Mrs. Know-It-All

     As a young child one of my favorite playmates was my cousin, Angie.  Our two families frequently saw each other and so we had many fun adventures as youngsters together.  We had a mild obsession with 'Jem and the Holograms' (a cartoon that depicted a band of girls...which had real songs, short though they were), played in her family's playhouse and on their trampoline and had sleepovers...one particular night we spent hours smelling her scratch 'n sniff book which had a page with pizza that smelled really gross...so we'd smell the gross page and pretend to throw up in the toilet and then repeat the process over and over again just for fun.  I know what you're thinking...and you're right.  Kids are weird.
     Anyway, inexplicably some days we would have fights (I know, weird huh?) and the result seemed to be something that I'm ashamed of today, although it's good for stories.  Back then, I, because of my vast and extensive living experience at my advanced age of around 6...at least far more experience than Angie had since she was 5 1/2 months younger than me...understood our relationship of 'cousins' to be different than it actually was.  I thought the term 'cousin' meant something akin to 'friend'.  So on those days when Angie wouldn't agree with me or do what I want, I clearly remember telling her, "Fine.  I guess we're not cousins anymore."  Then I'd storm away leaving her crying and begging me not to disown her, saying that she'd do what I want...at which point I would generously give in and reassure her, "Okay, I GUESS you're still my cousin."
     I'm not sure exactly when the knowledge of the fact that she was my cousin wasn't in my control came to me, but I've thought of it since, mostly laughing at how ignorant I was.  I was just so sure, with my young mind, that I knew what I was talking about that I didn't even think to ask anyone if what I understood was the truth.
     Fast forward years and I became a (gasp) teenager!  Yeah, by that time I was SURE I knew everything.  I was totally misunderstood, everybody picked on me, I never got what I wanted...etc.  And I was totally right in my knowledge of my world and my relationships, and was frequently irritated at those who had the gall to suggest that I was mistaken.  What was wrong with those people anyway?  Did they think I was stupid?  I knew what I was talking about!
     I was in my early twenties before I truly had the rug pulled out from under me and had the opportunity to look at the world in a whole new way.  I finally learned that as opposed to being omniscient, I in actuality knew very little about life.  All of a sudden I realized that the world I knew and saw didn't actually revolve around the rules that I had always understood to be its governing force.  What was I supposed to do then?  It was an incredibly scary thing.  Everything I thought, everything I knew was wrong.  I can't tell you how completely humbling that was when I finally understood.  Thankfully Heavenly Father was there to help teach me to look at things a different way.  Even if I didn't know what the heck was happening, I was following someone who did, someone who wanted me safe and loved me.  He helped me understand many things and I continued to learn and grow; I saw more of a more correct picture of reality or truth, or as I learned to think of it 'the way God sees things'.  It has had me on my knees many times since then, questioning my knowledge, my pride, my self worth, my desires, etc.  And I can't say that I've completely conquered it yet.
     Now my life has changed in a new way.  I'm on the other side of the fence.  In the last few months I've had 2 children move into my house and for the first time I'm a full time parent of sorts.
     I've had the opportunity to practice my parenting skills for 7 1/2 years now since I met Lyle and had the opportunity to try and care for Taylor and Annie without any prior parenting experience...except bossing around my younger siblings which was quite fun on the whole, though probably not exactly the training I needed.  When I met Lyle's kids they were 8 and 6 years old, their minds still young and malleable.  They looked up to me and thought I knew what I was talking about (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't, sometimes I thought I did when I really didn't), but they respected my knowledge and experience.
     We've had many experiences together and life has moved on.  Years pass and all of a sudden they are now the (gasp) teenagers!  I've changed in their eyes.  I have become someone who doesn't know anything.  Where they used to care about my advice and want my good opinion, they now think they know everything (ironically exactly how I did when I was their age...go figure) and that I don't understand them, enjoy being mean and making them follow rules, am extremely annoying in expecting them to keep their word, etc.  All of a sudden I once again know absolutely nothing.  And although I laugh knowing that it's partly a phase and that they'll have their chance to learn about their complete lack of understanding of life, their new opinion of me hurts a bit.  The sad part is that they are right.
     I always thought, like most people probably, that I knew a thing or two about parenting.  I recognize the fact that because I haven't had children of my own, there are parts of my knowledge that is woefully lacking, but I do have common sense, a strong morality, and I've learned to put my big girl panties on and do the hard parts of parenting without too much embarrassment.  But just like in my early adulthood, I've come to understand that I know so much less than I thought I did.
     I remember being a teenager, I remember the feelings, struggles, pressures, confusion, divided loyalties, not knowing who I was or what I wanted and so many more things that go with that stage of life, and yet sometimes I now feel that since my own experience, somehow or another teenagers became a completely different species, as yet unknown to humankind...or at least to me.  When did that happen?  They talk funny, worry about stupid things (in my opinion), want to wear the most horrid clothes.  One minute they want my help while the next they have everything completely in their control and know exactly what they're doing so just leave them alone, thank you very much.  The thing I find going through my mind the most often these days goes something like this:  'Wha...huh?  What the heck are they talking about?  What are they doing?  That makes no sense whatsoever!  Just keep cool, Laura, keep cool.'  I try to fake that I know what I'm doing, but I have a terrible feeling that they smell my insecurity, rather like my copier at work smells my fear that it will jam again and so it does jam just to spite me.  What's am I supposed to do now?
     I guess I should learn from my past experiences and go to the One who does know what the heck to do, since I clearly haven't the foggiest idea.  Somehow the Lord still understand teenagers, and I mean actually understands them as opposed to thinking they do like I did.  I have no idea how to influence my stepson to think about the consequences of his actions before he makes his choices.  I am at a complete loss as how to help my stepdaughter truly understand her worth, which I know will empower her in so many ways.  How, in the name of the every loving stars,  do you get your teenager to WANT to go to school, eat good stuff, brush their teeth, go to bed somewhere before dawn, look at their future, not spend every waking moment on social media or on their cell phones, be totally enthralled at what they call my 'lectures' and most importantly to want to have a testimony and a relationship with the Lord?
     Sheesh!  I'm totally exhausted just trying to figure it out!
     I guess I'll just have to keep in tune with the spirit, make greater strides toward being understanding and having patience (ha ha, that's a laugh), and most of all love them no matter what.  I think I'll leave the rest to Someone who knows a lot more than good old Mrs. Know-It-All (yours truly).

