I think that maybe this is just WAY to early to make any conclusions on the matter, but, as I was thinking of the different trials that I'm going to face in the near future (to make me prepared to endure the final trials that will necessarily pass my way... Like enduring my trial of Abraham [because, YES, we are all going to be tried as Abraham was if we are going to gain the same blessings that he has already...]), I was reading, again, from C.S. Lewis (which I have already posted this quote here among these "extemporaneous rants"...):
"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace."
What I never included in my last post was the sentence that he wrote that comes after this quote was that He (meaning Christ) has built this palace so that He can come and live inside and make it his house...
If Christ is going to live inside of this palace that he has now made from our humble-little-cottage-beginning (remember, remember, that this whole idea is metaphorical... Don't even think that Lewis is making a break from christian ideology...)! Do we not want to let Him make the greatest palace that he can and using the least amount of struggles and effort possible? Wouldn't that be our wish?
Joseph Smith said something almost exactly like the Lewis quote when he said,
"You ill have all kinds of trials to pas through. And it is quite necessary for you to be tried as it was for Abraham and other men of God, and God will feel after you, and He will take hold of and wrench your very heart strings, and if you cannot stand it, you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God." (as recorded from John Taylor in the Deseret News, 8/21/1883)
My trials, I believe, have started with my car accident, but that was just a preamble to my Abrahamic trial, as it just made life harder for me (not harder to bear, mind you...) and I'm afraid that the other part of the "test" will be making my way though life with the desire and the aptitude and the choice made to be remarried, but never actually having the struggle culminate in a Celestial Marriage... I don't know, maybe I will eventually be married to another student or maybe professor in Graduate School (you think?).
I will continue to live my life day-to-day and take on each new experience with whatever wisdom and knowledge I have brought with me from the rest of my life... I'm not in a hurry to have 'all of the experiences that I will pass through in this life' be completed or "over"... Now! I do not want anyone to think that I've written this posting in self-doubt or in self-worry or, especially not in self-pity; but I have written this as a self-declaration that I will let things unfold as they may and stop trying to push my will onto anyone else. I have been trying to learn as much about "agency" as I could, but I see now that the best things that I can learn from are the very experiences that I am passing through!!! Like I say, I will just be ready for the next step--and I will do my best to try and not "run up the stairs" but just take them one at a time...
It's move-on to the next step!!!
JPS
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