In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the alien Ford Prefect warns his earthling friend Arthur Dent that space travel is “Unpleasantly like being drunk.” Arthur Dent asks, “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” to which Ford Prefect replies, “Just ask a glass of water.” If we were to take for a moment the viewpoint of a glass of water that is bobbing along on the surface of the ocean (never mind how it manages to float), the water inside of the glass may feel separate from the water all around it. In fact, it may come to view its identity and existence as entirely dependent on remaining inside of the glass. Sure, perhaps some of the water inside spills out, and some of the ocean’s water sloshes in, but if the glass were to tip over or sink below the surface then the water inside of the glass would be swallowed up by the ocean. As Ford Prefect would say, this seems unpleasantly like being drunk. It is estimated that there are something like twenty-two million trillion cups of water in the Earth’s oceans. It seems like one more cup getting dumped in would just vanish into obscurity. Sure, it would become part of the ocean, but it would have no sense of self and it would be impossible for it to exert any kind of influence. The one glass of water being swallowed up by the ocean would be a complete waste, at least, from the perspective of the glass of water. But hold on. As huge of a number as twenty-two million trillion cups of water in the oceans is, it is nothing compared to the number of molecules of water in a single glass. A single glass of water has about eight trillion trillion molecules in it, or in other words, there are about a quarter of a million times more molecules in a single cup of water than there are total cups of water in all of the earth’s oceans. If all of the molecules from a single glass of water were to be swallowed up and evenly mixed throughout the ocean, then given enough time you could scoop up cups of water from different parts of the ocean and have even odds that there would be at least a few molecules from that first glass in it. In describing the humility of the Savior Jesus Christ, the prophet Abinadi taught, “Yea, even so he shall be led, crucified, and slain, the flesh becoming subject even unto death, the will of the Son being swallowed up in the will of the Father.” (Mosiah 15:7). We assume that following in the example of humility of our Savior and allowing our will to be swallowed up by the will of the Father will be unpleasantly like being drunk, that it will be like dumping one measly glass of water into a vast, infinite ocean. We will be destroyed. We will disappear into something so vast and cease to exist or to matter. But it is just not so. And besides, we’ve got it all backwards. We assume that we must always be the swallowed, and never the swallower. In fact, Christ invites us to come, eat of His flesh and drink of His blood, to feast upon His words, to taste the fruit of His love most joyous to the soul. We are to receive and embrace and swallow all that the Father would give us, all of His mercy and His love and His peace and His joy. And like that glass of water floating on the surface of the ocean, once our water has mixed and mingled with the ocean for long enough, we will not panic or fight when we have reached the point where we have swallowed so much of our Father’s light and His goodness that His will and His thoughts have become our will and our thoughts, that our will has been swallowed up by His. And when we get to this point, we will find that yielding to the enticings of the Spirit and becoming a saint and submitting to all that the Father sees fit to inflict upon us is pleasantly like being drunk.
