I've said elsewhere (on this blog, perhaps?) that repentance is our life's work. No one can do it for us. Various events in life can, however, propel us in a certain direction.
Remember Jonah. He went in the opposite direction of Nineveh, but the Lord only gave him two options: Nineveh, or the belly of a whale. He could not even choose to go somewhere nice instead of Nineveh. No flip-flops and beach chairs and sunny sands for him.
It is easy to cringe and shy away from that one dreadful thing the Lord has asked us to do.
Ironically, Jonah discovered he had the easiest mission any emissary of the Lord ever had. The instant the king found out about his warning of impending doom, he ordered everyone in the kingdom to repent in sackcloth and pray mightily. He ordered a universal fast—even animals could not eat!
Ironically again, Jonah was angry, rather than pleased, with their repentance. He asked the Lord to kill him (after he cried for deliverance from death in the whale), but the Lord tried to calm him: "Doest thou well to be angry?" (Jonah 4:4). Then Jonah sits outside the city limits under a lean-to, and waits for the Lord to unleash destruction on his investigators. (Sounds like someone waiting for a fireworks display.)
Jonah seems tossed back and forth between extremes; either he runs away, and begs for life, or fulfills his mission, and begs for death in frustration at his own good success.
"And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?"
The Lord spares everyone in the story—Jonah, the people in the ship who threw him overboard, the whale, the entire city of Nineveh. Only the gourd is destroyed, and its destruction is instructive. Jonah did not do anything to create Ninevah, its 120,000 inhabitants, or the gourd. He mopes and grumbles because the Lord will not destroy Nineveh after they repent. He is ambivalent about his own life, too.
So many bad things can happen in life, but we can usually look back and say in honesty, "That wasn't so bad." Anticipation of the horrors is usually worse than the things themselves. (Jonah would have run to Nineveh if the Lord had told him how the people would receive his message. But the Lord tests our faith by not giving us windows into the outcome of our obedience.)
"...thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high..." (D&C 121:7-8).
Jonah could not change anything in his narrative but his own attitude. He could go to Nineveh on foot, or by whale. He could not change the people's attitude (though he did succeed at persuading them, the most amazing thing Jonah did affect in the story!). He did not make the gourd grow; he could not keep it from dying; his lean-to was insufficient; nothing he did, EXCEPT what the Lord told him to do, made the slightest bit of difference in his success or trajectory. He did not change a thing, except his own attitude.
If the circumstances do not change when we endure well, what does "enduring well" entail?
Remember Jonah. He went in the opposite direction of Nineveh, but the Lord only gave him two options: Nineveh, or the belly of a whale. He could not even choose to go somewhere nice instead of Nineveh. No flip-flops and beach chairs and sunny sands for him.
It is easy to cringe and shy away from that one dreadful thing the Lord has asked us to do.
Ironically, Jonah discovered he had the easiest mission any emissary of the Lord ever had. The instant the king found out about his warning of impending doom, he ordered everyone in the kingdom to repent in sackcloth and pray mightily. He ordered a universal fast—even animals could not eat!
Ironically again, Jonah was angry, rather than pleased, with their repentance. He asked the Lord to kill him (after he cried for deliverance from death in the whale), but the Lord tried to calm him: "Doest thou well to be angry?" (Jonah 4:4). Then Jonah sits outside the city limits under a lean-to, and waits for the Lord to unleash destruction on his investigators. (Sounds like someone waiting for a fireworks display.)
Jonah seems tossed back and forth between extremes; either he runs away, and begs for life, or fulfills his mission, and begs for death in frustration at his own good success.
"And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?"
The Lord spares everyone in the story—Jonah, the people in the ship who threw him overboard, the whale, the entire city of Nineveh. Only the gourd is destroyed, and its destruction is instructive. Jonah did not do anything to create Ninevah, its 120,000 inhabitants, or the gourd. He mopes and grumbles because the Lord will not destroy Nineveh after they repent. He is ambivalent about his own life, too.
So many bad things can happen in life, but we can usually look back and say in honesty, "That wasn't so bad." Anticipation of the horrors is usually worse than the things themselves. (Jonah would have run to Nineveh if the Lord had told him how the people would receive his message. But the Lord tests our faith by not giving us windows into the outcome of our obedience.)
"...thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high..." (D&C 121:7-8).
Jonah could not change anything in his narrative but his own attitude. He could go to Nineveh on foot, or by whale. He could not change the people's attitude (though he did succeed at persuading them, the most amazing thing Jonah did affect in the story!). He did not make the gourd grow; he could not keep it from dying; his lean-to was insufficient; nothing he did, EXCEPT what the Lord told him to do, made the slightest bit of difference in his success or trajectory. He did not change a thing, except his own attitude.
If the circumstances do not change when we endure well, what does "enduring well" entail?
