What Earthbound Feels Like

Let’s hear it - three cheers for difficult!

Crickets.

Humanity is not, as a rule, a fan of difficult - the thing that distinguishes this few minutes of eternity called mortality with the rest of our existence on either end.

I don't know very many people who love hard. Of course there are the perverse few, but generally, humans don't just lean away from it, they'll go to great lengths to avoid it. The spectrum can be as broad as pushing a snooze bar repeatedly to preferring getting shoved in a locker over standing up to a bully.

We even say it out loud from time to time, "Why can't it ever be easy?" The answer is short and simple: It can't. It can't ever be easy, because that's not what Here is about.

"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so,... righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad...." (2 Nephi 2:11)

Gordon B. Hinckley has quoted a 20th-century journalist on more than one occasion, to the point where this has often been attributed to him. Nevertheless, Jenkin Lloyd Jones wrote:

“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise.

"Life is just like an old time rail journey…delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.”

As I'm emerging from a particularly difficult few weeks, I'm thinking about the three reasons I think earth life was designed to be difficult because of the opposition at every turn.

1. "We'd gone about as fer as we could go..."

Living in eternal realms of glory before this earth life, there was only so much we could learn in our quest to grow up like our Heavenly Parents, from the safety of Their presence. The crucial sticking point for inheriting Their glory as Their heirs: we needed to discover what we preferred if left unsupervised with a constant array of opposites before us for the choosing.

It was necessary to leave the actual presence of God, and go away to school. This is the place where we learn, by our own experience, to distinguish good from evil. More importantly - we're here to learn from that experience to prefer what is good, beautiful, and true - more than that which is evil, ugly, and counterfeit.

2. "Who ya gonna call?"

We didn't just need opposition to widen our field of choices, but to place us in a place that seems - for the entire time we exist there - irredeemable and broken.

If we got even the slightest notion that we could do it on our own, we would never feel the necessary desperation that would cause us to look helplessly upward for power greater than our own to help us.

Interestingly enough, thanks to temporal / temporary comforts such as wealth and luxury, or power and influence, there are many humans who believe just that. You need to know you are broken to consider searching for Someone to fix things.

Enter: Jesus Christ - the Mender of broken things, the Healer of sick things, the Redeemer of irredeemable things. Jesus Christ was planned for from the very beginning, Father knowing we would put ourselves wrong with the glory we came from. However would we find our way back, if a Rescuer wasn't sent?

C.S. Lewis wrote:

"Christianity does not make sense until you face the sort of facts I've been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness.

"It is after you have realized there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind that law , and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power - it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

"When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you begin to understand that our position is nearly desperate, you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about.

"All I'm asking you to do is to face the facts that Christianity claims to answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it were possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true.

"Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

The dismay Lewis points out comes living in a world full of opposition, sensing you're not really from that world, and begin - possibly wistfully at first, but eventually desperately, as he says, to work to put yourself more at home with where you came from. That means pushing against the opposition and not giving into it.

That will mean more than just letting Jesus mend and heal you. He'll also have to help you as you carry the oppositional load of your earth life - carrying it right along beside you. He carried it alone in Gethsemane and on Calvary, so He could walk with you as you live it.

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

"Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

"For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30)

Which brings me to the third reason earth life is so difficult:

3. "[You're] here to PUMP... you UP!"

There's something most mysterious about Grace - the thing that happens when the Savior breaches the gap of our current capacity and the higher capacity He possesses.

You get really, really buff.

Just like our bodies respond to resistance training, so do our spirits respond to pushing against the ever-present opposition of mortality. Avoiding or surrendering keep us soft as plump little spiritual marshmallows. But strapping on that yoke with Jesus yields results that are often not seen in this lifetime.

I like to picture what it will be like when we're finished with this sphere of existence and move onto the next. My mind has conjured the scene in Forrest Gump when he is being bullied because of the braces he needs to wear to straighten his legs. Forrest must have had the braces sufficiently strengthen his legs by this moment - as he awkwardly runs away in the braces, his legs take over on their own, and the braces fall by the wayside. Forrest simply runs - and runs faster - on his own.

The analogy doesn't work completely, because even after this life, everything we learn and achieve will be because of the help of Jesus Christ. But - when the restraints of mortality are behind us, I have a feeling the lack of that tug from opposition isn't simply going to surprise us. I suspect it's going to take our breath away. We have no idea how very earthbound we are, because in the here and now, we’ve never known anything but having feet of clay.

But because we partnered with the One who beat all the opposition for us, Jesus offers to share what He alone could earn - with all of us. If we choose to grow the muscles.

We will have been conditioned from our resistance training, having grown spiritual muscles we could gain in no other way - because we carried our yoke with a perfect Partner.

I guess it's not the actual difficulty I cheer; I'm not one of those perverse few. But I tell you what, I cheer for what it teaches me, what it's growing in me, and Who I'm better acquainted with because of it. The fruit of difficulty is most definitely worth cheering about.