The purpose of suffering
Some incorrectly think that the closer you draw to God, the less you will suffer. Do you think that God does not feel pain? Jesus bled from every pore because of the things he suffered. Enoch saw God weep. God suffers more than any man can. Do you think you will suffer less as you draw closer to him? God has the most joy because he is capable of enduring the greatest suffering. His commandments instill us with the same capability to the degree that we obtain his light and truth by seeking and obeying him in all things.
The purpose of life is to maximize joy. In order to maximize joy, you must acquire the greater light and truth required to contend with the equal and opposite suffering that always co-exists with joy.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the path to maximized joy, not minimized suffering. The question is not whether you will suffer, but how much joy you can have in spite of suffering. Learning truth does not free you from suffering. Instead, it will increase your suffering. What the acquisition of truth changes is not the presence of suffering, but the purpose of suffering.
Those who possess little truth suffer because they are ignorant of cause, effect, and reality. Your actions will change when your understanding of reality changes: your understanding of cause and effect; your understanding of consequences and constraints; your hoped-for outcomes. All of this is driven by your beliefs, and your beliefs will change when you are exposed to something that indicates that your current beliefs are incomplete or incorrect in some way. “Faith comes by hearing” (Romans 10:17), or through expanded observation and understanding. This is always from God, even when it is difficult or painful.
If pleasure unalloyed with pain is not attainable in this life, and if greater suffering accompanies greater happiness, then why bother progressing? One reaction we can have to the chaos is to become jaded—our hearts can wax cold and we can become apathetic. A loss of feeling will deprive us of the deep love of others that is required to keep going through the toughest of trials.
In the face of such a risk, it is important to realize that the gospel is the plan of happiness with respect to the default . It is not the plan of pleasure, because truth produces radical disillusionment, and that doesn't feel good. However, with respect to reality, the gospel is the most direct path to unveiling it. Reality is atrociously harsh. It exists independent of God. God, being aware of it to a greater extent than any of his children, provided a means for them to experience joy in spite of the harshness. To experience the greatest amount of joy, one's desires must be aligned with how things really are. Those who desire what cannot be will be miserable, even if in the short term they encounter pleasure.
If you seek to minimize suffering, you will inadvertently maximize ignorance. You will still end up with a great deal of suffering, just without any of the commensurate joy that would have come had you instead attempted to maximize joy.
Pleasure can come from truth or illusion. Worldly happiness is a fleeting illusion. Pleasure devoid of knowledge is pain whose inevitable bill has not yet come due. This is the fate, for example, of both the wicked who have pleasure for a season and self-proclaimed Christians who stop short of all God has to teach them, satisfied with a childish understanding of the gospel.
The joy of anyone whose suffering is limited is merely a temporary illusion. It will be violently ripped from them in the moment they are exposed to a greater share of reality than they are presently aware. There is no pleasure based on illusion that is ever worth experiencing because, in the end, the cost will always exceed the benefit. “Wickedness never was happiness.” (Alma 41:10)
It pays to discover all the truth you can, because doing so is the only way to maximize your joy and minimize the suffering you can avoid.
Avoidable suffering is overcome by trust in God
So much of our suffering is mental anguish. God does not avoid exposing us to pain. But, he does not make it worse through mental anguish. So much of our pain is actually caused by our mental reaction to reality. If reality is according to God’s purposes, and God is perfectly loving and all-knowing, then we must conclude that even the most revolting aspects of reality are actually for our good.
At its root, what is mental or emotional pain? It is nothing more or less than the revelation of a difference between our expectations and reality. Most people avoid this revelation at all costs. They will cut off their closest friends, dive into the deepest delusion, and cause themselves great harm to avoid it. This is highly irrational, and the worst possible behavior in the context of obtaining happiness. Avoidance of a more accurate perception of reality will more effectively prevent your obtaining greater happiness than anything else.
Physical pain is a mechanical reaction, but mental pain is not. Our emotional state is 100% subjective. Negative emotions are mental constructs. You can choose how you interpret anything. You can stop and think intentionally about how you are interpreting something, and you can choose to interpret it differently.
