Of Life and Times

I have a niece what was raised with high standards. She made covenants with God and was obedient to what she had been taught. She was happy. But at some point her vision blurred and she became spiritually lost. This is a dreadfully sad and eventually painful thing that happens when we are not careful about keeping our promises to God.

The reward for obedience to God's commandments is knowledge. Little by little as we keep our promises to Him, he opens our minds to grander and grander views of eternity. We begin to understand why we need to do some of the things He has asked of us. Our ability to place our trust in him and his counsel grows and we become more and more sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, who's responsibility it is to teach us the ways of God. Only through the gentle voice of the Spirit can we find our path through the distractions and falsities of this life. He is our guide and protector, the bringer and revealer of truth. We must cherish that relationship above all others in this life if we are to make it to the other side in triumph.

So what happens to us when we lose our focus and start doing things on our own, ignoring the urgings of the Holy Ghost and our own conscience? Disobedience acts like an opiate. You head into its use with your eyes wide open, but soon you begin to become numb to your surroundings. You begin to do things you would have never dreamed of doing before, and you honestly no longer see anything wrong with it, except that you feel more and more uncomfortable with those who still do the "good" things you used to do. At least you still recognize that much. So you start to avoid the places those people go and hang out with others who don't do those things. You begin to forget, as from a waking dream, the details that once governed your life. You adopt new standards, which are never higher than the ones you are abandoning. Before long even things you were raised doing seem foreign and uncomfortable. You don't realize that the uncomfortable feeling is the Spirit trying to urge you back into the light of reality.

There are those who descend so far into the abyss that they no longer comprehend anything that they themselves used to espouse publicly. They forget everything that they once held so dear. Life now is the pursuit of one pleasure after another. The catch is that all these pleasures come at a high price. Families are torn apart, friends lost, friends betrayed, loved ones made distant nuisances to be avoided, a grim and uncomfortable reminder of the standards that have been forsaken. We become stubborn in our insistence that our way is okay, and that we are better off this way. Yet we never do feel the joy we once felt when we kept the commandments.

The only solution to this spiritual euthanasia, or the killing of the soul in a quiet numbing way, so that the guilt of wrong is not felt, is to face our problem squarely and admit that we have made a poor choice. Sometimes it takes decades for someone to get to the point that their misery becomes more than they can stand any longer, and they start to grope their way through the darkness of their lives back into the light of understanding. Some never make it, but some do eventually come back, wiser and more humble, and glad to have escaped the mind numbing drug of disobedience.

In this life we are blind. We can see no further into the past than our own birth and can see no further into the future than our own death. Anything past those two end points is a stab in the dark, a guess. Is it any wonder that so many espouse the belief that there is no purpose to this life except what we assign to it? After all, what is there to tell me that I am anything more than just one of the many animals that have evolved on this planet. We are just the lucky ones, because we can think and direct ourselves, whereas no other animals can.

So many questions. Surely there is some purpose to life other than living and dying. Surely there is some grander design other than pure chance that has allowed me to come into existence as something other than a gnat. But if there is no other purpose than to live and die, then I may as well have been a gnat. At least the gnat doesn't have to worry about its reason for being. The gnat can't see into the future and wonder about the past. The gnat just is until it isn't any longer.

If all this were true, then we of all beings must be the most miserable and lost, knowing that we are without purpose and design, no destiny or past, and no way to change it. What a terrible existence it would be, living from one temporary pleasure to another with only the darkness of the grave at the end of our journey.

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I am so grateful to know better. We as Latter-day Saints have been blessed with the truth. We are all the children of a race of resurrected beings with glorified and eternal bodies. We have lived forever and will continue to live forever. Just as we were raised by our Father in the premortal world, so we understand that our time here is brief. We have certain responsibilities to fulfill and challenges to overcome before leaving this testing ground to continue our development on the other side of death.

This beautiful planet was created for all of God's children so they could be happy while they are here, and delight in the splendors of His creations. This is a place of trials, to see if we will be able and willing to be obedient to the commandments we are given by Him. His promise to each of us is that by being obedient we will be blessed with vision beyond this mortal life. Our faith in God will be able to transcend this small time in mortality and grow into a grand view of all eternity. Only with this view can we muster the hope and faith needed to be completely true to the covenants we have made with our Father and endure in that faith until the end of our small time here.

It is the vision of the hereafter that fuels us. We look forward to a time when we are raised from our separation from our bodies and given perfected versions of what we laid down in death. Because of the covenants we have made the Lord will garner us with knowledge of the universe and how it is made and sustained. We will grow in power and abilities until eventually we will have become like our Father, creators of worlds and families to people them with. We will have joy in our posterity and their happiness for all eternity.

Yes, we as Latter-day Saints are different from the world. We do not see things in the same way. We do not behave in the same way. Our behavior and beliefs are fueled by a vision of eternity, not the short duration and end of mortality.