- Christ has prepared a place for me. John 14:1-3
- In the introduction to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis offers this lovely image of the entrance hall to a church where we can meet to find a room we are most comfortable belonging to. He invites us to treat each other equally no matter what room/sect we have selected, I feel an open invitation from Christ through Lewis to treat all my siblings equally as I seek to find the sect/room I am most comfortable spending eternity in.
As I have grown older and desired to universalize my faith I saught a great deal of Holy Envy. I have known since I was a youth of 14 years of age that Joseph was chosen to restore the church. But for a church to be restored it must preexist Joseph's time. Elder John Taylor taught that there were many good and righteous men and women who lived during the apostasy and they guided and supported his church.
John Taylor, on ancient men and the light they offered
When I was fourteen and learning church history. I desired to seek out and find the pre-restoration prophets. Joseph Smith's maternal grandfather was a prophet who received a vision and printed a flyer of that vision.
I knew that God must speak to other men and that he must have begun the preparation for the restoration early. I love to study the Reformation, especially the English Reformation. The English reformation began anew under William Tyndale and was almost completed under Henry viii. Henry was not so much a protestant as an English Catholic.
One of myfavorite Puritan prophets was John Milton He was one of the rare Puritans who was not a Calvinist. I have spent decades studying his life and his works. I love his epic poem Paradise Lost. As I study the Puritan prophets I am more convinced that God the Father reveals himself to all men and women who desire to learn of him. That is why I am so strengthened in my desire to possess holy envy.
Let me leave you with one more reference the seldom read preface to The Great Bible an early precursor to the King James Bible and the one Henry viii commanded to be the English Bible read to his English Catholic subjects.
