Responding to Light
A Study in Spiritual Physics Covenant Identity and the Heart’s Capacity to See
There's a pattern in how souls meet light. Scripture speaks of it with disarming simplicity.
Light reveals.
Darkness hides.
The moment light touches a soul, the reaction itself reveals us. Light doesn't accuse, it does expose. It shows what is true so healing can begin. Light never flatters the image we've built of ourselves. It interrogates it with honesty.
Darkness isn't always wickedness. Often it's simply the instinct to defend what's familiar.
Over the past year, some of the clearest things I have learned about responding to light have come from covenant family whose insights stretch me beyond what is familiar and invite me into deeper humility.
Responding properly to light isn't just helpful, but essential for spiritual wholeness.
And the response has 3 dimensions:
- The individual
- The community
- The covenant identity
Break one and the others weaken.
These three form a triad of how a people become Zion rather than allowing Babel to mature into Babylon.
Part One: The Lamp and the Shadows
The individual response to light
When something true touches the soul, whether revelation, scripture, insight or correction, it creates pressure. You feel it before you understand it. You sense it before you welcome it.
That sensation may feel like danger. It is actually invitation.
This reminds me of the Brother of Jared. When the Lord touched the stones he was holding, there must have been pressure before there was sight. At some point, before understanding caught up, he felt something real enough to trust. Faith led to contact, and contact led to seeing the Lord’s finger. Revelation arrived through the hands before it arrived through the eyes.
How many times have we felt the Lord’s finger pressing before we recognized what we were touching?
Light behaves like a lamp in a long shadowed room.
Picture someone who has lived for years in dimness. They navigate by memory. Corners blur. Forgotten objects fade. Then, one day, someone switches on a lamp.
The lamp doesn't change the room.
It changes their relationship to the room.
- Dust becomes visible
- Corners gain shape
- Objects reappear
- Eyes resist before they adjust
Receiving truth feels like exposure before it feels like clarity.
Most of us wince before we welcome light, and Heaven doesnt shame the flinch. It simply keeps shining until we can bear more.
Some welcome it. Some recoil. The lamp didn't choose. The heart did.
A Note on Discernment
Not everything that presents itself as light truly is. Scripture warns of false light, borrowed authority, and words that mimic truth without carrying it. Responding well to light doesn't mean suspending discernment or agency. It does mean resisting the reflex to harden before we've asked God what part, if any, belongs to Him.
When light arrives and the nervous system reacts before the mind can catch up, the goal isn't to resolve it quickly, but to stay open long enough for it to do its work.
A helpful sequence :
- Slow the body first. Breathe, pause. Light can"t land on a clenched fist.
- Name what you feel. “I'm afraid this will make me look stupid, wrong or exposed.”
- Do not rush the tension. No arguing, no scripture bombing, no premature resolution.
- Ask honestly: “Father, what part of this is from You?”
- If light arrives through a person, say: “I feel heat. I want to understand. Help me see what you see.”
Every time new light becomes part of us, there's a clumsy season. Like a child learning to walk. New reflexes feel foreign. Words feel borrowed. Behavior feels awkward.
The clumsiness is evidence that repentance is real. Hiding it suffocates the process.
Responding to light in this way is how the veil begins to thin.
I once believed in and defended polygamy. I even encouraged someone I love toward it. When God revealed more light, I had to admit I was wrong and face the consequences of what I taught. That kind of humbling is painful. It was not the only time I have had to lay down a belief I once held tightly, and I don't expect it will be the last. Yet every time, light has proven itself worth more than pride. Responding to light means surrendering certainty so God can give us truth in its place.
Part Two: The Campfire and the Circle
The community response to competing claims of light
Light tests communities as well as individuals.
The real test isn't when we all see the same truth, but when sincere disciples see different angles of the same fire.
Imagine a circle around a campfire at night.
The fire is the shared light, but each person sees a different face of it:
- One sees sparks rising
- One sees shadows behind the rocks
- One sees smoke and irritation
- One sees warmth reflected on faces
Everyone is describing the same flame. Everyone insists they're accurate. Everyone is partially right and partially blind.
A fire can't be understood from one vantage point.
Neither can truth.
A community begins to resemble Zion when people stand up, walk the circle and look through another’s eyes. That requires humility, curiosity and courage to leave the comfort of a fixed place.
A healthy community engages disagreement as holy work:
- Confess openly that we're not one yet. Stop performing unity.
- Restate the opposing position until the other party says, “Yes, that's exactly what I mean.”
- Strengthen their argument. Make it clearer and more honest than they did themselves.
- Only then take the whole offering to God together, without demanding that He declare a winner.
Opposition itself may be the Lord’s part. Earlier saints often mistook the Lord’s refining as the adversary’s interference.
Refusing to recognize God’s voice because it comes through a mouth we distrust or a person we don't revere is how a people repeats condemnation instead of escaping it.
If each remains seated in their own spot around the fire, the community freezes.
Some stay seated because they have been burned before, or taught that movement is betrayal. Safety can feel like stillness, even when the fire is calling us closer.
If everyone is willing to walk the circle, the flame warms all.