The Agency Puzzle

   Here I go again, blogging.  I'm thankful for this blog.  It's been something to help me process thoughts and events that happen in my life.  Many of the blogs I post are things I struggle with, so even if I have found good answers to some of my questions that bother me, I still struggle activating those principles in my life, but I'm thankful for the chance to learn and grow anyway.  

What a ham!  Lyle not wanting
a good pic taken and Annie
tolerating him.

     Those of you who know me know that the last month of life has been more trying than usual.  And since I tend to be a whiner, that's saying something.  I'll leave out most of the details to protect the involved parties but in the process of trying to deal with some family problems, my 14 yr old stepdaughter, Annie, ran away.  She was gone for 3 1/2 days before she contacted my husband to pick her up.  She is now living with us (before she was at our house 1 weekday night a week and every other weekend).  As you can imagine, I've felt a huge array of emotions on the spectrum during the events that lead up to this experience and the resulting adjustments, which have concluded in some profound thoughts to go along with them.
     During the first night when Annie was gone and we had no idea where she was, who she was with, what was happening to her, etc, I got physically sick and spent half the night near the toilet. As I sat there cooling myself on the bathroom floor, my thoughts revolved around agency.  Why does God allow us to use our agency to make choices that hurt other people?  Many times in our lives we suffer at the hands of others.  How do we reconcile ourselves to the fact that life is ultimately unfair and that we have no control to change others actions?
     Annie was hurt by someone and her choice was to run away from the situation.  This choice hurt those closest to her who love her and were worried about her, and during the whole thing I sat there helpless to force either of these people make the choices I felt would have resulted in peaceful coexistence.  Frustration, anger and hurt mounted though I had not made the choices that had resulted in the events that transpired.  How is that fair?  It's not.  And this is not by far the worst consequences someone has ever had to pay because of the decisions of others.  So why would Heavenly Father allow suffering to the innocent at the hands of those who either make mistakes and bad decisions or purposely inflict pain on others for their own purposes?
     I know I'm not the only one who asks these questions.  I know people who have given up that God exists or that He loves because of the presence of trials and afflictions in this life, especially those which occur at the hands of other people.  So I thought I'd apply myself to thinking about how I feel about this question, which I trip over myself on a somewhat regular basis.  I think pondering this has helped me feel a little bit better and a little bit wiser.  We'll see how much of that hangs around when things are back to normal.
     As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (i.e. a Mormon) I've been taught what is called the 'Plan of Salvation' since I was a child.

   

