Over this past year, I have made much progress in my spiritual and emotional life. One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with is my relationship to my father, who passed away in April of 2015. I was very angry when he passed away. So angry that soon after picking my older sister and mother up from the airport in Portland, Oregon, I kicked them out of the car on the side of the freeway. My emotions were so confused and tangled then, and they balled up tighter and tighter inside of me, forming a knot deep within my soul.
My father was a difficult man to know. He worked on many top secret government projects for the US military as an engineer contractor through Lockheed Martin and BAE systems, among others, as well as being a hardware director at 3Com when the first Palm Pilot PDAs were developed, precursors to the modern smartphone to which we have all become so willingly or unwillingly attached. He was a brilliant man, truly, but one who had a troubled emotional life and a hard way of expressing his emotions. This often manifested in cruelty to those closest to him in one of the strange paradoxes of human relationship that I have seen mirrored across many other’s relationships to dear loved ones.
I both loved and hated my father. He was both a good man and a bad man, sometimes both at the same time, sometimes alternating between one and the other. I, and many others in my family, had a difficult relationship with him. In the last years of his life I was perhaps the closest to him out of anyone on the Earth, because he was a banjo player and I had inherited my love of bluegrass music from his influence. He ended his life as a profoundly lonely man, living alone in Vancouver, Washington. He passed away one day and it took a week for anyone to notice that something was wrong, when he wouldn’t answer any phone calls or texts or emails.
I was working very hard as a truck driver in those days. I would be on the road for 14 to 16 hours a day, moving mail from the main postal office near the Reno, Nevada airport up to the towns around Alturas, in Modoc county California, which involved around 200 miles of driving in each direction every single day to complete the route. It was during that time that my father passed away. I had been asking for time off work for weeks on end, and was told “just another week, we need you this week; you can go next week, I promise!” until finally the news came that my father was no longer alive in this world.
I was filled with an anger beyond description. Not at anyone or anything in particular, but just a sense of immense frustration with the world and with my inability to relate to my father when he was alive and my inability to comfort him in his last moments. I then drove up to Vancouver to meet my older sister Emma and my mother Dawna to handle his affairs and settle things.
Over the few years since his death, I have had a difficult time wrestling with these emotions. They formed a deep, dark, violent ball of negative energy within my gut. I repressed them and compressed them down with the help of drugs and alcohol so that I wouldn’t have to feel the pain that seemed to have no release. This is not an uncommon story, and I have seen reflections of similar tales in the faces of many people I have met in this world. I feel that this story has benefited me greatly in my music and my art so that I may be able to create something that will touch the lives of others that I meet.
It was only in this past year, as I came unto the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, that this knot finally began to unwind. I began to understand the suffering and atonement of Jesus Christ as he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane and suffered on the cross on Calvary hill. I understood the divine love of God for all of us, His spirit children upon the Earth, and the importance of this Earthly academy which we have come to live in to learn and grow and become greater and more whole beings. In the book of Genesis it is said that God created us in His image, and each day as we strive through difficult trials and tests we are able to become more and more like him, improving ourselves day by day to adopt the pure love of our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ our Lord who died and was resurrected so as to cure our sufferings and give us the remission of our sins.
I was baptized in the Reno, Nevada Temple as a surrogate for my father, so that he might have a remission of his sins in the world after this world. I did not think he would accept this blessing, and as I prayed and meditated, for a long time it seemed as though he hadn’t. He was still struggling in the afterlife, faced with the hellish images of the suffering that had been inflicted on him and the suffering that he had inflicted on others in return. Over time, though, it seems progress was made.
A few nights ago, as I went to pray, I prayed to be made an instrument in God’s hand unto the salvation of my brothers and sisters here upon the Earth. I prayed that He would make me a tool for the liberation of my fellow beings from suffering. As I prayed, I felt an immense weight pressing down on me. Deep within my core, a knot began to slip and loosen. Tears flowed down my face as this knot unwound, and images flooded my mind showing me many memories that I had forgotten or repressed of my father. These things were released, then, I was told by a quiet, solemn voice, because my father, Earle Thomas White, had finally accepted the gift of the atonement of Jesus Christ on the other side of the veil of death. Through my work in the Temple, my father had found a remission of his sins, and all the negativity he had left in this world was now being retracted through the power of his repentance, and being replaced with the pure love of God and the pure light of Jesus Christ.
My father was not always the best man, but still he was a good man. I love him with all my heart. All the negative feelings I have ever had that had been knotted up inside of me for so long had finally come unwound, and this through the power and atonement of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
As we come upon this Christmas season, I say unto you who reads this, that our Savior Jesus Christ lives. Our Heavenly Father lives. He loves us. This world was created as a place for us to learn and to grow and to love and have joy. Let all beings seek their salvation and work out their salvation with penitent hearts, coming unto Christ and their Heavenly Father with a contrite spirit and seeking the healing that has always been available to them, if they but had the faith to ask for it.
Christ told us in Matthew 7:7-8: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
I know that this is true. I know that this power of atonement has been gifted to all of us here upon the Earth, if we but open our eyes and look to Heaven for the blessing of Christ and our Heavenly Father. If you seek it, pray unto him and ask for the healing of your afflictions, and in your faith it will be given unto you. I testify of this in the name of the Son of God, which is the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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