Our perspective determines how we interpret life. The difference between pain and investment is the perceived outcome and purpose.
So much of our pain and suffering in life is the result not of external events outside of our control, but our psychological framing of them. In other words, most suffering isn’t about what happens to you, but how you react to it. Pain—even physical pain—need not translate into the negative spiral known as ego death. It need not metabolize into the internal perception of loss, defeat, or failure. If you think for a moment, you might realize that a great many of the negative experiences you’ve experienced were actually events you chose to interpret as loss, defeat, or failure, even though that was not the only way to interpret them.
For example, if I dream of being a world-class ballerina, and due to overuse, I end up breaking my leg during a performance, I could experience a great feeling of loss at realizing that my dream has been shattered. But I wasn’t yet a world-class ballerina, and you can’t lose what you don’t really have. But, you may say, what if I was already a world-class ballerina? The situation is no different once you realize that we do not yet possess the future!
We have to grapple with reality how it really is, not how we would like it to be. It is good and essential to imagine the world how we would like it to be; this is how we determine our goals. However, we have to interact with the world as it really is. Our daily actions are based on reducing the distance between how the world is and how we would like it to be; they cannot be effective if our starting point is not how the world actually is. The elements of reality that we wish were not true are the richest source of new truth. Embracing these realities causes cognitive dissonance and psychological pain. Recognizing these holes as opportunities to learn is essential. These are moments to reflect and ask what our understanding lacks on these points. This is how we progress.
While expanded awareness can come in the form of a visible manifestation of an angel or an audible voice from heaven, it is available to you all the time through your conscience. You can increase your awareness by leveraging the faculties of observation and reason that God has given you. Heeding your conscience perfectly while actively contemplating and questioning your experiences and seeking improvement always result in greater light and truth.
If you seek solutions to the problems in your current level of truth, you will necessarily seek higher truth. Obtaining the next level of truth will solve the problems of the previous level, but it will also generate new ones. At any level of awareness, there will be problems. The question is not whether there are problems. They are unavoidable. The question is what kind of problems do you want? Most normal people go through their whole lives pinching their eyes shut, trying to ignore what they know is out of accord in their lives. They think that by ignoring what they know is not reconciled to their understanding, they can enjoy what they do like about their lives and avoid what they do not. This, however, never works.
As you progress, you encounter greater peace because you no longer suffer from avoidable consequences, and the unavoidable ones don’t bother you as much because you understand why they have to happen.
As you acquire the additional truth that you need to overcome the problems at your present level of understanding, you will inherit a new set of problems, but these problems will pertain to a higher order of existence.
Eventually, you will overcome all problems pertaining to this world. You will still have problems, but they will not be focused on what can or does happen to you. Instead, they will entail the well-being of others. Those who possess higher truth suffer in behalf of others. Your expanded awareness will include seeing the consequences of the limited perspectives of others, consequences they are blind to. You will suffer by knowing how far below their privileges they are living. You will also suffer through investing your increased capacity in others, knowing full well they will not recognize and in only few cases accept what you offer them. You will also experience a special kind of loneliness which is reserved for those who have excelled their peers in light and truth. The next chapter is dedicated to this topic.
One secret of constant peace is letting go of our perception of what the future holds. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6:34) This does not mean, however, adopting apathy towards all things future. We must learn to be both tenacious in our seeking to achieve future goals, and completely flexible and subdued towards future outcomes as the future shifts outside of our control. That is the key: laser-like focus on what we can control, and complete submission to what we can’t.
How can we mitigate our sorrows? Once, when Alma the Younger found himself in a particularly hopeless situation, he offered a powerful prayer. The Lord responded to it by blessing him with “strength, that they should suffer no manner of afflictions, save it were swallowed up in the joy of Christ.” (Alma 31:38) Note the very important fact that God did not remove his afflictions from him. Rather, he blessed him that his joy in Christ could surpass his sorrow. Disciples of Christ have always and will always have more earthly sorrow than most. However, their joy in Christ surpasses those sorrows.
What is joy in Christ? In part, it is the peace that can only come when you fully trust God. This is a state of rest, because you cease worrying about things outside of your control, and you are empowered to interpret all negative situations as being blessings sent from an all-knowing God.