     I believe that before this life we all lived with our Heavenly Father in a premortal existence where we were presented with Heavenly Father's plan which would enable us to come to Earth, gain a body and have the opportunity to live a mortal life after which, if we were faithful we would be able to live with Heavenly Father for all eternity, now perfected beings, in glory and love.  A very important part of this plan was free will or agency.  Even in this premortal existence we were given agency.  Lucifer and a significant part of Heavenly Father's children decided to rebel against him because He could not guarantee our return to Him and because He chose His Son, Jesus Christ, to be the central part of His plan- to become a Savior and suffer for our sins, since because of free will, we would sometimes choose wrong and sin and no longer be able to return to God's presence without a reconciling of justice and mercy.  We chose the plan including Jesus Christ and came to this Earth to live our lives, to learn and grow, hopefully, into the people who will use our agency to choose to use Christ's Atonement and return to the spirit world in a state of progression which will lead to eternal life.
     However, not all of us know about the plan of salvation or what it can do for us (which is why Heavenly Father wants us to share it with those around us who don't know about it), and there are others who do know who choose not to accept it.  In addition, some of us who do know about the plan don't completely understand it, while others, because of our mortal condition still slip up and sin sometimes.  Many of these sins inevitably lead to hurting others.
     C.S. Lewis in his book, "The Problem of Pain" says referring to a widespread argument against God's willing such a plan for us: "'If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished.  But the creatures are not happy.  Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.'  This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form."  So does God exist?  If so is he powerless?  Is he not as good as people believe?  Or could there be a fourth option which we, as humans, find difficult to understand?  At one time or another I've wondered if the first three could be right.  But the sum experiences of my life and relationship with God have lead me to believe that the fourth is the ultimate truth.
     There is this same argument for the fact that God lets us suffer at all, even when it's not at the hands of other people, but today I'd like to address why He allows us to suffer when others make bad choices and we suffer the consequences.
     I turn to C. S. Lewis to discuss the arguments presented: "His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible.  You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.  This is no limit to His power.  If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it', you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can'.  It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.  It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
     I think many people don't realize that though God has all power, he still has rules by which He is bound; for instance the law of obedience.  If God chose to go against this law (though in His perfected state that could not happen), He would cease to be God.  He would no longer have power or glory if He could not obey His own laws.  Though it is possible for our Heavenly Father to help us, to try to encourage and influence us to make good choices and to consider others in our decisions, He cannot take away the choice of even one person and yet still allow this person to keep their free will.  It is completely self contradictory and therefore impossible.  So although Heavenly Father is all powerful, He cannot stop one person from hurting another without taking away that same free will which allows us to make choices to love and help each other.  It is simply not possible.
      In addition, C.S. Lewis has to say: "The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbor on the head...We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults.  But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.  All matter in the neighborhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations.  That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.  In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature.  You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently.  But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him- if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking- then you could not have a game at all.  So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible.  Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."
     Now as for the argument that if God loves us, He would not let us suffer.  "The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man were the center of them.  Man is not the center...We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us...'"  We need to forget about ourselves and think about the nature of God if we truly want to understand Him.  1 John 4:8 "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."  Love is so central to His character that the scriptures actually say, "God is love".  So if He really is love, why would he allow suffering?
