My will vs. Thy Will?

My Will vs. Thy Will?   

Easy to answer. Hard to live.

I hate it—though I know I shouldn’t—when this happens--it disrupts my comfort. This morning I was rolling through the scriptures with cruise control set at 80 when an obstacle appeared in the road and forced me to stop. I tried to go around it. The Spirit wouldn’t allow it. So here is my attempt at going through it instead.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone; but if it die, it brings forth much fruit.” (John 8:2 RE)

Most days I would rather be the other grain—the one that gets ground into flour and baked into bread. That grain is useful. It feeds someone. It is thanked. It looks productive. It even receives a small ceremony before it is eaten. The falling grain simply disappears into dirt. No applause. No immediate usefulness. Just burial and waiting.

And yet Jesus insists the buried one is better.

The Grain I Prefer

The grain that becomes bread has a short but honorable career. It is harvested, milled, mixed, baked, and consumed. It serves. It satisfies hunger. For a day, someone is fed and grateful. Then it is gone. Nothing multiplies. Nothing continues. One meal is given, and the story ends.

This is my default setting: be useful, be visible, be needed, and then politely expire. Teach a good lesson. Serve when asked. Write something thoughtful. Stay inside the lines of what is currently approved. Don’t fall into the ground if I can help it. Falling is messy. Dying is worse. Multiplying requires a risk that no handbook I have ever read knows how to manage.

I am not ashamed of preferring this grain. In ordinary life it 'is', or at least seems, better than rotting on the ground unused. Usefulness is not nothing. Service is not nothing. Being ground into bread is a real form of giving. The trouble is not that the mill is evil. The trouble is that the mill is final--terminal. The grain that is carefully preserved and productively consumed can never become more grain. It feeds once. Then the line ends.

I know that grain well. I have spent years trying to be it—and in many seasons it has been the right thing to be.

The Grain I Resist

It is the other grain that does something irrational. It lets go of being a grain at all. It accepts the dirt, the dark, the apparent waste. Only then does it become something else—roots, stalk, head, more grain than anyone could have predicted from the original seed.

Jesus ties this directly to His own path: “He that loves his life shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 8:2 RE). He says the same thing again when He tells anyone who wants to follow Him that they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow (Matthew 9:3 RE). Losing your life is not a metaphor for mild inconvenience. It is the condition for finding it.

Paul uses the same seed language when speaking of resurrection: “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die” (1 Corinthians 1:65 RE). The pattern is consistent. Death precedes increase. Burial precedes fruit. The grain that refuses to fall remains alone—respectable, intact, and sterile.

There are many scriptural stories that won’t let me off the hook. They're in your scripture "evidence vault."

Abraham had to put the knife to the promise itself before the multiplication of nations could proceed. Joseph had to go into the pit and the prison before he could feed nations. Moses spent forty years on the backside of the desert before he was useful to anyone. The early apostles watched their Teacher die and then discovered that the movement only exploded after the seed had been buried.

Even in the Covenant of Christ (Book of Mormon) the pattern holds. Alma the Younger had to be struck down and remain for three days as if dead before he became a man who could not be silenced. The Anti-Nephi-Lehies buried their weapons and accepted the near-certainty of slaughter; the result was a people whose faithfulness outlasted empires. The grain that falls produces more than the grain that is carefully preserved.

I see quieter versions around me. The man who walks away from a secure religious position because he can no longer pretend the institution is producing the fruit it claims. The woman who stops managing her reputation and starts telling the truth even when it costs her belonging. The family that chooses costly obedience over the safer path of cultural Christianity. These are not dramatic martyrdoms. They are ordinary seeds accepting the ground.

I recognize the cost because I keep calculating it for myself—even though I know I should not. As Alma taught, planting the seed is only the beginning. The next hard thing awaits: the watering, the dunging, the digging about that causes the seed to germinate, grow, and thrive into something more.

The Temptation of the Mill

There is a real temptation in the mill version. I would rather be ground than buried. Grinding feels productive. Burial feels like failure. Grinding keeps me inside a system I understand. Burial removes me from it long enough for something new—and uncontrolled—to grow. Religious systems of every age prefer the mill. They need reliable grain that can be turned into predictable bread. They are less enthusiastic about seeds that disappear and then produce fields they did not plant and cannot manage.

That is why the idea can smart with the potency of a wasp sting. The disciple who insists on remaining useful only on his own terms remains alone. The one who consents to fall may look, for a season, like he has been wasted. Then the harvest arrives and the math changes.

The Question That Keeps Finding Me

Which grain am I trying to be?

The one that is thanked for a single meal, or the one that is willing to vanish so that far more wheat—and far more bread—can exist than ever could have come from a single intact seed?

