Commandments at the Beach

I'm not sure what to write this time. The videos I watched this morning, Stay Within the Lines and We Are All Enlisted, I watched mostly for my own benefit. But I'll ramble on for a while, and you can judge whether or not my ramblings can help you.

Elder Holland spoke of lines of worthiness in which we must stay. In typing that, I felt a little bit of what some of you may feel in reading it: restriction. I felt like I was describing a fenced field which we are not allowed to leave. What comfort me are the many other analogies of commandments that I've heard over the years. One of those analogies admit that, in a way, commandments are like fences.

In San Francisco, just to the West of the North side of the bridge, there's a beach. The name of this beach is Rodeo Beach. (I've always heard it pronounced Row DAY Oh rather than Row DEE Oh, but I'm not sure it matters.) Rodeo is mostly a pebbly beach with some kind of estuary or saltwater lake behind it. On either side of the beach, there are cliffs with trails leading up and around, offering wonderful views of the ocean and the surrounding nature. Most of those trails, when they get near to the cliff, have fences.

Commandments are like those fences. They seem to be holding us back, but they're really not. It's easy enough to cross those fences, if you want to, just as it's easy to break the commandments (in fact, it's sometimes hard to KEEP the commandments). But the fences, and the commandments, aren't really there to restrict us, they're there to keep us safe. They're there to keep us from falling off the cliff by accident. They're there to force us to make a choice. Will we stay on the Lord's side, the safe side, or will we cross over the line and take our chances with our own judgement?

Another analogy. Rodeo Beach doesn't have this problem, but some beaches do: whirlpools. A sign reads "Danger! Whirlpool. No Swimming." But this sign is not a fence. We're still free to do whatever we want, unimpeded. We can walk up and down the beach. We can gather seashells, make a sand castle, feed the seagulls. We can even go swimming, if we want. There's no one to stop us. But if we choose to swim, we may get caught in a whirlpool, and once we're stuck in there, we'll have a hard time getting out. I stole this analogy from the Gospel Principles manual.

Commandments are like the No Swimming sign. God can warn us that there are dangerous things around, and He can tell us what to do to avoid them, but the choice is still ours to make. Do we want to have thrilling fun, and risk the consequences, or do we want to have the kind of fun that keeps us safe? I haven't gone swimming at a beach in years, but I still like going. I especially enjoy hiking along the cliff trails, but I stay on the safe side of the fences.

The world is full of choices, but some of the choices we can make carry dangerous, painful consequences. God would rather that we didn't have to suffer those consequences, so He'd rather that we all made safer choices, so He tells us about the cliffs and the whirlpools and He warns us not to go near them, not because He wants to control us, but because He wants to keep us safe.

In the past, I have ignored a No Swimming sign and I have gotten myself stuck in a whirlpool, so to speak, and I can tell you from personal experience that you don't want to go there. It's better to keep the commandments. It's better to make sure you stay safe.