Strength

This morning, I poured 52 pounds of dog food into three 5-gallon buckets. This is not normally a difficult feat for me. I'm a strong young man. I carry groceries from Costco into the house all the time. I climb trees. I ride my bike. I'm athletic and reasonably strong. But almost a year ago, I crashed my bike while dodging a garbage bin. In doing so, I fractured one of the bones in my right arm. This caused pain and a loss of mobility. I got the mobility back, but it still hurts sometimes, and I think I know why.

For the months following my accident, I tried to go easy on my arm so it could heal. Then, knowing that my arm would be weaker than it was before, I spent a good deal of time trying not to ask too much of it. Now, I have no idea how strong, or rather how weak, my arm is, because I haven't been testing it. I haven't been putting it to the test. I've lost, and now must regain, most of my strength.

I'm not asking for sympathy here. My weakness is entirely my fault. Yeah, the crash was an accident. I might have been able to prevent it, or it might have been unavoidable. Whether I could have done anything to stop it doesn't matter anymore. It happened. What matters now is what I'm going to do about it, and that's something I can control.

In a quote I copied two days ago, Elder Paul V. Johnson said, "We clearly understand that an athlete who resists rigorous training will never become a world-class athlete." Or, to put it in turns of regular people, those who don't work out won't be as strong as they would be if they did. Elder Johnson related this fact of life to progressing spiritually, and so will I.

Some of us are already strong, and they can become stronger. Some of us are weak. We can become stronger, too. Whether we're weak because of bad choices we made or because life happened to us doesn't matter. It's water under the bridge. What matters now is what we're going to do next. Are we going to keep making bad choices? Are we going to just let life happen to us? There's not much we can do about it. Life's going to happen to us no matter what we do. Why fight it, right? I'll tell you why: Because we were made to be strong.

I once wished that Satan wasn't so evil; that all the he did to work against us, he only did because he knew it would make us strong. I know that that's not true of him, unfortunately. But it may be true of the world.

Life is hard. Life is harder for some people than for others, but there's plenty of hardship for everyone. If we're not making problems for ourselves, someone else is making problems for us, or maybe our problems are nobody's fault. It's just life. And the truth is, life's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be a workout. We're supposed to fight our way through the hardships so that struggle can make us strong.

It's not easy.  Some people find that ignoring problems or running away from them is easier than facing them. But life was never meant to be easy, and God won't let us get away with taking the easy way out forever. Eventually, we'll run out of places to run and then we'll have to face our problems. Eventually, we will need to be strong. I think that's the point.

Satan isn't our personal trainer. But in a similar analogy, our life on Earth may be the "fitness center" of our spiritual progression. This is where God sent us to get experience; to face challenges, to win some battles and lose others, and to learn how to become spiritually strong. I believe that's the purpose of life. So far, I haven't been fulfilling my purpose. I'm one of those people who'd rather not face problems and challenges. But thinking that strength-through-struggle is the purpose of mortal life, or at least my life, encourages me to try.