Sunday, September 7, 2014

Did the Creator create evil?

The Great Creator did not create all things.

  • The Creator did not create dark, he created light. Dark is merely the absence of the light God created. 
  • The Creator did not create cold, he created heat. Cold is merely the absence of the heat God created. 
  • The Creator did not create agency, it is co-eternal with God. The Creator did not give us agency, he simply acknowledged that we have it and promised to never remove it or violate it.
  • The Creator did not create evil, he created love. Evil is not a creation of God, it is a creation of people who have rejected God's love. 
Light and heat are physical forces that have physical limitations in the physical universe, and thus we may see places of darkness and cold where the Creator's forces do not reach.

God's love, on the other hand, is infinite and eternal. It can reach every corner of the universe and penetrate every human heart.  With their agency, people create places that are dark and cold by erecting walls and barriers to block light and heat. With that same agency, people create evil by erecting walls and barriers around their hearts to block God's love.

We cannot blame the Creator for darkness or cold or evil. We can blame only ourselves for using our inalienable agency to build the walls that keep God's beautiful creations out.

My prayer is that the Creator will show me the walls I have built around my heart so that I can tear them down and let his light, warmth, and love shine brightly in my life, and that I can bring a measure of light, warmth, and love into the lives of others.

The errand of all those who know the Creator's love is to shine His light into the darkness, radiate His warmth into the cold, and share His love where it is absent.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Living life Upside Down

No one will argue that everyone has struggles. We are all different, and we all have our own struggles, but it is a universal truth that we all struggle. That is why we are here on earth, to "prove [us] herewith, to see if [we] will do all things whatsoever the Lord [our] God shall command [us]" (Abraham 3:25). God tests us with life in mortality and a world full of wonderful and distracting things, not so much so we can prove to him what we can do, but to prove to ourselves what we are made of.

I struggle to get out of my own way and let the Lord’s hand work in my life. I struggle with pride and vanity and letting other people shine without worrying about how their brilliance reflects on me. I struggle to learn simple lessons and then to implement what I have learned instead of just doing the same old thing the same old way.

When I was young and starting out, I focused on getting my temporal life in order: education, career, marriage, family, house, furniture, reliable cars that had to keep expanding as the number of car seats increased, and a reasonable amount of entertainment. The Church was really a hobby. I kept the commandments, read the scriptures, paid tithing, went to church, did my home teach most of the time, filled my callings (unless they became totally inconvenient), went to ward temple night most months, and so on. I did the essential things, and I said that once I got established in life, and I was not so busy with the temporal demands of this telestial existence, I would focus more on the spiritual things. I would go to the temple more, get serious about family history research, really study the scriptures, bake more loaves of bread for my neighbors, get anxiously engaged in a good cause and do good works of my own free will, figure out what the temple covenants really mean, pray more diligently, ask for the gift of charity, align my life with the will of the Lord, and so on.

What I am learning is that all of that temporal stuff was, and still is, a distraction. I focused on the stuff of the world for forty years, and now I am finding that those habits do not just fall away when I decide it’s time to get serious. It is all upside down and backwards. Life is the distraction that keeps me from seeing what is really important. In my old age, I see that faith and service are the stuff of existence, and temporal pursuits are the hobby. The Book of Mormon teaches repeatedly that if we keep the commandments of God, we shall prosper in the land. For so long I lived as if the Book of Mormon said, “if ye prosper in the land, ye shall be able to keep my commandments.” I have had it all backwards, and when I try to turn it around, the old habits of thought and practice are hard to break.

When we are ready, however, the Lord humbles us. He has promised that if we ask him, he will show us our weaknesses. I have put that promise to the test, and I can testify that the Lord delivers, for I see weaknesses all over the place in my life. He has also made a related promise: He will make weak things become strong unto us (see Ether 12:27). I'm anxious to see how the second half of the promise pans out for me. I've got the weakness part down pretty good. Now I'm waiting for the strength part to kick in. The older I get, the more I hope that it gets here while I can still remember what I asked for.