If you love God and earnestly reconcile your life to your understanding of his will, everything in your life is precisely what is required to direct you towards the greatest happiness. If you really believe that what happens is the will of an all-loving God, then any perceived loss is actually a better aim towards happiness, not a deviation from it.
Attaining awareness and reconciling yourself fully to it is the only way to find more purpose in life: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) Trust in God is the only thing that can provide sufficient hope to cross over the unavoidable suffering that exists here. Hope is only efficacious when it is based in reality. Abraham was successful in his endurance towards the contrarian goal of his long-barren wife bearing a child because he was told by God that it would happen. He “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.” (Romans 4:18) If God had not told him his wife would have a child, it would have been foolish for him to hope for that in spite of ample observations of her infertility. Our knowledge of God is the source of contrarian hope: “I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.” (Psalm 130:5) Wishing will not suffice.
God allows the righteous to suffer for two reasons. First, their willingness to suffer for the benefit of others allows blessings and opportunities for growth in those who otherwise would have no claims on greater light and truth because of the law of justice. Second, God allows the exact minimum amount of suffering required to reveal to the righteous the ways in which they do not trust God, that they might repent and grow into a fullness of trust. When someone reaches a fullness of trust in God, nothing in mortality remains that would overcome their trust in God, and their calling and election is made sure.
All it takes to reveal your distrust in God is disobedience to the light he has given you so far. It isn’t as easy to know the limits of your trust in God once you are reconciled to the light you have. That requires experience. As you encounter more and more suffering, you will discover the limits of your trust in him. You can rest assured that you do have a limit, because if you did not, you would already enjoy a fullness of his glory.
Of Jesus we read: “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8) What does this actually mean? Jesus already trusted the Father to the degree that he kept the commandments he knew. Through his suffering, he acquired the greater trust in the Father necessary to keep the next commandments as he would receive them. These lessons take a deeper meaning when you replace the concept of commandments as explicit instructions (“thou shalt” or “thou shalt not”) with the act of reconciling your actions, feelings, and desires to the character of God as far as you understand it. Through his suffering, he became better acquainted with the character of God while simultaneously deepening his trust in God, which is the inescapable result of knowing him better.
The key to salvation is trust in God, and in a sense, the entire point of this experience is to provide a place where we can necessarily experience a lack of obvious reasons to trust him. As God inflicts more and more severe situations upon us, we have the chance to develop our trust in him in harder and harder situations, until our trust becomes stronger than anything this world can produce.
The branch of a bush can become its own plant through scraping the bark off of the base of the branch and securing moist soil around it (say, in a cup). This gives a signal to the plant to change the purpose of that portion of the branch from a conduit connecting the plant and branch to a selfsustaining root structure for the branch. In time, the roots grow and the branch can be cut off from the plant and placed on its own. The branch then becomes its own bush.
God scrapes off our bark by placing us in seemingly undesirable situations. Whether internal or external, we are given these situations so that we can sprout roots. He makes weakness strong. He does this by first exposing weakness. When we see our inability to cope with something, it is a signal that God has something to teach us there. If we are sufficiently humble, patient, seeking, earnest, and obedient, he will teach us what we lack to make us strong in that area. We can then take that strength to others who have not had the opportunity or means to learn what the Lord has taught us through suffering, and we can help them learn what we know without their having to pass through the sorrow required to teach us.
What is the role of awareness and good and evil in terms of trust in God? You can say and think that you trust God up to the point where nothing in this world can overcome you, but if you are not actually aware of what this world can produce, you can’t really say or think that—at least it is meaningless when you do. As we become more and more aware of things as they really are, we can see the limits to our trust, and in each instance, decide whether or not we do trust God. This is akin to our applying the light he gives us to sorting what is good and what is evil. Being whipped nearly to death and hung on a cross while seemingly cut off from the Father probably seems like evil, but it was the most righteous thing ever done by anyone on this earth. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ prayer was sorting his increased awareness into good and evil: what he would willingly pursue, and what he would not.
