Three-Sided Coin

Come Follow Me (2 Nephi 2)

I’m forever indebted to David A. Bednar for expounding the importance of being agents to act rather than simply being acted upon.  Pondering this concept as explained by Lehi in 2 Nephi 2 has helped me solidify what it means to be a true disciple and take upon myself the name of Jesus Christ.

When a person of authority cannot be somewhere within the purview of his authority, he sends an agent. That agent goes into any scenario he is assigned in the name of his master. He does what his master would do had he come himself - not only out of loyalty and love, but so as to not sully his name and reputation.

When we’re baptized, we become agents of Jesus Christ. We become His agents in the circles of influence in our lives, since Jesus can’t be literally in the individual lives of all of us. But He can be in the individual lives of all of us if we take seriously the covenant we make of taking upon us His name and becoming His agents, doing what He would do if He were there.

Agents… act.

In 2 Nephi 2:14 & 16, Lehi teaches:

“…for there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.

“Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other.”

In my mind, I always thought of this as an either/or proposition. God created us to act and intentionally exercise the agency which He gave us at infinite cost. Many other of his creations would be acted upon - things without sentient will, like rocks or trees.

Until recently, I’d always assumed this either/or scenario could also be applied to humans who were more fully proactive versus humans who were more passive. I imagined that in teaching us this principle, God expected us to be more active and less passive - not allowing things to simply happen to us the way things happened to rocks or trees.

But then I started noticing how many times the Book of Mormon talks about people departing from sensible behavior because they got “stirred up.” Individuals and communities alike behaved in horrible ways because of being stirred up by someone else. Far too often, the stirring up was done completely by design.

Suddenly, I saw a third side to a scenario I’d always imagined as two sides of a coin: act, or be acted upon.  But… what if another way to be acted upon is to let emotion play far too great a role in your decision making?  What if your choices were altered in unrighteous ways because your thinking was clouded by emotion?

My whole life, I’ve heard people talk about certain people’s behaviors being the cause of their own bad behavior. Someone “made” them do it. But isn’t that the purpose of personal practice? To weed out those tendencies so we are more fully agents to act, and not be acted upon? This was a different side to being acted upon I had never considered before.

Lehi teaches that we’re enticed by our divine natures through the element of our spirits, and by our carnal natures through the element of our bodies.

All this - so we can learn to choose.

Choose light over darkness. Kindness over cruelty. Charity over enmity. Generosity over stinginess. Magnanimity over pettiness.  Law over chaos. Liberty over bondage. Creation over destruction.

God - and all that He is - over all else.

If those are the choices we really want to make, don’t we want to make them with the clearest head possible - using fixed principles to navigate over the fickleness of our emotions?

Being stirred up and only acting on emotions is just as much being acted upon as remaining a rock-like clump of passivity.

If we don’t practice making the things we value truly matter most, then we will never be true agents who act. We will never do more than react - making us vulnerable to demagogues and propagandists. The stirrer-uppers.

If you’re really going to be an agent, don’t you want to make up your own mind and make your own choice really be… your choice?