Jesus did not leave the matter ambiguous. The falling grain is better. Not because suffering is inherently noble, but because life multiplies on the other side of death. The safe grain feeds one person once. It's not nothing but the buried grain feeds a multitude and keeps producing.

Sometimes both options feel like different flavors of loss but, one is terminal--the other, a new beginning.

I know which one I prefer in the moment.  

I am still learning to fall.

Signed,  

John The-Not-So-Beloved

What Could I Have Done More? Off the Sacred Path – an open letter

What Could I Have Done More?  

Off the Sacred Path – an open letter

Dear Friend,

I have a 200-acre ranch in the mountains where a cabin sits with views that still take my breath away after all these years. When we built it thirty years ago it stood in a grove of quaking aspens—quakies, as we call them. The whole mountainside was covered in relatively dense stands of them. You know how aspens work: whole groves connected underground by the same root system, one living organism wearing the appearance of many trees. A family connected at the roots.

Over those thirty years I watched several of those stands die. Not a few trees. Whole connected families and communities. We brought scientists from the University of Utah up to study their demise. Was it some disease we had missed? Harsh climate? Fire scar? After several seasons of careful work they came back with an answer that was almost too simple: it was none of those things. The land was healthy. The weather had been favorable enough. The stands had simply completed their cycle. They came and they went the way everything does. All I could do was watch. As Ecclesiastes puts it, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

New stands are rising now—young, green, vigorous. I will not live long enough to see them grow into the mature groves that once shaded the cabin. But someone will. Somewhere back in time those old trees had themselves been the young ones, newly risen on ground that would give them everything they needed. I used to wish I could have done something—anything—to keep them as they were. Nothing I could have done would have changed their cycle.

I think about my six children a great deal these days. They too were born into fertile soil. They were nourished, taught, provided for, and surrounded by the ordinary kindness and love of a family that actually loved being together. As they reached adulthood I have watched them pick their way through their lives. I showed them, as best I knew how in their youth, the path I believed they should walk. Yet now, I have only the ability to watch and see them along whatever path they have chosen.

When Denver taught about cycles of existence, something in me unclenched. Much of the stress I carried about seeing them choose roads I would not have chosen for them—roads that may be filled with challenge, pain, joy, happiness, or long stretches of quiet confusion—was relieved. My conscience was released from duties that were never mine to begin with. Interestingly, I can only see where they have already been. The trail behind them is visible. Ahead of them I do not know which mountains they will have to climb, which streams they will rest beside, or what work is still waiting for them. I only have hope and faith that their paths will eventually rejoin mine, or mine theirs, so that we can share in being heirs with Christ.

I see my job now much the way a mother bird sees hers. Take care of them in the nest while they are young, then set them free. Setting them free does not mean I abandon them. I do not walk away when they leave the nest. I work with them more subtly, more quietly, and at their request—much as I think Christ does with us when we seek His input. The Savior used nearly the same image when He said He would have gathered His people “even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.” And He still extends the open invitation: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” I think of Zenos and the allegory of the olive tree, where the Lord of the vineyard asks again and again, “What could I have done more for my vineyard?” The real answer is likely little—without disturbing their agency and without trying to withhold whatever the Lord Himself had in store for them. I believe my children are all wonderful people with good work and good families, and I am proud of who they have become. In many ways they are already better than I ever was at their age.

I did not embrace the gospel the way I have come to understand it now until I was fifty. I was religious and “righteous” (whatever that word is supposed to mean) but really only dutiful to the institution. My concern for my children has never wavered, but the heavy feeling of responsibility I once carried for them beyond the nest has been replaced by something quieter and better: the simple joy of watching them tumble upward. I allow them to own their choices, feel their own cuts and bruises, glory in their own successes, and then keep walking. I am left to believe that if nothing else they have experienced exactly what God would have them experience. And if some part of their work remains unfinished in this round, then eternally—in another cycle—they may be given the chance to repair what still needs repairing. I hope the same for myself.

When a mother grieves because her son seems uninterested in the path she holds most sacred, I understand and share in the ache. It feels as though he has rejected the very reason we came here. Yet I have learned, slowly and with some reluctance, that agency is not a flaw in the plan; it is the plan. We can water, we can dig about, we can dung, we can prune with all the care we possess. Beyond that we must trust the same God who trusts them with the power to choose. Looking forward we rarely see His hand in the moment. Looking back along the trail they have already walked, we almost always do—sometimes gently, sometimes with a severity that still turns out to have been mercy.

Despite our agency, the Lord continues to work with His children—so shall I. Not by force, not by hovering, but by remaining available, ready to answer when they knock, ready to draw near when they draw near.

The old stands of quakies are gone. The young ones are rising. The cabin still stands in the light. And the view, somehow, is still breathtaking.

With hope that is quieter than it used to be,  

and with real affection for you and for your son.

Signed  

John The-Not-So-Beloved