A good mentor and friend has defined repentance as a change of perspective, seeing things differently. The biggest change is not giving back the money we stole—it is becoming an honest person who sees others' needs and feelings as equal to his own. Where has the big change happened? In the thief's mind and heart. If a change of behavior were the sum of repentance, going to prison or losing the opportunity to sin would count as repentance. Having the opportunity, but not wanting to commit the sin, is the essence of repentance; a change of behavior is one of the symptoms (an important one, but a symptom nonetheless). Dragging our feet when the Lord asks us to do something is rebellion, however innocuous our omission may seem externally.
Giving up a horrendous evil is fairly easy in the sense that we know we need to do it; giving up something we see as good or neutral requires a genuine love of the Lord, because there is no peer pressure to smoke us out of our bunker. God's requirement to surrender whatever it may be makes holding onto it a sin. So we may be losing the Spirit by sitting still, not simply by committing overt, grievous sin.
I wonder if the Lord looks at our messed up hearts the way a mother might look at her small daughter's tangled, snarled hair. The mother might apply a painfully firm stroke of the brush to untangle the knots; the Lord applies the absence of the Spirit.
"I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy..." (D&C 11:13).
But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I...of which in the smallest, yea, even in the least degree you have tasted at the time I withdrew my Spirit" (D&C 19:17, 20).
"...After ye have repented of your sins, and witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, and can speak with a new tongue, yea, even with the tongue of angels, and after this should deny me, it would have been better for you that ye had not known me" (2Ne. 31:14). Entering into covenants with the Lord is like driving a car over one of those one-way spike systems; forward is the only safe direction to go. The Lord knows this, and so He is willing to use harsh measures to keep us oriented toward Him. That includes being thrown overboard in a storm, or swallowed by a whale.
Jonah seemed to have come to a path, where he did not know what would happen if he walked down it (though it seemed like certain doom). The Lord told him to walk that path. He balked at first. He gave in when the Lord twisted his arm. When he finally did walk down the path, an entire city repented together. The same thing would have happened whether Jonah tried to take a detour in the ocean or not; that is probably why Jonah received the assignment in the first place. Jonah needed to repent as much as anyone in the city; his heart was in the wrong place, whether his body was in the whale or in Nineveh.
Giving up a horrendous evil is fairly easy in the sense that we know we need to do it; giving up something we see as good or neutral requires a genuine love of the Lord, because there is no peer pressure to smoke us out of our bunker. God's requirement to surrender whatever it may be makes holding onto it a sin. So we may be losing the Spirit by sitting still, not simply by committing overt, grievous sin.
I wonder if the Lord looks at our messed up hearts the way a mother might look at her small daughter's tangled, snarled hair. The mother might apply a painfully firm stroke of the brush to untangle the knots; the Lord applies the absence of the Spirit.
"I will impart unto you of my Spirit, which shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy..." (D&C 11:13).
But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I...of which in the smallest, yea, even in the least degree you have tasted at the time I withdrew my Spirit" (D&C 19:17, 20).
"...After ye have repented of your sins, and witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, and can speak with a new tongue, yea, even with the tongue of angels, and after this should deny me, it would have been better for you that ye had not known me" (2Ne. 31:14). Entering into covenants with the Lord is like driving a car over one of those one-way spike systems; forward is the only safe direction to go. The Lord knows this, and so He is willing to use harsh measures to keep us oriented toward Him. That includes being thrown overboard in a storm, or swallowed by a whale.
Jonah seemed to have come to a path, where he did not know what would happen if he walked down it (though it seemed like certain doom). The Lord told him to walk that path. He balked at first. He gave in when the Lord twisted his arm. When he finally did walk down the path, an entire city repented together. The same thing would have happened whether Jonah tried to take a detour in the ocean or not; that is probably why Jonah received the assignment in the first place. Jonah needed to repent as much as anyone in the city; his heart was in the wrong place, whether his body was in the whale or in Nineveh.
In the midst of the darkened wreckage of the destruction after the Savior's death, the Nephites hear a voice that consoles and amazes them, even as it takes credit for all the catastrophes: "Behold, I have come unto the world to bring redemption unto the world, to save the world from sin. Therefore, whoso repenteth and cometh unto me as a little child, him will I receive, for of such is the kingdom of God. Behold, for such I have laid down my life, and have taken it up again; therefore repent, and come unto me ye ends of the earth, and be saved" (3Ne. 9:21-22). Cities being laid waste was more than a spanking—it was a nudge in the right direction. They were a people who had made covenants, and they were careening off into the path of sin. The Lord saved them from sin by ending the party (abruptly, roughly). The survivors did come to the Lord, and He did receive them.
"...Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people...And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea" (Ether 3:3-4). We are not just being clobbered; we are being driven in a specific direction.
What changes can we make? We can adjust our attitude, bend our will a little, and go along with the Lord's plans for us.
"...Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people...And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea" (Ether 3:3-4). We are not just being clobbered; we are being driven in a specific direction.
What changes can we make? We can adjust our attitude, bend our will a little, and go along with the Lord's plans for us.
