From Kathy K. Clayton and her book “Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness:
Neither our classrooms nor our homes are peopled with individuals with baskets full of every color of crayon. We all work within limitations. Once identified, those circumstances, whatever they are, can serve as promising springboards to glorious life sketches, maybe even more beautiful than the ones we thought we wanted to draw. Every child of God including teachers and parents, is equipped to succeed. No one was sent to earth to fail. Acceptance of limitations and imperfect circumstances and determination to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope” (2 Nephi 31:20) liberate to expert righteous influence without expecting or needing total control.
Every teacher and parent must resist feeling compelled to control the particulars of the students and children with whom he works. Trusting in the wisdom of heaven and letting go of unprofitable efforts to control the things we cannot control frees us from assuming more authority than we have and allows us to work with our charges wherever and however they are. Our example of peaceful acceptance of our own inability to control all things in this mortal sphere serves well the students and children we work with who will likewise inevitably bump up against that mortal reality.
Likewise, we cannot control or usurp the agency of others not even that or our children or students. However seemingly benevolent our motivation may be for wanting to make another’s choices for him, doing so is in conflict with the plan of heaven. Agency is a precious, divinely appointed gift from God. Knowing full well that affording His children that gift would mean that it would frequently be exercised unrighteously, He still established it as a foundational principle upon which mortal experience is based. We may and should seek to do all in our power to influence with love without trying to conscript the agency of another. The difference between influence and control is the difference of the plan of the Savior and the plan of Satan.
Additionally, we cannot control the timing of certain things. Growth, learning, and positive change involve worthy influence, worthy exercise of agency, and the Grace of God. We “cast [our] bread upon the waters: (Ecclesiastes 11:1) pray that the person we are seeking to influence will choose well, then trust that the Lord will use His spirit to magnify the result.
The Agency of Others, Timing, Personal Differences, and Mortality All Limit the Things We Can or Expect to or Should Seek to Control
A curious, bright-eyed young high school student showed up unexpectedly in a seminary class I was teaching one morning. Two young women who assumed the seats on either side of him were his friends. They introduced Anthony to those of us in the class who didn’t know him. I welcomed him then carried on with the lesson, seeking to be responsive to adjustments that I might be inspired to make in my lesson plan to be sensitive to Anthony. He returned the next day, and the next, and every day after for the remainder of the school year. I asked if he would like to be introduced to the missionaries to learn more about the Church, but he politely insisted that he was very content to simply continue to attend seminary. Anthony graduated and moved on to enroll at a university in the eastern part of the United States. I worried that I had failed Anthony as a teacher. In spite of all those days attending seminary at 6:00 A.M., he had not been baptized before I lost track of him.
Many years later I received from our son a link to something Anthony had posted on line. Unbeknownst to me, years after graduating from high school, Anthony had come in contact with the Church again. The feeling that had brought him to our seminary class years before resurfaced and he hungrily asked the missionaries to teach him. In fact, feeling that he already knew that he was ready to take action, he called his local missionaries and simply announced that he wondered if they could please baptize him. I suspect they were eager to accommodate his surprise request. The time was right and Anthony was ready. Heaven blessed the seeds that had been showed in that seminary class years earlier. They took root and flourished responsive to Anthony’s exercise of agency and the workings of the Spirit.~~~Kathy K. Clayton Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book: 2012) p.51-53
