Whenever a public performer delivers a punchline or a particularly powerful statement and is hoping for a big reaction from the crowd but instead encounters dead silence, the cliche is that it is so quiet that you can hear the crickets chirping. In Disney's Pinocchio, the personification of the titular puppet’s conscience is Jiminy Cricket. There are times when Pinocchio gets swept away by all of the hustle and bustle and noise and distractions of Pleasure Island that he can no longer hear or pay attention to the still small voice of Jiminy Cricket. We can't hear the crickets in a crowded room with everyone cheering and making noise. By the same token, when we allow our mind and our hearts to get crowded by worldly distractions, we can't hear our conscience, or the still small voice of the Holy Ghost. We might very easily compare the challenges we face in this life to a great big obstacle course, with lots of things swinging in and out at unpredictable intervals, the floor giving way beneath us at unexpected moments, and all manner of other nasty surprises. When we try to live our lives without the guiding influence of the light of Christ and the Holy Ghost, then it is like we are trying to run the obstacle course blindfolded and wearing noise-cancelling headphones. It's a challenging obstacle course and we didn't get a lot of time to prepare so either way we are going to fall down and hurt ourselves a lot, but it doesn't take much of a leap to assume that we will hurt ourselves a lot less if our eyes are truly open so that we can see at least a little bit of what's coming and we can hear clearly the whisperings of the Spirit that will coach and advise us on which path to take. A lot of us don't want to take the time to be still because we get uncomfortable with a silence so profound that all we can hear is the still, small voice of the crickets chirping. We may even start to conflate the pain and discomfort that we feel with the Holy Ghost Himself. The pricks of our conscience are not the result of an angry and vengeful God poking us in punishment for failing to live up to His standards. Those spasms that we feel are the pains of splinters and thorns being plucked out, the sting of alcohol or iodine cleansing and washing our wounds. Satan and his minions are trying to swindle us into believing that pain and misery are our natural state and there is nothing that we can do about it so we might as well try to distract ourselves with meaningless and fleeting pleasures so we can momentarily forget that we are miserable. If he has truly done his job he will convince us that we deserve our pain and that we should fight off any efforts, mundane or divine, to take us out of our wretched state. If we keep getting smacked in the face and falling into the water regardless of what we do on the obstacle course, then we might as well blindfold ourselves and cover our ears so that we can pretend now and then that the next blow isn’t coming. This is nonsense. Our conscience does not cause us pain, it reminds us that we are in pain and that we're not supposed to be in pain for no reason and that we can and should do something about it. If we run the obstacle course a hundred times and fall flat on our face a hundred times, the answer is not to pretend that we are no longer in an obstacle course. This will not stop us from falling down. We have to banish all of the distractions and hear the crickets chirp and remind ourselves that God did not create us only to exist forever in pain. His great plan is not called the Plan of Misery but the Plan of Happiness. God gives us commandments and the guiding influence of the Holy Ghost not to add to our sorrows but to help us navigate through the obstacle course with fewer and fewer falls. And God wants us to fall less not because He gets embarrassed by how awful we are and ashamed to call us His children, but because He hates to see us suffer and will do anything, up to and including sacrificing His beloved and Only Begotten Son, to give us the chance to end that suffering as soon as we can manage it. I hope that whenever we feel the sting of our conscience, we will tune out the world and all of the voices shouting inside and outside our head until all we can hear in the great stillness is the chirping of Jiminy Cricket so that He can lead us from pain and misery to happiness and joy.
