From Kathy K. Clayton and her book “Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness”. From a Chapter with the above title:
Shortly before Christmas one year, I dropped everything and hurried to Las Vegas to embrace a blessed grandma duty. Our second daughter was about to give birth to her third baby boy and I did not want to miss it. All went well until just as that tiny man was about to appear. His timing was a little off, and he gasped for his first breath of air just before there was air to breathe. The result was a gulp of liquid that filled his tiny lungs with amniotic fluid. Struggling for air, he was taken promptly to the neonatal intensive care unit where he was to remain for a week while his lungs slowly cleared.
For the first several days of that tender time, little baby Tanner was given nothing to eat. The grandma in me who loves to watch the people I nurture eat goodies could hardly bare not to take that baby in my arms and feed him. The thought of that little guy going without food hurt my heart. I could not bear the possibility of his being hungry. I felt better when the able doctor shared with me the reason for the decision. Tiny Tanner needed all his strength to attend to the absorption of the fluid in his lungs more than the digestion of food. If they gave him nutrition before he was able to tolerate it, they would need to discontinue the feeding. Until he had had food and activated his digestive system, he felt no hunger pains. Once the system was activated, however, the feeding need to be regular or he would suffer hunger.
I have thought about Tanner and hunger pains and growth. Until that newborn ate, he would experience no hunger, but he likewise would experience no growth. He would remain peaceful but small, malnourished, and under developed, never even starting to grow toward manhood.
The Principle of Agency is a Divinely Appointed Call to Action
Let’s flash back to the beginning when the earth was new and the first newborns, Adam and Eve, were taking their first breath of mortal air. In the Garden of Eden, they were peaceful. Had they not eaten the fruit of the tree of good and evil, they might have remained in Eden forever, but the whole plan would have been frustrated. Our eternal growth would have been stunted since we would not have had the possibility of reaching our divine potential as fully grown sons and daughters of God. We would have known no sorrow, but we likewise would have known growth. Tasting the bitter was an essential precursor to tasting the sweet.
There may be occasions in which we entertain wistful thoughts of a simpler world with fewer opportunities to make bad choices, especially for others, but opposition and choice are the stuff of growth. Eve’s brave act introduced, figuratively speaking, the possibility of hunger or sorrow into the world, but it also invited the possibility of growth. If in frustration and fear we could deny our children the opportunity to make wrong choices, we would simultaneously be denying them the opportunity to make right ones. We would be denying them the access to their God-given gift of moral agency, the precious gift for which the first battle for the souls of men was fought in the premortal world.
We would also be dis-affirming the choice we personally made when we chose to come to earth. In a sense, we made the same choice as Eve when we chose to obey the Father’s plan and come to earth on his terms. We knew there would be risks and an authentic possibility of making wrong choices, but we rejoiced in the whole package. We accepted the privilege and responsibility of trying to make good choices even as we knew we risked affliction and remorse as we made mistakes. We signed up for the whole program, and so did everyone else on the planet. Our students and children were there too. And now we are here, trying to help each other make worthy choices and avoid poor ones
Learning together in our homes and classrooms is much more about helping each other exercise our God-given agency righteously than it is about dispensing or accumulating information, they must help students and children translate that learning into doing and being. Growth toward discipleship is not about filling our heads with facts as much as it is about filling our hearts with faith and our lives with faithfulness.
Exercising agency well to do right is an essential precursor to knowing and being. Upon her release from a prominent calling, a woman in our ward spoke In a sacrament meeting. She shared her own experiences about coming to know of the truthfulness of divine principles as a result of putting them into practice. The doctrine is clear: “If any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17). She told of her personal conversion about the principle of tithing after she was married. . She said, “It is not that I didn’t believe it, I just had never really experienced it. Because I never had really experienced it, I didn’t really have a testimony of it. I had to do it to know it. ~~~Kathy K. Clayton, Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012) p.65-67
