Choose ye, Choose ye

God in the Garden of Eden commanded Adam and Eve to first, multiply and replenish the Earth and second, to eat all of the fruit of the trees in the garden except "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Moses 3:17) Never before and not once since has our Father in Heaven given a commandment and added a way out. It's like when your mother tell you that "you should really go and clean your room because we have family coming over soon," and then adds, "but if you want your cousins to see how messy you are, you could just leave it." She wants you to clean up your room but gives you the option that comes along with a punishment by direct effect.

God gives us commandments that he knows will bless us if we follow them but then respects that we have the choice laid before us. He loves us enough to let us to have trials and to let us to have rainy days so that we can learn and love the good days. The same way that Adam and Eve would never have know happiness with knowing sorrow, we can never understand how much God blesses us with out having choices. 

I know in my life that when I am following the Spirit and striving my best to keep all the commandments, my life is happy. Not that trials don't come but when they do come I know they are meant to happen and I can always make it through them. It is a choice for us to be bogged down and broken by trials. We can choose to be happy and have the Spirit with us all the time.

By Experiment and by Faith

19 Jan 2016

The human mind is feeble and limited. When we are commanded to have faith we are transcending the normal thought process to a higher plane of thought. But from that higher plane we must still look down and acknowledge the way of human thought. Believing in something we cannot see does not mean we don't have to see somethings in order to believe them. The past few months, I have been involved in the initial phases of a social venture in Ghana. To get where we are today, there has had to be a fine balance between basing important decisions by experiment and that by faith. 

From the very beginning, my group has had good motivation and high hopes but strongly lacked in the concrete skills in business management. We had faith that we would be able to conquer the tasks ahead and that, if it were right, Heavenly Father would assist us. From that faith, the windows of heaven were opened and time and time again, we were amazed by the wonderful blessings that rained down. So many times, we would be in a position where we came to a road block that we had no way to overcome. But without fail, every time, something miraculous would happen; we would meet someone who knew the exact data we needed, airline tickets would drop or obstacles would just suddenly be removed. We had a strong faith that all we were doing was in line with the Lord’s will and as long as we humbly accepted his assistance and strived to do good, we would be in his hands. 

Just as much as we had faith however, we had to validate our ideas in a real world way. We applied for competitions and grants and had to pitch in front of businessmen with decades of experience and convince them that our claims could be proven and could be profitable. We spent months in Ghana gathering data and making contacts and made presentations and had arguments. We had to prove to the world that we had what it took. If we went in to these experienced businessmen and told them about how much hope we had and how optimistic we were about our ideas, we would have been kicked to the curb and stopped before we ever started. We had to use a combination of science and faith to have the brightest outcome.

Alma stated that we must “experiment upon [his] words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe.” We do not blindly place our trust into a God that we have a relationship, we must search out and experiment on the principles of the gospel. Wee must dig deep and really search to find what is true. When we do that with good intent, we will build a testimony that can never be shaken.

Speck of time

I particularly needed to hear once again that not only I am a child of God.

Moses 1:29 “And [Moses] beheld many lands; and each land was called earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof.”

I needed to hear that not only am I a child of God but an offspring of an all powerful God who is the ruler of not just this world but of the whole expanding universe with infinite earths similar to mine with even more infinite children. Here on this earth, we like to think we know a lot. We have made machines that wash our clothes, chairs that can fly in the sky, and we have even made possible to share information with every corner of the world at the push of a button! We think that because of the advances we have made with sending a man to the moon and making massive telescopes that we understand the universe. 

God’s ways will always be higher than our ways and we know nothing. In fact, we are nothing. We are stubborn children that always fall into sin and contend with our fellow man. And we are just 7 billion of the numberless children who act the same way across the expanse of space. God holds all the worlds in his hand but he holds each of us in his heart. When attempting to understand the scale and magnitude of God’s love, we can’t even comprehend it all. But the fact that he loves me personally and I can have a personal and real relationship with him, it puts into perspective the trivialities and the useless aspects of our lives that we spend time on. Of course, God cares what we care about, but we put our focus on things of this world like caring what people thing about us, how we look and how cool we are, we are just wasting our time. All of our trials, or things we thing are trials are just a spec in time of the eternities.