Life is a forge, and we are the metal: if we are to be strong and virtuous tools we must be placed in the fire and hammered until we cannot break. Life is a loom and our journey is accomplished one thread at a time, line upon line, precept upon precept. Our life is clay on a potter's wheel and we must shape it and reshape it until it is what we want it to be.
Awkward intro
I was (and probably still am) a Molly Mormon all through my teenage years, and I will be the first to admit that I often went to extremes in my efforts to follow God and keep the commandments. For example, at one point when I was about 12 I decided that wearing undershirts was evil because if the shirt wasn't high enough in the first place it was too suggestive and you shouldn't be wearing it. I also wrote this small snippet about my opinion on flirting in a 7 page dissertation about my personal standards (no joke, it was 7 pages long. Single spaced.)
Flirting [my definition of which was basically just playful banter] Is one of the most selfish acts that one can commit, using someone you care about to gratify your own personal lusts under the pretense of love; It is heretical and blasphemous, it is an evil counterfeit for true love, as well as a tool of the devil's to desensitize, lead down the path to emotional, spiritual and physical desecration, and takes focus away from God, and things which are Good, therefore, it is below anything which a future Queen of Zion should participate in.
All this to say, I sincerely wanted to be good and do what I thought God wanted me to, but sometimes I didn't go about it in quite the right way, or I had funny notions about what God wanted me to do. Some of those notions I've only recently realized were wrong.
False Paradigms
I
Grace and Personal Responsibility
Whenever anything went wrong in my life I used to assume that it was meant to be that way. I thought that if I made a mistake, or was running late for a class that thing was supposed to happen because otherwise I would be smashed in a car crash on the way to my class, or that that mistake was supposed to be made because God wanted me to learn a lesson from it. This paradigm, I'm sure, was naturally born from my fondness of looking on the bright side of things and trying to find the good in life, and even from my testimony that God is good and works miracles in our lives. I don't deny that God's workings are beyond my comprehension and that those kinds of miracles do happen, but the result of that way of thinking was that I ended up believing my whole life was predestined and planned for me. That I didn't have to make any choices other than believing that God was in control. It took a C. S. Lewis novel to make me realize I was living a lie.
In the his book, The Silver Chair, Jill made a mistake at the beginning of the book which set off a chain of events which resulted in their quest being much harder and much longer than it needed to be -- a fact which Aslan pointed out to her. Then throughout the journey she failed to follow the instructions Aslan had given her and she ended up not only endangering her life and the lives of those with her, but almost failing the quest he had sent her on. Through out all of it Aslan was able to help make up for lost time and help her learn from her mistakes but she still had to suffer the consequences of her actions.
In his talk Personal Strength through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, Elder Scott told the story of the Strippling Warriors and said
Consider the tender feelings of those fathers [of the Strippling Warriors]. How must they have felt to know that the rebellious actions of their past prevented them from protecting their wives and children at that moment of need? Knowing personally of the atrocities their sons would now face, they must have privately wept. Fathers, not children, are supposed to protect their families! Their sorrows must have been intense. . .sometimes our poor choices leave us with long-term consequences. One of the vital steps to complete repentance is to bear the short- and long-term consequences of our past sins. Their past choices had exposed these Ammonite fathers to a carnal appetite that could again become a point of vulnerability that Satan would attempt to exploit.
Conclusion: Mistakes are real, I do actually make them, it's not all God's fault. God does actually expect us to bear the consequences of our actions and mistakes, but He does so to teach us to become like Him. God has given us agency, and we can't have agency without consequences. Whenever we make a mistake, or choose to do something we know we shouldn't we still have to suffer the consequences of that mistake - grace is not a "fail-safe". We still loose blessings when we sin or fall. Grace is what allows that mistake or sin to be consecrated to our good through repentance, and what allows us to return to the presence of God despite human frailty. God is "a perfect just God, and a merciful God also."
No comments:
Post a Comment