First Love

The betrothal station

The last essay called this journey a long betrothal — the Bridegroom's courtship of the bride, seven stations deep. So it should not surprise us where the road begins: at the engagement.

Because that is what first love is, in scripture's own memory. Listen to how the Lord himself reminisces about Israel's beginning — and notice that it is he who kept the mementos: "I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown" (Jeremiah 2:2). The love of thine espousals — the engagement season, when she followed him anywhere, into unsown wilderness, because being with him was the whole point. Hosea promises the same season back: "she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth" (Hosea 2:15). The first station of the road is the newly-betrothed heart — and every one of us has either lived it or watched it: the season when the beloved's voice is enough; when you bring their name into every conversation whether it belongs there or not; when their letters are read until the creases wear through; when you lose whole hours and call them minutes; when you would rather be with them in a wilderness than anywhere else with anyone else. Nobody serves a fiancée out of duty. Nobody schedules delight. That is the covenant's ground floor: love freely given, freely answered — because God will not build a marriage on obligation.

Now read the first of the seven letters, to Ephesus, and you can hear what has happened to the engagement.

The Lord's opening audit reads like a commendation plaque: "I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience... thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: and hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted" (Revelation 2:2–3). Works. Labor. Patience. Doctrinal vigilance sharp enough to catch false apostles in the act — readers of our first series will notice that Ephesus aced the weed tests. Endurance without fainting. If your ward checked every one of those boxes, you would call it the best ward in the church.

And then the knife, wrapped in one of scripture's gentlest words: "Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love" (2:4).

This is a marriage that has become a well-run household. Everything continues — the machinery turning at full speed, the accounts balanced, the doctrine sound to the last decimal, nobody fainting — and the romance has left the building. The bride still keeps the house; she has stopped rereading the letters. The calendar is full and the conversation is empty. Works still turning, heart gone home early. It is the most respectable ruin there is, and the hardest to detect, because a well-run household looks exactly like a marriage — right up until you notice that nobody in it is delighted anymore.

And the Lord's response tells you how seriously heaven takes the difference: "or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place" (2:5). The candlestick — the lamp. A people that loses the love loses its light, whatever else it keeps, because delight was never one virtue on the list. It was the fuel. A betrothal can survive poverty, distance, and tribulation — the next station will prove it. What it cannot survive as a betrothal is becoming an arrangement.

The first thread of the veil

Now read this station with the last essay in your hands, because the shadow-rule of the whole road appears here for the first time: every station's pitfall is a thread in the veil.

The veil, we learned, is woven of unbelief — and here is the thing about a cooled engagement: underneath it, always, is the quiet failure to go on believing something. Not a doctrine about God — Ephesus's doctrine was perfect — but the first thing, the thing the newly-betrothed heart knew before it knew anything else: that you are chosen. That the proposal was meant. That of all the souls he could delight in, he delights in you. Delight cannot be manufactured; it is a response — the bride's answer to being loved and knowing it. When the knowing fades, the delight fades with it, and duty arrives to cover the vacancy — the way a spouse who no longer feels chosen starts keeping the marriage like a job. So a soul can keep every commandment with a thickening veil, because the fabric isn't woven of bad works. It's woven of forgotten love — the bride no longer quite believing she is wanted — and that is the deepest unbelief there is, and the one that looks most like faithfulness from the outside.

Which is why this station comes first. The journey to the face cannot begin anywhere else, because the face at the end of the road is the Bridegroom's — and a bride who has stopped believing in the proposal will walk right past the altar. First love isn't the beginner's station you graduate from. It's the ground floor every other station is built on, the engagement the whole betrothal keeps returning to. Lose it, and the most advanced pilgrim on the road is walking in place.

The tree at this station

And look at what the Lord promises the Ephesian overcomer — the first prize of the whole ascent: "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God" (2:7).

