Parable of the Toy Lantern

Little kids are fascinated with the world. Everything is new for them and they like to know how things work. Sometimes, they will invent stories to explain things. For example, I remember thinking that when you turned up the volume on the radio, it told the announcer to speak louder and that there was a little tiny band inside of the car that played the music.

On my sixth or seventh birthday, a friend gave me a Fisher-Price lantern as a present. It had a feature on it where it would automatically shut off after about twenty minutes if it was not being used. Being the curious kid that I was, I wanted to know how it worked, so I asked my mom. She told me that it had a clock. And of course in my child’s mind, I envisioned that a digital watch would be inside of it. So I found a screwdriver and opened it up to see this mystical clock. Once it was open, I was a little disillusioned to find nothing but a circuit board inside. It looked nothing like any clock or watch I had ever seen. As good as I was at taking things apart; I wasn’t terribly skilled at putting them back together. I remember hiding it in the back of my closest because I was too embarrassed to let my friend see that I broke his present.

At times our faith journey may be like this experience. We all have beliefs about what God is like, what heaven is like, how the world was created, how prayer works, etc. At some point we become curious enough to get out the screwdriver and disassemble those beliefs and see what we find inside. When we do, what we find on the inside may at the very least confuse us. We may feel upset. We may feel like we were lied to when we were told there was a clock inside.

But was it really a lie? My mom knew that the “clock” in there wasn’t one with a minute and second hand. But my mom was not an electrical engineer and neither was I. Describing the electronic workings as a clock was the easiest way to communicate her knowledge to me in a way I could at least partially understand.

We do not have a perfect understanding of God, nor do the leaders of the church. It is not likely that the writers of the Bible did either.  We may picture in our mind that when God created the world, he simply snapped His fingers and it appeared ex nihilo, or out of nothing. When we learn about evolution or geology, we might find that belief challenged. When we expected to find the allegorical clock, we found something else. This does not mean we need to throw away our faith, nor do we need to dismiss science as a lie. Instead, it might simply mean that we did not have a full understanding of how God works. As science continues to progress, we will find more and more of our suppositions about God and the universe challenged. Maybe we’ll find out that the soul isn’t quite what we expected, or that the Holy Ghost is not some kind of spiritual radio wave from heaven that we tune into. Instead of feeling threatened by new knowledge, perhaps we can see it as a manifestation that God is greater and more mysterious than we previously imagined. Each new discovery will be an opportunity to stand back and say, “Oh, so that’s how it works!”