One way of quantifying your trust in God is by measuring the amount of suffering you can endure without understanding it before doubting God’s love for you, his wisdom, and his knowledge. The Lord said:
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? (Matthew 5)
Everyone trusts God when he is sending sunbeams and rainbows. This is the least valuable type of trust. We have to grow to trust him when he sends us rain. This is an apt metaphor, because rain is only bad for those who aren’t aware of its necessity to sustain life. Rainy days are just as needful as sunny days.
Just as we are to pray for those who hurt us, and just as our prayers are of limited charity when we pray for those who love us, we are to trust God, especially when his will causes our suffering.
Perfect trust is when you can’t enumerate anything that would cause yourself to doubt God.
The pendulum of joy and sorrow
A wise man once wrote, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) If Solomon had more knowledge than his peers, he would be equipped to judge whether or not he also had more sorrow. Why do these two things go together?
There is opposition in all things. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness is like pulling back the pendulum on a grandfather clock. When you pull back the pendulum to the right, you know that it will swing to the left to equal displacement. If you want greater righteousness, you willingly submit yourself to God for greater affliction. The more you want, the more you will encounter what you don’t.
When Jacob was shown the ladder of ascent and descent in a dream, it was marvelous to behold. But hearing about or seeing this is quite different than experiencing it. He was shown what would happen from a very different perspective than those actually experiencing the ladder would describe it. This journey is not one of angelic floating through the air. Jacob crawled on his face toward God, figuratively, over twenty odd years of suffering for the benefit of others, and, literally, in an excruciating night of approaching God.
You can’t increase in knowledge without experience, and you can’t have experience without experiencing pain.
Every rung in Jacob’s ladder is another swing of the pendulum—but this time the arm is longer and the path wider than the last. It supplies greater joy and knowledge at the cost of greater suffering and pain.
Challenge increases the contrast between darkness and light. It is the only thing that has a hope of helping the unaware become aware of God’s voice and move towards it. When God’s light shines in the darkness of our hearts—which it does unceasingly—we recognize it to varying degrees. Those who do not recognize it or who recognize only very little of it are well served by a loving God to go through tremendous affliction. When the darkness increases, the light is more obvious, like a diamond on velvet versus held up to the daylight.
There are two secrets of happiness. The first, that everyone seems to realize, is that to get more happiness, you have to seek more happiness. The second, that no one seems to realize, is that to get more happiness, you have to learn to respond better to and even enjoy the opposition to happiness. The way you do this is through acquiring and reconciling yourself to knowledge—knowledge of how things really are.
We can change the way we frame what we now consider to be negative. We can change the way we react to it. The illusion is that pain is always negative. It is a silly illusion, and surprisingly common, because we encounter things almost daily that we frame as positive, even though they cause pain. Exercising, having kids, eating cake, drinking alcohol, sitting in a car, all of these things are painful experiences. Yet we regard them as positive.
Life is not meant to be and cannot be a constant series of objectively beautiful moments. Instead, it is like a road trip through Montana: an almost constant series of objectively bland moments, punctuated with scenes of tremendous beauty. Most people don't do anything close to what they could do to multiply those beautiful moments. But even if you do, you are still going to end up in a place where the majority of your life is things other than those. If you want more happiness out of life, you have to develop a perspective that allows you to derive value from what others do not appreciate—those much more common moments that are not exciting, not what you would have picked, and maybe even painful. If you make the effort, you can learn things about life that make you appreciate the normally undesirable. You still won't like it as much as those rare special times, but because these other times are so numerous, just learning to appreciate them a little more will mean you get a lot more happiness out of life compared to those who don’t appreciate them at all.
One way to interpret disagreeable experiences is to recognize that they are exactly what is needed to teach you precisely what is necessary for you to enjoy the next level of reality. Every disagreeable experience is an invitation from God, showing you that he knows you are ready to qualify for the next level of joy. Maintaining your godly character through the experience will require new knowledge from God—tools that you currently lack, but that are required to contend with greater proportions of reality. This process is how you proceed to greater joy.