The tree of life. Do we know what that is? We do — because a young man once asked, and heaven answered on the record. Nephi wanted to see what his father had seen, "believing that the Lord was able to make it known" — and was caught away to an exceedingly high mountain, where the encounter opened exactly the way the last essay taught: with a question. "What desirest thou?" (1 Nephi 11:2). And here is the detail that has moved us for years: the Spirit of the Lord, appearing to Nephi and speaking "as a man speaketh with another," personally conducts exactly one exhibit of the entire vision before handing Nephi to an angel — one thing shown by the Spirit's own escort, as if nothing else could be seen until this was:

The tree.

"And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me: Look!... And I looked and beheld a tree... and the beauty thereof was far beyond, yea, exceeding of all beauty" (11:8). And when Nephi asks for the interpretation, the answer is the whole gospel in one line: "It is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things" (11:21–22, 25).

The tree of life is the love of God. The Spirit's single act as tour-guide was to walk a seer to Love itself and ask what he saw. And listen to Nephi's vocabulary — "most desirable above all things," beauty "exceeding of all beauty" — that is not the language of theology. It is the language of the betrothed describing the beloved; the tree is love seen the way an engaged heart sees. Which means the Ephesian promise now reads at full strength: the overcomer of station one is given to eat of the very thing the station is about — the one who returns to the engagement is fed on First Love, forever, from the source. And Lehi's dream adds the practical geometry: the way to that tree is a path along a rod of iron, "the word of God" (1 Nephi 11:25) — the word leads to the tree the way love letters lead to the beloved; scripture's whole function is to walk you back to the love. Any use of the word that leads somewhere else — vigilance without affection, doctrine as ammunition, Ephesus's own late style — has let go of the rod while still quoting it.

And one small treasure, offered as an old preacher's delight rather than a scholar's claim — the same way we once read six city names on the roads to refuge. The old Bible name-books render Ephesus as "desirable" — from a Greek word meaning a longing, a reaching-toward. (To be fair: the city's name is older than Greek, and its original meaning is uncertain; this is the received reading, not settled scholarship.) But if the old books have it right, then look at what the first of the seven letters is: a letter addressed to a city named Desirable, about a people who lost their desire, promising as its prize the tree that is "most desirable above all things." The station's name, its wound, and its cure are all the same word. We wouldn't build doctrine on it. We also suspect, as usual, that the text is smiling.

The pilgrim who forgot

If this station's diagnosis stings — and if you've been at this long, it probably does — then meet the traveler heaven sent ahead of us, because his lapse is the most comforting verse in his story.

The brother of Jared — the man this series follows to the summit, the greatest believer in the record — forgot to call upon the Lord for four years. Four years. Camped by the sea, journey stalled, prayers quietly discontinued; the record doesn't even give a reason, which feels true — first love rarely dies of anything dramatic; it dies of Tuesdays. And when the Lord came to him, he "stood in a cloud and talked with him... for the space of three hours... and chastened him because he remembered not to call upon the name of the Lord" (Ether 2:14).

Now watch what happens next, because this is the doctrine: "the brother of Jared repented of the evil which he had done, and did call upon the name of the Lord" — and the relationship resumed at once, at full strength. No probation. No residue. No demotion to the back of the line. Within a chapter, this same lapsed man is on a mountaintop being told "never has man believed in me as thou hast." Four years of forgetting, answered by three hours of correction and an immediate return — and the trajectory continued to the highest summit in scripture.

Decode it gently, for every reader with lapsed seasons behind them: summit-faith is not built on never forgetting. It is built on being correctable. If your first love has cold years in it — if the prayers went quiet somewhere by your own seashore and you can't even say why — you are not disqualified from the road. You are on it, standing where its greatest traveler once stood, one honest response away from resuming.

The way back

Because the Lord does not diagnose Ephesus and walk away. He prescribes — three verbs, and they are the whole way home: "Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works" (2:5).