     Joseph Smith, a modern prophet, was persecuted severely for bringing forth the Church of Jesus Christ once more on the earth.  At one time, he was taken away from family and friends and imprisoned for false charges while the Saints, or followers, of Christ's church were innocently enduring horrible pains at the hands of mobs.  Joseph in despair asked of God, as many of us have at times, "O God, where art thou?...How long shall thy hand be stayed, and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people...?"  His answer came, "My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes."  He later adds, "If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea;...And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.  The Son of Man hath descended below them all.  Art thou greater than he?  Therefore, hold on thy way...fear not what man can do, for God shall be with you forever and ever."
     If Heavenly Father, truly loving his Only Begotten Son, allowed Him to suffer for the sins of the world, for every physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pain each of us will ever experience, though He was pure, in order to make it possible for us to gain salvation and live with Him again, can we truly expect that we will not have trials and suffering?  We certainly do not have the goodness that Christ did.  Why would we have an life free from persecution when the Son of God didn't?  The wonder of God is that even though we may experience truly horrible things at the hands of others and because of their free agency which God cannot take away, He can truly make these things become a way to strengthen us, if we let Him.  He can no more force us to accept His offering of help and healing anymore than He can stop someone from hurting us, but the offer is always there for us whenever we choose to accept it.
     So I guess there's no getting around the truth that when there is free will, there will be abuse of it at the same time.  What a hard thing for us to have to accept.  It's easy for me to sin in a way that hurts someone else and apologize, have my apology accepted and think that all is well, but to accept that someone else has that right as well, someone who may sin in different ways and hurt others even more, and who may not be sorry at all at what they have done, is an entirely difficult thing to have to come to terms with.  And yet, this is how free will works.  How do I find acceptance or even peace in such times when my heart is torn because of the actions of others?  Here I think is the most puzzling part, because the answer seems to be one word: faith.
     We're asked to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  That means all the time.   That means even when its hard.  Heavenly Father has said through scripture on numerous occasions that He has the ultimate control of His plan, that we should not be afraid and that all will receive justice and mercy in the end according to their desires, thoughts, words and actions.  How do we let go and have faith that He means what He says and that He really does know what He's doing; that He really will be able to take care of everything in the end?  Because we cannot see how He will take care of it, it's hard for us to be reconciled to this idea.
     I thought of an analogy once a number of years ago which has helped me with faith.  I am not personally a fan of jigsaw puzzles but my mother-in-law really likes them.  I see her set up a card table and open a 1000 piece puzzle and start the process of fitting each of them into place, one by one.  I know when I was little I would get frustrated when there was a certain piece that didn't seem to fit anywhere.  Did the manufacturers get a good laugh including a piece that won't fit while frustrating us as consumers?  I would look on the front of the box which usually showed what the puzzle would look like when fitted together and wonder where the heck that piece went.  Ultimately I'd have to set it to the side and come back to it when I had more of the puzzle done.  I've yet to hear of a puzzle where there are superfluous pieces which have nothing to do with the puzzle included in the box.  Somewhere or another, that piece will fit.  I just need to be patient and work on other things until, after completing more of the puzzle, I pull it out and try again to see where it fits.

     Maybe this is what we need to do when we don't completely understand a piece of the gospel puzzle.  Exercise faith and realize that even though we can't understand where or how that puzzle piece fits, that Heavenly Father does, and that someday when we're more progressed, we may be able to fit it in and understand better.
     I hope I understand agency a bit better now and that I'll choose to have faith even though I can't see how everything will be in the end.  It's a good thing an all knowing and all powerful God is in charge and not me.