Our Complicated Lives

I said the other day that I wanted to go back to the basics again, and that has never been more true than it is now. I sometimes feel that life is too complicated, that there's too much going on that distracts us from what's really going on. I'm sure I'm not fulfilling the purpose of my life, but in order to fix that, I need to learn what the purpose of life in general, and specifically mine, is.

Thanks to the Plan of Salvation, we have a little more perspective on the purpose of life in general. We're here to gain bodies and experience, to learn and to grow, so we can eventually become like our Heavenly Father. Yet, though that is our ultimate goal, there's no way we can reach it in this life. There must be some post-mortal preparation between us and Eternal Life, which leads me to wonder what parts of our Eternal Education can only happen here? If we can learn what it takes to be like God after we pass through the veil, what are we supposed to learn here? With that logic, I talked myself into a circle and again needed to ask what the purpose of mortal life really was.

The answer I eventually came up with some time ago is linked to trials. The trials in heaven, if there even are any, are likely to be less severe and less numerous than the trials we face here. Through our trials, we learn some lessons that can't be learned any other way, and we gain experience and strength.

It seems that we're not really here for knowledge, but for wisdom and experience. Not for book smarts, but for street smarts. Not to learn, but to practice. Granted, to have wisdom or street smarts, or to practice, we need to gain a little knowledge first. Fortunately,  'a little knowledge' is exactly how much we have, especially compared to how much we'd need in order to be like God. All we really have is the basics, no matter how "deep" we try to get. Maybe practicing the basics of how to live the gospel is really all we're here for.

But if we're just here to practice basic Christianity, what's everything else in life for? Why is there so much complexity and confusion? I can think of three people that could be responsible for everything that's confusing about life, and each of them have their own reasons for making our lives more difficult.

The first person is God. He throws confusing and difficult challenges at us because He's trying to get us to think and act for ourselves. Another complicator is Satan, who tries to distract us from what's really important by getting us to think too much about things that are not important. And the third culprit is ourselves, or rather humanity, who, in its quest to solve the world's problems, ends up making more complicated problems for humanity to solve.

Whoever's responsible for the complications in life, God has worked out a plan for all aspects of life to work for our eternal advantage. We're supposed to learn to apply gospel principles to God's complications, learn to avoid Satan's distractions, and with man-made complications, I think it's usually best to apply one or the other of the previous solutions, but the real test is to learn to recognize which is which.

Life is complicated, and I sometimes think that it's more complicated than it needs to be. I often wish that it were simpler. But I know that God is in control of everything (or at least saw it coming and found a way to turn it into a good thing), including how complicated and confusing life is sometimes. I think He's trying to teach us wisdom - trying to teach us how to apply gospel principles, even when it's hard to do the right thing, or even to know what the right thing to do is. Maybe life's problems are designed to help us figure it out.