Part Three: The Sun The Shadow and Cold
Light doesnt only illuminate, it warms.
Heat is presence. Cold is what remains when presence withdraws.
Darkness isn't a substance. Cold is not a substance. Both are simply the absence of something real.
At the 2017 Covenant of Christ Conference, Denver shared an eclipse experience:
It only takes one percent...of the sun’s exposure to give absolutely adequate light. But obscuring any significant portion of the sun affected heat.... Those who have entered faithfully into the covenant this day are going to notice some things. The Spirit of God is withdrawing from the world... The covenant, if it is kept, will prevent you from losing light and warmth of heart as the Spirit now steadily recedes from the world...
May God bless you and send to each of you a growing light and warmth. As the spirit withdraws from the world may it continually shine uneclipsed on each of you to enlighten your minds and to warm your hearts. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Many have felt the temperature dropping for years. Most are only now noticing the chill.
God doesn't take away His presence to punish the world, He honors choice. The covenant promises that a place of warmth will be open to us as we continue to keep it.
You can see clearly and still freeze if you stand too far from the warmth.
A covenant people is not protected from darkness by status or vocabulary. They're protected because they choose to stay near the heat.
The covenant isn't insulation from pain, but from spiritual frostbite.
Meaning: life will still hurt, but the covenant keeps the heart soft instead of bitter, alive instead of numb. It protects our warmth when the world grows cold.
A covenant identity requires three ongoing choices:
- Seek light personally
- Reason with humility communally
- Stay aligned with heaven when the world tilts
This is how a remnant remains warm while the sun dims.
Babel is the beginning of pride. Babylon is what pride becomes once it matures.
Babel is the heart posture that resists God, protects ego, and refuses correction.
Babylon is the system built when many hearts make that choice together.
Babel - The Seed
- Personal refusal to be changed
- "I already know"
- Blocks light at the door
- Private hardness of heart
- One soul defending its own story
Babylon - The Structure
- Culture built on that refusal
- "We will build our own heaven"
- Drowns under its own shadows
- Institutional hardness of heart
- Many souls organizing around pride
Zion is the opposite pattern: soft hearts, shared humility and light that can pass from heaven through a people into the world.
Part Four:Physics of the Heart
Why soft hearts comprehend light and hard hearts go dark
Alma explained the whole mechanism:
Those who harden their hearts receive less of His word. Those who don’t harden their hearts are given a greater part of His word, until they understand God’s mysteries. They can be given God’s mysteries until everything is fully known. However those who harden their hearts are given less of His word, until they know nothing about His mysteries. Then the accuser captures them and leads them by his will down to destruction. This is what the chains of hell mean.
A soft heart is not emotional tenderness. It's spiritual permeability.
Fertile soil. Warm wax. Loosely woven cloth. Sand welcoming rain.
Light passes through. Truth travels inward. Warmth penetrates.
A hard heart is spiritual impermeability.
Stone. Metal. A wall painted as a window.
Shine a lamp on stone: the surface glows, but nothing inside changes.
Where light cannot enter:
- Order collapses into confusion
- Confusion deepens into compulsion
- Compulsion hardens into captivity
This is hell- the soul unable to see enough to choose freedom.
A soft heart opens and expands.
A hard heart calcifies and closes.
One becomes Zion.
One becomes Babel.
Putting It All Together
How God creates a people of light:
Individual humility
Receiving light with patience and letting it reorder us.
Communal reasoning
Walking the circle, seeing through another’s eyes, and seeking God’s part together.
Covenant identity
Staying near the warmth as the world cools.
Held together, the triad is no longer theory.
Slow your body.
Walk to the other side of the fire.
Stay near the Sun that is withdrawing from the world.
One softened heart at a time. One honest conversation at a time. One covenant people willing to look awkward.
That is how fertile soil forms.
That is how a house of prayer is built within us.
That is how a remnant stands warm while the nations go cold.
The light is still moving.
Every soul still chooses, in real time, whether to open or to close.
Choose to open.
A raw plea that lands like Light itself outside the door.
"You don't get burned, 'Cause nothing gets through. It makes it easier....Easier on you. But that much more difficult for me.... To make you see"
It's like a voice at the door, not forcing its way in, just waiting. The cost of staying protected is that nothing reaches you, not even what’s trying to help.
I’m grateful to Rob and Q Adolpho for the conversations and reflections that helped get these ideas moving. They don’t get credit for anything I’ve mangled along the way, but their insights definitely got my mind turning.
To live these principles takes more than desire, it requires tools that help us practice courage, connection, and curiosity in real relationships.
For those interested in learning to become people who can hold tension, reason honestly, and stand firm without becoming rigid, I recommend Strong Ground by Brené Brown. Particularly Chapter 4: Paradox and the Human Spirit
For a deeper, more historical and literary exploration of what courage actually entails -especially the moral kind required to face shame, exposure, and the unknown- I also recommend The Mystery of Courage by William Ian Miller. He unpacks why true courage often feel divorced from our everyday will or character, yet emerges precisely when we refuse to close against what threatens our familiar self-image. It’s not the lightest read, but even skimming a few sections is worth it, in my opinion.
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