Leave the Party

I found this video on LDS.org. It's about the exercise of righteous courage in the face of temptation and especially peer pressure, and the effect that courage can have on your future. The title of the video is Leave the Party, and the text was taken from Bishop Gary E. Stevenson's October 2012 talk, Be Valiant in Courage, Strength, and Activity.





My first thought of this story, partly inspired by its title, is that, yes, you should leave such parties when you find yourself at them, but it takes less moral courage to simply not go in the first place. Of course, to successfully avoid such parties, one needs to either avoid all parties or have the ability to discern what kind of party each party will be before they happen. Sometimes, we find ourselves unwittingly attending a "party" like that one through no real fault of our own. At the point, the only good advice we can follow is to Leave.

I've heard it said that it's easier (and better) to avoid temptation than to resist it. It's easier to not go anywhere near temptation than to get away from temptation when it's close. But we don't always have a choice in the matter. Yes, a fair bit of wisdom can help you avoid some temptations, but it's virtually impossible to avoid them all. Some don't give you any warning, and some are camouflaged to seem benign until you get too close. Every once in a while, we might make a bad judgement call or simply get duped, and we find ourselves at one of Brandon's "parties." It is for that reason that we need to develop within ourselves what Bishop Stevenson called "righteous courage," to help us resist the temptations that we weren't able to avoid.

Sometimes we don't have a choice whether we face temptation or not. Like Joseph who was sold into Egypt was a slave and literally couldn't leave Potifar's house and his lusting wife, we sometimes need to face temptation and overcome it the hard way. It takes strength and courage to do that, and like all things that require strength, it rewards you with more strength for doing it. God wants us to be strong - strong enough to resist every temptation He allows to come at us. In order to follow God's chosen path, we need to develop that strength by resisting every temptation we're unable to avoid, even the small ones. That way, our moral courage can grow full and strong, and we can become unbreakable by Satan's temptations. At least, that's my theory, and I hope it's true. I hope that it's possible to become strong enough to be undefeatable. But until we achieve that, if it's even possible, we just need to fight temptation as hard as we can and, win or lose, keep fighting until the battle is over. We will be faced with temptations as long as we live. We can avoid many of them, but some of them, we'll have to resist, and for that, we will need to be strong.