Lead Kindly Light

Are there really such things as accidents? Especially, are there significant ones?

I watched a video that attempted to explain different dimensions beyond the third dimension. It said the fourth dimension is time. To a being who could see all time at once, we would not appear as we see ourselves; rather, we would appear to be one long snakelike blob, like a dough-boy, extending from a baby-shaped end of the blob to an old, decrepit person end of the blob, with all the stages of growth and development in between. What you see as your trip to school and back would just make you look like a long slinky or extension cord stretched out from your home, to school, and back again. A car accident might make the decrepit end of the blob even more decrepit and hunched over; good health would mean a much longer blob, with a less decrepit looking old end.

It struck me that, if you put that long dough-boy representing the entire life of a person on a wheel (since change in time happens in cycles, circles, orbits, revolutions, rotations, sine waves, oscillations, pulses, etc.), you could imagine various external forces shaping the development of that long blob, the way fingers wet with slip can massage a lump of clay on a potter's wheel into a cup or a vase. I mentioned a car accident changing the physical shape of a person; what about other accidents that change the internal makeup or structure of the same person?

Obviously, the Lord is the Potter throwing the clay in this metaphorical scenario. 911 is the phone number we dial in emergencies, when accidents happen; in Eccl. 9:11 we read, "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." This suggests that one person may do everything right, and have one tiny misfortune lead to ruin, while another person may be doing the wrong thing, or minding his own business, and suddenly find himself in possession of his heart's desire. "...time and chance," forces of nature and objects jostling about bump into each other, and the outcome is random.

Let me go back to that image of a four dimensional person as a long rope of clay. It occurs to me that the Lord can not only subject us to various forces to shape and tutor us. He can also weave our paths so that we crisscross, mingling and colliding with each other to accomplish His ultimate purposes. Jesus described people who are born again as being led by the Spirit, like the blowing wind, to show up at certain places and times. John 3:8, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." Below is a segment of an article by Catherine M. Thomas, "Alma the Younger, Part 1":

"Joseph Smith wrote, 'At the first organization in heaven we were all present, and saw the Savior chosen and appointed and the plan of salvation made, and we sanctioned it.' What was this first organization? Brigham Young quoted Joseph Smith: 'Be sure to tell the people to keep the spirit of the Lord; and if they will, they will find themselves just as they were organized by our Father in Heaven before they came into the world. Our Father in Heaven organized the human family, but they are all disorganized and in great confusion.' Brigham continued: 'Joseph then showed me the pattern, how they were in the beginning. This I cannot describe, but I saw it, and saw where the Priesthood had been taken from the earth and how it must be joined together, so that there would be a perfect chain from Father Adam to his latest posterity.'"

Imagine all these billions of people, the course of each life, woven together by the Lord. It is easy to guess at why such a structure or organization might be difficult or impossible for a three-dimensional Brigham Young to describe. Repentance might be defined as trying to get one's life in harmony, or on the path, that Heavenly Father intended for that one person to be on in the first place. At best, I can imagine a family tree, gnarled and intertwining from roots to branches; this might be only part of what Brigham Young saw—maybe the rest was people being in the right place at the right time, to have the expected effect upon each other and fulfill their preordained missions in mortality.

All of this happened premortally, in a giant pre-planned layout of humanity; hence my question about genuine accidents. Elder Maxwell noted: "At Christmastime, for instance, we celebrate a special star that announced Jesus' birth at Bethlehem. Thus, the...'little star of Bethlehem' was actually very large in its declaration of divine design! It had to have been placed in its precise orbit long, long before it shone so precisely! Persuasive divine design is underscored in what the Lord has said: 'All things must come to pass in their time' (D&C 64:32). His overseeing precision pertains not only to astrophysical orbits but to human orbits as well. This is such a stunning thing for us to contemplate as to our obligations to 'shine as lights' within our own orbits and personal responsibilities!"

I learned the basic rudiments of crocheting from my paternal grandmother. I could manage to make a rope, and get it to double back on itself. I think I made a somewhat useful pot holder at some point. (Yarn does not respond well to high temperatures; my pot holder got a tan, and ended up in a landfill somewhere, if memory serves.) My grandma, on the other hand, excelled at the craft, and crocheted altar cloths for the Temple. My mother framed one as a wall hanging. I kept the crocheting needle she gave me as a keepsake after she died, stored with my coin collection.

We are not just guided by the Spirit; when we heed its promptings, we are woven together into communities by it. That idea has echoed louder and louder in my head in previous months. Some people claim they get a more fulfilling religious experience fishing or hunting in the wilderness than by attending church on Sunday; others express limitless contempt toward "organized religion." My response to them all is simple: heaven is described to us as "an innumerable company of angels" (Heb. 12:22). I believe one purpose of organized religion, groups and churches, is to prepare us to be part of that innumerable crowd. If we cannot get along with each other here and now, are we fit to be a part of heaven? John suggests not: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" (1 John 4:20). It is easy to have a good relationship with the Lord, because one of the people in the relationship is perfect. Perfect plus imperfect equals perfect. But what does it mean to be like the Lord? It means, in part, to have the same forgiving, loving, patient attitude towards imperfect people that He does, that He shows to us.

God is not an interstellar hermit. In 1Ne. 1:8, Lehi was "...overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God." He is referred to as "the Lord of Hosts." We read about a great council in the beginning before the creation, and a resulting war in heaven. "...they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect" (D&C 128:15). "In God’s eternal plan, salvation is an individual matter; exaltation is a family matter" (Elder Nelson, Salvation and Exaltation, April 2008 General Conference).

If we discover God alone (like Abraham did when he cried for help as his family volunteered him for sacrifice), and we stay with God long enough, eventually we will find ourselves as part of a group, a family, even presiding over a family (like Abraham, whose name means "Great Father"). There is no substitute for a private relationship with God, yet God equates our treatment of each other with our treatment of Him. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matt. 25:40, 45). In societies that actually succeed in becoming Zion, or at least being worthy of the term, we read the culturally unacceptable final step they took to achieve the title: "They had all things in common." (Acts 2:44, 4Ne. 1:3). The rule is implied here: "there was no poor among them" (Moses 7:18).

I guess there may be accidents, even significant ones, but I also assume that the Lord has made ample provisions in His web of interconnection for every significant, and even insignificant event. Elder Bednar's landmark talk, The Tender Mercies of the Lord, (April 2005 General Conference) about "tender mercies," those seeming coincidences that let us know the Lord is mindful of us, lays out the idea in detail for examination. Even in the minute details and what seems to be random, the Lord is silently organizing and influencing for good, pressing like a potter on clay.