It is important to understand that a step towards that life isn’t the same as instantly receiving an increment of more joy. Degrees of happiness don’t seem to be continuous, like awareness is. You accumulate awareness bit by bit. While the bits can be large or small, there seem to be no jumps. Our experience with God and our joy seem to be discrete. They seem to stay at one level for what seems like a long time, then jump ahead radically, all at once. When scriptural personalities have collapsed in a state of joy, it is not from an incremental experience. It hit them all at once. When God appears to you, it is all at once.
Were you to be in God’s presence in a reconciled state, you would marvel at the love you feel. It is indescribable. And yet, you may be surprised to discover that you feel at least as close to him while suffering for others here and now than you do in his literal presence.
God will show you as much of reality as you are willing to see
Suffering is not an arbitrary punishment from a capricious God. God is not capricious. He is bound by law. He is precisely aware of the degree of light and truth we need to overcome all challenges related to this life, and his gospel consists of everything we need to know to attain that light and truth. Whenever we suffer, it is the consequence of beliefs based on a lack of light and truth—the natural consequence of possessing less light and truth than needed to overcome the world. In spite of how hard it is to see it so, we ought to recognize our suffering as a gift from an immeasurably loving and perfectly wise God. It is a gift in at least two ways. First, no matter how intense our suffering, it is indescribably less than we would endure were we made aware of a full awareness of all truth pertaining to our sphere. Were he to reveal the fullness of awareness, it would literally be hell to those who had not yet built up an awareness of it.
Second, the granting of a slight exposure to some of the natural consequences of our current limited beliefs creates an environment where we can be much more capable and motivated to seek, consider, and adopt higher order light and truth. Suffering helps our eyes see the paths to greater light and truth. Paths that lead to greater light and truth are like diamonds— they aren’t nearly as visible in the daylight as they are contrasted on dark velvet. It is also much less likely that we see the need to change in a setting where we are artificially shielded from the consequences of our lack of limited understanding of reality through the grace of God. You may ask if God is able to shield us from those consequences now, why can’t he continue to do so later? God’s grace can withhold the consequences of our lack of knowledge, but the consequences withheld must include both the negative and the positive. The only way one can acquire the joy that God has is by also acquiring the awareness he has, and that awareness requires one to overcome the negative consequences through the acquisition and application of law—an advanced understanding of good and evil. There is no other way.
The amount of light you acquire in this life is determined by how far you are willing to walk into the darkness. The more darkness you are willing to abide in, the further God can take you. This is because God teaches you truth by a) exposing you to chaos, b) differentiating the chaos, c) inviting you to choose to accept the good and turn away the evil in what you have ordered and defined.
If you turn your whole heart to God, he will subject you to situations that will feel and act like a crucible. They will burn out all your impurities if you trust God enough to allow him to leave you there until it is complete. Too many people ask to be taken out of the fire before their dross is purged. They want to stay at their current level of trust in God, and don’t want to know what trust they yet lack.
As you endure the increasing light, you will have everything ripped from your heart until the only thing that remains is God. That is sanctification. Through this abasement, you become exalted. It is the only way. It is how you gain everything by losing everything. It is how you lose yourself by finding yourself. Your awareness increases, your old principles fail to order the new chaos, and you must discover and assimilate new light and truth to revise or replace them with something greater.
Before the trials we read of in the Bible narrative, Job had overcome all the chaos he knew of in life. Exposed to normal situations, he had deciphered God’s will and followed it. He had derived the principles of God’s will that governed the situations he encountered, and he lived them faithfully. As a result, he had accumulated wealth, wisdom, the respect of his peers, and a measure of happiness. Yet, Job’s life was not perfect. He had wild and disobedient children, and a wife of limited understanding, as evidenced in the former case by his frequent intercessory prayers for his children’s foibles, and in the latter case by his wife’s reaction to his imminent trials. When Satan is first authorized to test Job, Job responds well. His statement is positive, but also betrays ignorance of God’s character. He states that it seems fair to endure some storms, when God has been so gracious to have blessed him so much to that point. Job was considering God’s trait of justice, but justice was not God’s motivation in allowing his testing. God’s love was the motivating factor, as it always is in allowing challenges to arise in the lives of those that love him. God exposes us to situations that are beyond our understanding and seemingly beyond our capacity in order to teach us more about the way things work—about good and evil. This is the only way we can attain a higher level of happiness than we presently occupy. Job should have reacted by saying that any situation that comes to the faithful is exactly what is needed—nothing more and nothing less—in order to teach them what is needed to be saved. Job should have rejoiced in his affliction, taking it as a sign that God loves him and trusts Job enough to teach him more about himself. Instead, his confidence in God erodes as the trials gain in intensity, until his faith reduces to complaints about the seeming unfairness of the situation. Had Job known God’s character better, he would have rejoiced in any seeming injustice, knowing that temporary injustice is the vehicle used by a loving God to bring about greater dispensations of knowledge and happiness than can be had in our previous equilibrium state.
