Network Out and Chains Ascending

What happens if you read a couple of pages of D&C 132 back to back with Elder Christofferson from May Conference being wryly funny about why we don’t baptize rolls of microfilm?

You see an image in your mind.  This is the image you see.

There is a man standing but leaning forward.  He is wearing a suit and looks suspiciously like President Nelson.  A brilliant light is beaming straight down onto his head, his neck, and his upper back.

His arms are straight out to each side.  Each one is resting on the upper back of another man in a suit who is also hunched over a bit, just like the first man, to receive the weight.  The light appears to run through the first man’s arms to those two men.

Each of those two men have their arms straight out to the side.  Each of them touching the backs of two more men in suits.  The light flows through their arms too.

It goes on like this.  Every man has an arm on his back transmitting the light to him.  Every man has his arms out on the backs of two more men, transmitting to them the light.  Except sometimes it gets too crowded, and then a man with a hand on his back will grasp another man by the hand who will grasp another until they have gone far out enough to have space to resume the pattern.

This is important.  Though in a suit, each man is an individual.  No one is exactly the same height or mien.  Each one adds their own ‘flavor’ to the light.

You see, briefly from above, that this network goes out and out and creates a vast circle.  At the edge of the circle there is a ring of men facing outward.

Your viewpoint then shifts to just behind that ring facing outward.  You see what they are doing.

Each man of the ring is an officiator.

In front of the man in front of you stands a picture book wedding couple. He is slim, tall, wearing a tuxedo. He has light brown hair. She is pretty, slender, has very light colored coppery hair almost blonde, wearing a classic A-line wedding dress. They look classic. Like wedding cake figures, or like an illustration from the 1950s.  (The image is so vivid, so real, that you are convinced you must have seen a painting or illustration of it before.  But when you go looking later, you find nothing).

The officiator is marrying them.

As far as you can see in either direction, there are similar couples in front of each officiator. Very similar, basically identical. But–this is key–the couple in front of you has a light in their eyes that makes them wholly unique and wholly desirable to know. They are intensely real. So is each couple you look at.

The couple is holding hands. The groom has his other hand reaching up in the air clasping a hand reaching down, from a couple that is in the air above him. They in turn are clasping hands with a couple above them and so on. These couples in the air seem progressively more ethereal the higher up they are. Their solid colors replaced more and more with light. The couple up in the air looks a little older than the wedding couple.

The bride has her free hand reaching down. She is holding the hand of a boy who is rising up out of the ground.

There seemed to be a great force pulling everyone upward. Because when the officiator finishs marrying them some force holding the couple on the ground seems to break and the entire chain rises further up in the air. The couple that are just married rise up becoming slightly ethereal and older. The boy is pulled up out of the ground until he is standing and in the process became a young man in a tuxedo. The boy-become-a-young-man is holding hands with a young girl who gets pulled out with him. She becomes a young bride in a bridal gown. She in turn is holding hands with a little boy rising out of the ground to her side. The process then repeats.

All around you there are these chains of couples ratcheting up into the air.

Every one you focus on you see them full of life and individuality and purpose. It would be worth a lifetime of getting to know that one couple.

Your view then shifts again.

You are now looking up.

You see a beautiful bright light far above you, like that Arnold Friberg painting of Jesus in the Americas but higher in the air.

All around the light in  your visual field are chains of people rising, spiraling up towards the light until the chains became vanishingly small far far above you and finally disappear from your view in the general brightness.