms is a lack of impulse control - it means that when you get the urge to do something, you just do it out of anger, curiosity, or any other emotion. I imagine that normally, a human fields dozens of impulses without even noticing. We think "I really want to hit him in the jaw" or "I really wish I could spit right now" or "I wonder what it feels like to fall off a tall building," or "I wonder what it's like to kiss him." What would it do to your life if you just did it - without thinking?

Part of the gospel is learning when and how to obey impulses, and when to reject them. We are meant to reject temptation ("I really want to hit him"), but obey promptings immediately ("turn left"). It becomes an impossible task when we realize that all ideas (impulses) come from one of FOUR sources: God, me, my brain chemistry, and the devil (etc.). Nephi, for instance, was told to kill a person who had robbed his family of a lot of money and then beaten them. How was he to know if it was anger (brain chemistry), reason, God, or temptation? And if he was supposed to follow immediately, how could he have lived with himself?

Nephi didn't obey immediately. He stopped to argue with God, and God didn't reprimand him for it. To be fair, asking an abnormally moral person to kill another person is a unique situation, and warrants some thought. It warrants a lot of thought. And a jury trial. And societal repercussions which often include death. Being asked to, for instance, take a different road to work is a different case altogether. In my experience, God often concerns himself very little with minutiae, unless we need Him to care, for some emotional or moral reason. We become accustomed to making our own decisions about what outfit to pull out of the closet, what to prepare for dinner, when to catch the bus, and other inconsequentialities of everyday life. Our brains, just to make things easier for us, establish behavior patterns. They recognize things that work, increase our impulse to follow that route. Soon, we have created ruts often against which the Spirit must work to get us to be somebody's miracle, avoid danger, or any number of imaginable "good" outcomes. So we are encouraged to obey impulses against our ruts. But just because something works against a rut (or some other socially-established norm), does not guarantee its source.

I work under the assumption that ideally, we rely on ourselves until God interferes, and reject negative emotional impulses (anger, fear, jealousy, bigotry, pride, lust, etc). We feed our positive emotional impulses, we strive for logic, and we listen to the voices. The key to knowing which impulses to obey is becoming familiar with the voice of God. I don't necessarily mean words, I mean the timbre, the feelings, and the directions associated with the voice of the Holy Spirit. What does it feel like to be warned away from something? What does a "no" answer sound like? What happens in your head when God shrugs his shoulders? What kinds of things does He often say? What is consistent with scriptural and doctrinal teaching?

This kind of knowledge doesn't appear overnight as you decide to dedicate yourself as a servant of the Lord. This kind of knowledge has two components - study, and exprience. The scriptures are a record of God's interraction with man, and each moment of it has something to teach us about what God can and would instruct us to do/not do/say/think. We can recognize patterns, or limits. We can also catalogue potential responses and their consequences (Jonah vs. Samuel the Lamanite, for instance).

The other, ESSENTIAL half of this kind of knowledge is experience. By experience, I mean experimenting - obey impulses that seem good, and reject those that seem wrong. When experimenting, I expect (and am grateful for) the opportunity to be incorrect at least once. But I am forgiven EVERY time I ask. God has not condemned me even once. Chastened, yes. Mourned, probably several times. Given up on me? NEVER. Then I start over all the way at the beginning. I study His voice, I listen for it, and I pray for the strength to try it when it comes.

What have you observed?