Life is short. This life is the time we have to develop greater trust in God. There are no vacations here. There are no times we can afford to take off.
Comprehending the worthlessness of the world
John wrote:
15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. (1 John 2)
It is not enough for God to tell us that the things of this world are of limited utility. He must show us. The more we seek light and truth, the more he can. The more understanding a person acquires in this world, the more he will see the fragility and fleetingness of the things this world has to offer. They will suffer wave after wave of disappointment. The things they work harder than most to obtain will, once obtained, turn to dust in their hands. They will be tempted to think, “what is the point of any of this?”
A more mature perspective follows: What was actually desired in the first place? Was it really what was acquired? Or was the disappointment instead because a greater perspective of things as they really are showed that what was being pursued cannot provide what was sought? With every wave of disappointment, the person believes more and more that God is the only source of what he seeks. Everything else only contributes to that goal as far as it is a part of the path that God has provided to reach him.
We all come to this life with whatever character and desire for light and truth we acquired before this life. During this life, we must rebuild the awareness and understanding of good and evil that we attained before this life. If we surpass it, we will end this life with more character and desire for light and truth than we came with.
The most endowed intelligences arrive on this earth without a realization of how different they are to those around them. They suffer much more than those around them, because they project their advanced character and desire for good onto those around them and then struggle to understand why they are consistently assaulted by the behavior and failure of others. After sufficient repeats of the frustration cycle, they may finally come to the point where they realize that what they seek—someone or some environment that reflects or at least absorbs the light that they emit—is not the source of their frustration. Instead, it is in whom they are seeking it, as it is not to be found in this world. Instead, they have to come to the point where they realize the kingdom of heaven is within, that what they seek can only be found in God, and that they emanate light not for the reflection or absorption of it, but because it is who they are. They do it not for what they get back, but because they can’t help it. They don’t expect anyone to desire or appreciate the light they have acquired, but they give it freely anyway because that is what God does and they want to be with him and like he is.
Overcoming suffering
There are two ways God can relieve a trial. The first is by taking it away. For some reason, this is what Christians seem to pray for. The other way is to learn what you lack that makes the present situation a trial, and by doing so, overcome it. How can you know which relief you encountered? You imagine going through a similar trial again, and you ask yourself if it would be as difficult. When you overcome something, you can easily do it again.
Having a trial taken away is like going through all the trouble of dieting without losing weight. Trials are not meant to be an arbitrary test of our trust in God. Rather, they are meant to be a vehicle through which we recognize and obtain something we previously lacked. The goal in this life is to get to the point where you can face any possible situation in this world without losing any trust in God and without any degrading of your character. To maintain godly character and perfect faith in the face of any situation encountered in this world is to overcome all things. It is required for (and is the definition of) salvation. To avoid trials is to avoid salvation.
Job distrusted God, asking him why he was punishing him. God wasn’t punishing Job. He was blessing him! Job should have said, “Lord, I trust in your judgment, and I rejoice in these trials. They feel like more than I can bear, but I know you love me more than I comprehend, and that I’ve been perfectly faithful to you, so I know that anything you ordain in my life is for my benefit, and according to your wisdom. I submit completely to your will in this and all things, and I thank you for loving me enough to subject me to what initially hurts in order to help me progress. Please teach me what I lack, that I might overcome this and all things.”
