Sunday Bible Study: A state of unprecedented misery can produce unprecedented joy

It is an interesting exercise, to take inventory of all the many words being used to describe the state of the world today: strange, wild, turbulent, volatile, unprecedented, dangerous, crazy, insane, unimaginable.

Read enough headlines and you’ll find all of them, a weird little dystopian bingo.

These are days that are filled to the brim with adversity. Hospitals are overflowing with patients, to the point that we have brought in ships to take those who wouldn’t otherwise have a bed. Businesses have been forced to shut down, many of which will never open again. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Gyms and beaches, even the mountains, are closed. Individuals are being forced to stay at home. Hourly and gig workers are now scrambling, improvising as to how they’ll make rent and pay groceries. Many are making the impossible choice between the two.

Nothing about this Covid-19 situation is good, and yet good will inevitably come from this. Somehow. Someway. In some shape or other, good will come of this. Remarkable new businesses will be founded. A better way to handle the next pandemic — one that could be exponentially worse, deadlier — will be established. A sense of community, of helping one another, lifting one another up, will rise to the surface, as it invariably does during times of crises, as we have already seen across the country.

“For it must needs be,” it is written in The Book of Mormon, in 2 Nephi: 2:11, “that there is an opposition in all things.”

Here we have our opposition. And we also have a choice: How do we respond? It is easy to succumb to anger, self-pity. It is easy to lash out, to give in to the pressures that continue to mount. I know I have done so. What is hard, in times like these – and you can describe these times however you will – is to exercise our agency, our ability to choose, for good. To view this as a period of potentially unprecedented growth. We can use it as men like Kevin Love have, lifting others, donating $100,000 of his salary to help pay the hourly workers for the Cleveland Cavaliers. We can use it as droves of volunteers are, helping out at food banks. We can use it for personal development and discovery, to take a much-needed breath.

It is times like these that I believe — you can believe whatever you’d like; this is simply the way I choose to view life — God wants us to seek him, to ask how we can use this for our betterment and the betterment of those around us. To allow this unexpected yank backwards to one day, when this passes – and it will – slingshot us forward.

“And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the Garden of Eden,” it is written in 2 Nephi, 2:22-25. “And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.

“And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.

“But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things.

“Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.”

Many view Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden as sort of an accident, as if Satan had thwarted God’s plans for an infallible humanity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sees it, as you have just read, as exactly how God intended it. I am not a baptized member of the church – I was baptized protestant as a child – but I like that view. I like the idea that our time on Earth is a test, or “period of probation,” as it is described in The Book of Mormon. I like the idea that God allows bad things to happen, leaving it up to us and our agency to see how we respond, where we turn.

It is through these choices that miracles can happen.

At the beginning, in the Garden, there is no adversity. There is no overcoming. No triumph. No test of will. No sin. And “If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness,” it is written in 2 Nephi: 2:13. “And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there is no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment or misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation or things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore all things must have vanished away.”

In other words: A world without adversity, without challenge, is no world at all. There is no true happiness. Nothing that makes you spring alive, to come together. It is devoid of everything that makes life so worth living.

That is where we find ourselves now: In the midst of adversity. Like all other tests of our strength and will, this shall pass. A vaccine will be found. The economy will rebound. Doors, beaches and mountains will open once more.

The question, then, is this: How will we spend this time? Will we use it, as authors Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene like to say, for “alive time” or “dead time.” Will we overcome or get swallowed whole?

Will we use this current state of relative misery to produce the joy that invariably results in the overcoming of it?

Will misery beget misery, or will misery beget joy?

The choice is, as it always has been and always will be, yours.