Lesson learned, or person I’m becoming

When I was younger and had what I considered to be a trial, I would often find myself thinking, “I guess the Lord is trying to teach me a lesson.”  Then, when I had another challenge that seemed to be working on the same issue, I’d think, “I thought I learned how to do that – I guess not, since it looks like I’m still trying to learn it.”  I have to admit that this made me feel discouraged – and influenced how I felt about my Heavenly Father.  Somehow I felt like I was disappointing Him because I kept having to have the same lesson over and over.

Patience is one of those big “lesson” topics I felt like I kept having.  This morning as I was reading the Ensign (the official magazine for adults published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was an article on patience.  In the article there were a couple of quotes by Elder Neal A. Maxwell (late apostle of the Church) that caught my attention.  The first is, “Patience is not indifference.  Actually it means caring very much but being willing, nevertheless to submit to the Lord.”  The second is, “Patience is a willingness, in a sense, to watch the unfolding purposes of God with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than pacing up and down within the cell of our circumstance” (love that image!)

In the last few years, I have stopped feeling like the Lord is sending me lessons because I’m not “getting it”.  When Tom was out of work the first time, it seemed to go on forever and I got pretty good at not stressing about it.  Then, when we adopted Andrew and Haley and began the challenge of parenting a child who had significant needs, I looked back on our months of economic difficulty as perfect training for our current experiences.  I was grateful for the patterns of behavior Tom and I had established of being supportive and trusting in the face of major stressors.  We needed that strength ten times over.  God wasn’t teaching me lessons for the sake of it – He had been preparing me to be more successful in the thing that I wanted – to add to our family through adoption.

As a girl, I had this idea of what my life would be like – and that dream, if you will, grew more detailed and specific as I became older and was more aware of my hopes and desires.  Those plans are important, I think.  They give us hope and help us to understand ourselves and our motivations.  But I have learned that what I can plan and hope for myself is often short sighted and doesn’t always get me closer to my ultimate goal of becoming like my Father in Heaven.  I want to be happy right now.  I want everything to work out the way I want it to.  I want only the challenges that I think I can handle, not the ones I know I can’t – that force me to rely on God.

CS Lewis said it better than I can when he wrote a parable he got from George MacDonald.  “Imagine yourself as a living house.  God comes in to rebuild that house.  At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing.  He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on:  you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.  But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense.  What on earth is He up to?  The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.  You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage:  but He is building a palace.  He intends to come and live in it Himself.”  “Counting the Cost,” Mere Christianity.

A “lesson” on patience is really only one facet of the thing that every Christian is attempting to learn – the ability to submit ourselves fully to the will of God.  And it really isn’t a lesson in the sense that we learn the material and then we take the test and then we are done.  In fact, what we are practicing, over and over, is who we are trying to be.  Not a part-time follower, who does what God wants in some places and times and then gets to spend the rest of his time pursuing his own agendas, but rather a whole new man, born again into a new life, willing to put that life into God’s hands.  In Elder Maxwell’s words, “to watch the unfolding purposes of God with a sense of wonder and awe.”

The challenges we face in life change over time – we are tested again and again. We get to see just who we are and how well we live what we profess to be – and that is a blessing, because we get to see times when we are triumphant (and isn’t that a great feeling) and we get to see times when we fail and recognize that there is work to be done on our character.  When I was the parent of one child, who was securely attached to Tom and me, I thought I was a pretty good parent.  It was only when I was challenged to parent a child who mistrusted in a fundamental way, that I began to really develop qualities of unconditional love and forgiveness and humility.  It’s not an easy path – there are lots of tears along the way – but I like the idea of becoming a “palace” where “He intends to come and live…Himself.”