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