From Neal A. Maxwell’s book ‘That Ye May Believe’ (Personal letters to family):
Dear Heather:
You were apparently puzzled while hearing a Church leader speak about how suffering can be purifying.
To begin with, suffering certainly concentrates the mind, doesn’t it? Suffering can also scrape off hindering encrustations of ego and error. Each of these effects can facilitate purification. Suffering can also bring about improved personal comprehending.
Even so, Elder John Taylor candidly observed, “So far as I’m concerned, . . . I do not desire trials; I do not desire affliction. . . . I do not want to put a straw in anybody’s way.” However, he went on to say: “I used to think, if I were the Lord, I would not suffer people to be tried as they are; but I have changed my mind on that subject. Now I think I would, if I were the Lord, because it purges out the meanness and corruption that stick around the Saints, like flies around molasses.”1
Another essential task is to “give away” whatever is left of our sins in order to know God (see Alma 22:18). All of this certainly facilitates purifying.
Since, if we shrink from submission, we can’t be “swallowed up in the will of God” (see Mosiah 15:7), suffering can help us to yield, to surrender unconditionally to God, and to quit looking back. Each of these things purifies us and shrinks the distance between us and Him.
Therefore we appear to need certain clinical experiences involving adversity in order to help purify us spiritually. Just as food, water and air are clearly essential to our physical survival, so our clinical experiences are necessary to make life developmentally meaningful. However we certainly do not seek such tutorial experiences. In fact, we try to avoid them; we resist the spiritual equivalents of “Eat you spinach.”
One can observe the developmental differences certain experiences make, especially over years. Brigham Young could have remained as a conscientious craftsman and an upstanding local citizen in New England. He doubtless could have stayed there and made real contributions to his local community. Compare that outcome, however, to his having become (through his soul-stretching and developmental experiences) a modern Moses.
By the way, Brigham Young said that without the Restoration he would probably not have been much of a churchman for want of doctrinal satisfaction. “Before I had made a profession of religion, I was thought to be an infidel by Christians, because I could not believe their nonsense. The secret feeling of my heart was that I would be willing to crawl around the earth on my hands and knees to see such a man as was Peter, Jeremiah, Moses, or any man that could tell me anything about God and heaven. . . . until I saw Joseph Smith.”2
Eliza Snow might have remained in Ohio, writing occasional poems for the local paper, being a decent, good, serviceable local citizen. Instead, she became a poetess of a dispensation! In the exodus from Nauvoo, when she was bouncing along the frozen surface of Iowa “seated . . . on a chest with a brass kettle and a soap box for her foot stools,” she said she was “thankful” she was so well off.”3 Could she have done that and all she later did, including leading the Relief Society once she was in the West, without preceding enlarging experiences?
Notably, however, Jesus advised, “the spirit . . . is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). So it is that while we understand spiritually that we need clinical experiences, the natural man quite naturally flees from these; he misreads these trials. ~Neal A. Maxwell, That We May Believe (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1992), 114-115
