Well, the teacher began by sharing a somewhat negative experience of how he didn't necessarily have a testimony of fasting but he was called upon as a missionary to teach the principle, but then he asked the audience if we had any positive experiences of doing, or obeying a principle and gaining a testimony thereby. Well, before anyone answered, I posed the question if it's necessary to have a testimony of each principle. So the teacher opened the question up to the floor, and we got quite a few similar responses, that you can get by knowing a few things and the anchors of the gospel will help you with the principles you are struggling with.
Then he turned it back to me because he supposed I had an answer on my mind. And I did, building on one of the comments, I suggested that the doctrine is that Jesus is the Christ and that by obeying commandments, regardless of if we believe them even years after starting, we get a testimony of the doctrine--that Jesus is the Christ. So it doesn't actually matter if we have a testimony of tithing or of fasting, etc. The core doctrine is what we're striving for, so essentially, we can testify of the commandments we keep because they fit into the puzzle. That's the essence of what I said. But I have to admit that I didn't feel quite right about asking the initial question or even of my answer, though it still made sense in my mind.
After leaving church, I had an image come into my mind, some symbolism, which is often how I think. This time it was of an animal--it could be any animal, but it was an elephant, which seems to be a go-to animal for plenty of analogies for some reason--maybe because it's so big, you can't ignore it. :). Anyway, so the thought was this, if you can see a foot of an elephant, you can be pretty certain that the animal it's attached to is also going to be an elephant. So, if I needed to surgery on the elephant, I could be certain that if I opened it up, I would find an elephant's heart or an elephant's brain because the animal before me was an elephant. So, do I need to see the whole elephant, every piece of it before I know that the heart is an elephant's? No. It's only logical that each part be that of an elephant.
So, if I see a foot and step forward feeling and looking at the elephant, just as I step forward and keep more commandments, even if I can't say with certainty that the commandment itself has brought me blessings, because it's part of the elephant, part of the teachings of the gospel, it must be true, too.
Everything seemed clear in my mind, but I was still not feeling quite right about it, so I continued to ponder and then I found a hole in the theory. What if you'd never seen an elephant before? How would all of this apply? Then the little story of the blind or blindfolded men who had never seen an elephant and were all placed at different points of the elephant and were told that what was before them was an elephant. One man said elephants were hairy. He was feeling the end of the tale. One man said they, no, they're not hairy. They're solid like rock. He was feeling the tusks. Another man said they were both wrong. Elephants are wrinkly. He was feeling the side. And so on.
If they were blindfolded and had the blindfolds removed afterward, they could see they were all right. Elephants are hairy because they're mammals, and they have parts that are hard like rocks, and they are wrinkly. For someone who has never seen an elephant, even if they're told that every part must be an elephant and they can assume this logically, that still won't tell them much about the core doctrine--what an elephant is. They have to experience each part of the elephant to have the whole picture.
So yes, it's true that you don't have to have a testimony of each principle, per se, in order to testify that the whole of the gospel is true. But the Lord does want us to know what the blessings are for the whole gospel. He wants us to see the whole elephant. But it might not come right away. Sometimes we have to be blind for a while and just experience the tail, or just experience the tusks because those are the parts that are important for us at the time. But we do have to keep obeying the commandments we can't fully see the benefits of yet because otherwise, we never will and the elephant will remain only a tail, and really, the whole elephant is so much more majestic than the tail.
