Mom was Love, Dad was Law

Mom was Love, Dad was Law

“What? do you imagine mercy can rob justice? I tell you: No, not at all. If so, God would stop being God.” (Alma 19:16 CE)

Alma’s blunt question has been living under our roof for years. If you asked our six kids, each in their own way, you’d get some version of the same line: Mom was the love and Dad was the law.

It wasn’t that Mom had no law in her or Dad had no love in him. It just worked out that way. When mom was growing up, her family leaned into compassion, gentleness, and mercy. Dad’s side came out of a world where justice, discipline, and the law of the forest were the air you breathed. I’m not here to crown a winner. I’m just noticing the pattern.

Sometimes it felt like Mom against Dad—mercy against justice. One of us reaching for the soft word and the second chance; the other holding the clear line and the consequence. The house could get quiet in that tension. Neither was pure villain or pure hero. Both were necessary. Both could be overplayed.

Scripture keeps saying the same thing in different voices. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in goodness and truth… and yet by no means clearing the guilty. Both sides of the character named in the same breath. The atonement itself is presented as the place where the two meet without either being diminished: justice is satisfied, mercy is extended. Remove either pole and the cross becomes either sentimental or merely punitive. Justice and mercy held together—never by pretending the other side of the scale doesn't exist.

That little domestic drama is a miniature of something much larger.

Every moral system that elevates compassion can be gamed. When “love” quietly becomes the refusal to name evil, the imbalance appears. G.K. Chesterton saw it clearly: the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad—the virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Societies shaped by Christian moral capital have shown both the strength and the weakness of that inheritance. The tradition itself is not the problem. The problem is what happens when its adherents lose the nerve—or the clarity—to hold the full tension.

Mercy without justice does not stay merciful for long. It turns into entitlement and permissiveness. The moral immune system shuts down. Evil notices. Soft language about inclusion and non-judgment becomes useful cover. Boundaries dissolve, and the weak or the innocent end up paying the price. Compassion isolated from consequence grows sentimental, then predatory.

Justice without mercy fares no better. It hardens into endless retribution and dehumanization. Every failure is met only with penalty; no real path back remains open. The system becomes cruel. It produces bitterness, rebellion, or quiet despair. Law without the possibility of restoration stops protecting and starts punishing for its own sake.

Either way, the system starts to devour itself.

Modern Western Christianity has largely kept the rhetoric of grace while quietly discarding the rhetoric of judgment, sin, and the necessity of change. The result looks a lot like what sometimes played out under our roof: one parent trying to be all mercy, the other all law, and the kids caught in the middle wondering why the house felt off-balance.

I am no final judge of which emphasis is “better.” I am an advocate for understanding what is actually going on. Mercy and justice are not enemies. They are two attributes of the same God. When we drop one in favor of the other, we don’t become more Christian. We become easier to exploit.

The kids saw it clearly enough. Mom was the love. Dad was the law. Both were needed. Both still are.

Signed

John The-Not-So-Beloved

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