Remember. Always the covenant's first verb — and notice, from Jeremiah, that he goes first: I remember thee... the love of thine espousals. The Bridegroom has kept every memento of the engagement; the invitation is to join him in the remembering. Go back, deliberately, to your own espousal season: the answered prayer, the burning page, the night the fire came, the day you knew you were chosen. Not as nostalgia — as evidence. The proposal did not stop being meant when you stopped feeling it; remembering is how the heart re-verifies what it already ratified once.

Repent. Which here means something tender: turn around. Not the groveling of the guilty, but the turning of the distracted — the spouse looking up from the ledgers and realizing how long it's been.

And do the first works. Not the late works — Ephesus had those in surplus. The first ones. And you know exactly what they are, because you have watched every newly engaged couple ever: they cannot stop talking to each other — so talk to him again, the unscheduled, ungroomed prayer that is conversation and not recitation, the kind you used to lose track of time in. They read the letters until the creases wear through — so open the word the way you opened it then: as mail from someone who loves you, not a manual to be audited. They tell everyone, whether anyone asked — the name dropped into every conversation, the ring shown to strangers; testimony was never meant to be a duty roster item, it is the engaged heart's inability to keep quiet. They keep the standing date no matter what the week did — and there is a table set weekly for exactly this, with his emblems on it and remembering as its whole agenda. They want your people to become their people — the gathering, the ward, the names in the book, his family becoming yours. And they plan the wedding — openly, constantly, with lists and dates and joy; the covenant path walked not as compliance but as preparation, the way a bride prepares.

The prescription is wise beyond telling — because you cannot summon a feeling by force, but you can do what the feeling used to do, and find that the feeling follows the doing home. First works are love's native behaviors, and love, it turns out, still lives at that address. The betrothal can always be renewed, at any age, from any distance — because the Bridegroom never left. Only the delight did, and delight returns to wherever it's remembered.

The grove

And now the witness that this station is real, and near, and still operating — because our own dispensation began at it.

In the spring of 1820, a fourteen-year-old boy walked into a grove of trees to say his first vocal prayer. He went with a question about churches. What he met first was not an answer about churches. Read his own account of the moment the veil of this world thinned: "I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun... When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other — This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" (Joseph Smith—History 1:16–17).

Look at what came through the opened veil first. His name — Joseph, known, individually, before anything was taught. And then the first sentence of the Restoration, and it is not doctrine, not commandment, not correction: it is a Father saying this is my Beloved Son — love, introducing Love. The dispensation of the fulness of times began exactly where the seven letters begin: at first love. A boy, a grove, a name, and the Beloved. And remember what our second series found in the Lord's own preface to this dispensation: the Restoration is a proposal, renewed — the everlasting covenant re-established after the long estrangement (D&C 1:15–22). The grove is where the courtship reopened; everything since — the book, the priesthood, the ordinances, the gathering, this very essay — is the engagement season of a family being betrothed again.

So the pattern holds at every scale. Nephi's vision opened at the tree. The Restoration opened in a grove. And the road to the face opens, for every traveler, at the same place: the recovered knowledge, felt again and believed again, that you are loved — by name, personally, chosen on purpose, before you have answered a single question or fixed a single thing.

Setting out

Here, then, is station one's whole instruction, gathered: guard the delight, not just the doctrine. Run the Ephesian audit on yourself gently — works, labor, patience, vigilance... and delight? — and if the last box is empty, do not despair and do not double the works. Remember the espousals; he already does. Turn around. Do what the newly engaged do. Eat, again, from the tree the Spirit still escorts every seeker to first.

And pack the love carefully, because the road ahead needs it. The second station is the one the Lord introduces with the words "fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer" — the station of myrrh, of pressing, of ten days of tribulation and a crown on the far side. First love is not the reward for reaching the end of that road. It is the provision for walking it — because engagement season is when love is sweetest, but the pressing is where it is proven, and only the bride who knows she is chosen can hear "thou shalt suffer" and keep walking toward the wedding anyway.

That station — and the anchor heaven throws through the veil to hold you there — is where we go next.

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I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love... To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life.