Neal A. Maxwell continues in his book ‘All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience,’
“To err by having naive expectations concerning the purposes of life is to err everlastingly. Life is neither a pleasure palace through whose narrow portals we pass briefly, laughlingly, and heedlessly before extinction, nor a cruel predicament in an immense and sad wasteland. It is the middle (but briefest) and proving estate of the three estates in man’s carefully constructed continuum of experience.
One day we will understand fully how complete our commitment was in our first estate in accepting the very conditions of challenge in our second estate about which we sometimes complain in this school of stress. Our collective and personal premortal promises will then be laid clearly before us.
Further, when we are fully judged in terms of our performance in this second estate, we will see that God indeed is likewise perfect in His justice and mercy. We will also see that when we fail here it will not be because we have been tempted above that which we are able to bear. We would find that there is always an escape hatch were we to look for it—or we would also find that were we to call upon it, the grace of God would give us the capacity to endure and bear it well.
We would also see that our lives have been fully and fairly measured. In retrospect, we will even see that our most trying years here will often have been our best years, producing large tree rings on our soul, Gethsemanes of growth!
Just as no two snowflakes are precisely alike in design, so the configurations of life’s challenges differ also. We must remember that while the Lord reminded the Prophet Joseph Smith that he had not yet suffered as Job, only the Lord can compare crosses. Some of our experiences are not fully shareable with others. Thus, others, try as they may, cannot fully appreciate them. They must trust us, our generalizations, and our testimonies concerning these experiences
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not know if God would spare them from the fiery furnace. They simply said: “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O King. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” (Daniel 3:17-18.)
Note the words “but if not.” These are words of unconditional commitment. The possibility of ‘if’ was with these three until the very moment of their rescue, but they had determined their course regardless. Sometimes we must “take the heat,” even if we are not certain the thermostat of trial will soon be turned down.
When we have that kind of courage, neither will we walk alone in our own “fiery furnace,” for, as is recorded in Daniel, there was a fourth Form in that fiery furnace with the valiant threesome, and the Form was “like the Son of God”! (Daniel 3:25)
~ Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book Company, 1980), 47-49
Neal A. Maxwell’s conclusion to this chapter was yesterday’s post: see: * ‘no black despair’
For the beginning of these three part posts: see * The Fellowship of His Suffering
