When we make wrong choices we sometimes have to patiently bare with the consequences until we can get back on the right track.
Recently, while driving in a city unknown to us, I inadvertently took a wrong turn, which led my wife and me onto an express highway for endless miles without being able to turn around again. We had received a kind invitation to a friend’s home and worried that we would now arrive much later than we were expected to.
While on this highway and desperately looking for a way out again, I blamed myself for not paying better attention to the navigation system. This experience caused me to think about how in our lives we sometimes make wrong decisions and how we must live with the consequences humbly and patiently until we are able to change our course again.
Life is all about making choices. Our Father in Heaven gave us the divine gift of agency precisely so that we could learn from our choices—from the right ones and also from the wrong ones. We correct our wrong choices when we repent. This is where growth happens. Heavenly Father’s plan for all of us is about learning, developing, and progressing toward eternal life.
If we remember that life is about making choices and growing it should be easier to choose repentance when needed.
Sometimes we can also experience opposition and trials from things outside of our control…
Even though we usually cannot choose between these kinds of situations because they just happen, we are still free to choose how to react to them. We can do so with a positive or with a pessimistic attitude. We can seek to learn from the experience and ask for our Lord’s help and support, or we can think that we are on our own in this trial and that we must suffer it alone. We can “adjust our sails” to the new reality, or we can decide not to change anything. In the darkness of night, we can turn on our lights. In the cold of winter, we should choose to wear warm clothes. In seasons of sickness, we can seek medical and spiritual help. We choose how to react to these circumstances.
Adjust, learn, seek, choose are all action verbs. Remember that we are agents and not objects.
We have to remember that the purpose of life is exercising our agency.
Lehi said that there “must needs be … an opposition in all things.” This means that opposites don’t exist apart from each other. They can even complement each other. We would not be able to identify joy unless we had also experienced sorrow at some point. Feeling hungry at times helps us to be especially grateful when we do have enough to eat again. We would not be able to identify truth unless we had also seen lies here and there.
These opposites are all like the two sides of one same coin. Both sides are always present.
Let us constantly make a very conscious effort to see both sides of every coin allotted to us in our lives. Even though both sides might sometimes not be immediately visible to us, we can know and trust that they are always there.
We can rest assured that our difficulties, sorrows, afflictions, and pains do not define us; rather, it is how we go about them that will help us grow and draw closer to God. It is our attitudes and choices that define us much better than our challenges.
I like this concept of making a conscious effort to see both sides of every coin in our lives.
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