In the end, God blessed Job with more than he had before. He learned from what he had gone through, but he didn’t learn everything he could have. He drew a line in the sand before he had learned everything the trial offered him, saying “this is all I’d like to deal with, Lord. I’m done. I quit.” It is very rare indeed to find someone who will not quit, who trusts God, who will not draw a line in the sand and say, “I will go no further, Lord.
This is the limit of the trust I have for you.” The person who refuses to quit, whose trust in God is unshakable, will progress straight to salvation. It doesn’t matter where they start, or how long it takes, but they will obtain eternal life as sure as the sun rises.
Don’t ever quit. Consider Joseph of Egypt. Imagine how he felt, having done the right thing in his young life, and still ending up a slave. He didn’t complain that we know of. He didn’t make an ordeal of it. Why not? He trusted God. Even in those bleak circumstances, he clung to the belief that God loved him and was just. This gave him the perspective he needed to do his best to live according to the light he had, even as a slave. Then God blessed him to lose that position and he ended up a prisoner. He just kept living the light he had. Then God freed him from the prison and made him ruler of Egypt.
With every character in the scriptures, you can study the events of their lives and identify times when, through abasing themselves and enduring well what God sent them, they were able to acquire more truth, overcome more darkness, and become a brighter light by becoming capable of reflecting more of God’s glory through their character.
God's influence can systematically replace our character with his, but only if we provide the right environment. Like fossilization, it takes a great deal of pressure (in the form of trials) and it requires purging our harmful previous desires, behaviors, and nature (in the form of repentance). Fossils are not created just from burying bones. Fossils are very rare. Bones are not. Buried bones almost always just rot. What makes a fossil? Incredible pressure, but this is not all. Recently, scientists were able to simulate fossilization, but their experiments failed until they realized that all fossils are found in sedimentary rock, whose porous nature allows volatile degradation materials to escape the body.
When we don’t quit, God compounds our blessings. He compounds what he can teach us and what blessings we can receive. Joseph did not cash in his chips, and the blessings kept compounding. We cash out our chips when we tell God we have had enough or when we show him the same by not living with gusto and fervor in whatever situation he’s placed us.
Peace, but not as the world envisions it
We are saved by knowledge, so salvation requires us to get to the point where God can reveal any and all things to us—at least much more than he currently does. Life is, most simply, the experiences necessary to reveal our lack of trust in God. Stress, anxiety, and depression are signals indicating places where we need to grow our trust in God.
The Lord said: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (John 14:27) What is it? It is having total peace in total chaos because you trust God. Normal reactions are to lose your mind when a piece of your order is revealed to be wrong, because it brings the whole into question.
God’s love does not hide us from reality. It exposes us to reality.
The truth is progressive. The more you know of it, the more you will see the things inside of you that are not ideal. If you embrace the opportunity to part with what doesn't work, you will find more and better. Everything that is replaced brings you closer to your ideal self: more secure in God; in possession of greater peace; more resilient to the unavoidable difficulties of reality.
When you are consumed by love, you stand in the fire in peace. You can sleep on a boat in the midst of a terrible storm, as Jesus did. You can feel consummate joy while being stoned to death, as Stephen did. You can preach the gospel while being burned to death, as Abinadi did.
Embrace truth. Run towards it. Get excited about it. A warrior runs toward the sound of battle, because he knows that is where he is meant to be. Why are you running away from the battle? The battle is why you were born. It is why you are here. The battle calls you. Run to the sound of it.
Don't try to escape from reality. Like the pressures of deep water to the pearl diver, it is a sign you are in the right place, doing what you are meant to do.
Don't try to avoid pain. If you are reconciled to God, pain is the revelation of what you lack.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Everyone wants to be a beast until it’s time to do what beasts do. Embrace the vision of who you really are when it matters the most, when you are neck-deep in pressure and the only way out is through. True happiness is found only in facing and embracing all the undesirable things in this world! You do not receive happiness in the world to come in the same way people try to find it here. It isn’t that the undesirable things are taken away, it is that you have transcended them.
Others need you to do what you were born to do. Without you, they won’t make it.