Particles And Waves

For a long time, physicists debated on whether it made more sense to describe light as a stream of individual particles, or as a wave. If it were composed of particles, it ought to behave in certain ways, and same goes for if it were made up of waves. As it turns out, it's both. There's an experiment in which you can shine a laser at a metal plate with two parallel slits and then there is a photosensitive sheet behind the plate to record where the light hits. When you do this, the pattern of where the light hits proves that light acts as a wave. But you can actually slow the experiment down to where you shine a single photon or light particle at a time, and that single photon can only go through one of the slits at a time. It is equally likely which side it would go through because it's only one particle and it has to go through one slot. But the crazy thing is that even when you fire the particles one at a time, they still end up acting like a wave going through each side in a consistent pattern. This may all be uninteresting to non-physics nerds, but the point I'm trying to make is just as natural light can act both as a particle or as a wave, so too can Heaven's light shine upon us as both a particle and as a wave. Sometimes when we receive personal revelation, it is like getting hit by a particle of truth and knowledge. We know exactly what we're supposed to do. But sometimes, revelations come on us in waves. Just like a wave of the sea is composed of trillions of little water droplets, all moving together in a consistent pattern, sometimes we can understand God's will only through a consistent pattern of trillions of little correct decisions and righteous choices. Sometimes we get that one clear Eureka moment of paying our tithing even though we can't afford it and then miraculously finding that $20 bill in our winter coat to help get us through the week. And sometimes we gradually come to realize that the church is true only after attending thousands of Sacrament meetings week in and week out for decades. The fact that some revelation hits us like a thunderbolt and some revelation washes over us little by little does not mean we are more or less worthy for having received one or the other more often. Light is both a wave and a particle, whether we're talking about the electromagnetic spectrum, or the divine light of Christ.