In the temple this morning I caught on to the significance of the words “for your sake” as Heavenly Father placed a curse on the earth so that it would bring forth thorns, thistles, briars, and noxious weeds after Adam and Eve choose to take the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and learn by experience rather than spontaneously producing fruits and flowers as it has done when they lived innocently obedient in the garden of Eden. This is consistent with the necessity of opposition in all things. Having chosen to learn by experience they had to be free to experience evil or understandable things: poisonous plants, painful thorns, intrusive plant species, unripe or overripe produce, etc. Before our children choose to exercise agency and learn by their own experience it is safe for us to give them only good things (actually, we should never proactively give them bad things) but once they have begun choosing to go their own way we stunt their growth if we shield them too much from the consequences of their choices. It’s certainly okay sometimes to blunt the worst of the consequences but we do so at the rush of teaching them the wrong lesson. Similarly if we try to prevent them from making wrong choices—which is different than giving them information on which choices are wrong and why—we end up with then learning to thwart us and coming to believe that life is a battle of wills rather than then learning that life is a contest between truth and lies and success lies in clinging to the side of truth.
That alone would have been a full lesson from a temple session but later I had a realization about the law of consecration. We promise use all our time, talents, and everything with which the Lord blessed us, or with which He may bless us to the church for the building up of the kingdom of God and for the establishment of Zion. That means that we not only give of what we have but that we incorporate consecration into how we will dispose of what we hope to receive later. We should not look at an empty nest or a retirement as a chance to play without the constraints of day to day parenting but also as an opportunity or resource that we can give in consecration to build the kingdom and establish Zion in ways that were not possible while we were actively raising our families.
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