Remembering the Millennia of Preparation

I haven't blogged about a Conference talk for a while. There's one section left for me to finish up, and I only have about a month or two to cover it until the next one comes. The talk I just read this morning was Bishop Gary E. Stevenson's talk, Your Four Minutes. He spoke of how Olympic athletes had prepared for years for a contest which, in some cases, lasted only four minutes per person. He related these contests to our mortal lives, noting how such a relatively short time from the perspective of the eternities can nevertheless have eternal consequences. He even admitted that it may seem unfair that so much hinges on what we do in such a short period of time. However, just like the Olympic athletes, we have had a good, long time to prepare for this.

You are an eternal being. Before you were born, you existed as a spirit. In the presence of a loving Heavenly Father, you trained and prepared to come to earth for a brief moment and, well, perform. This life is your four minutes.

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Dear friends, you are in the midst of an exhilarating journey. In some ways, you are racing down the half-pipe or sled track, and it can be challenging to perform each element or navigate each turn along the way. But remember, you’ve prepared for this for millennia. This is your moment to perform. This is your four minutes! The time is now!

My problem with this idea is that I don't remember the millennia I spent preparing for my few decades of mortality. Does training really do a person any good if they can't remember any of it? Yes, and here's why.

Imagine that you're in terrific physical shape. You exercise each morning. You jog for miles, lift weights that weigh as much as you do, and you do it all easily because you're extremely physically fit. Then, one afternoon, a flowerpot lands on your head, knocking you out, and you wake up with amnesia. You don't remember what you did that morning. You don't remember what you've done every morning since you were a child. You don't know that you've been exercising for years. Yet, your body is still strong. You don't have to remember how you got to be so strong. You just need to recognize how strong you are and put that strength to good use.

We've all spent eons developing great spiritual strength, and much of that strength stayed with us as we were born. Some of us may have lost some of our old strength through lack of recent exercise, and some of us may have done things that weakened our spirits even further, but we all still have a great deal of spiritual strength inside of us. We just need to tap into that strength and use it to choose the right - to start exercising again.

One part of our training that I'll admit may not still be useful to us is the study of techniques. If, in the pre-mortal world, we learned tricks that help us resist temptation, keep the spirit with us, and remember Christ always, we've probably forgotten many of those tricks. We don't remember the strategies we learned as we fought in the war in heaven. Yet, maybe subconsciously we do.

The idea of muscle memory is that your body has done something so many times that now you can do it almost without thinking about it. Like tying your shoe. When was the last time you had to ask yourself "Where does this end of the shoelace go at this step?" It's probably been a while because you've had so much practice at tying your shoes that now your hands can do it automatically. The same can apply to other things, like driving your car or writing or typing - things that may have taken a lot of practice at first, but now you can do them without even thinking about it.

It could be that there's something like a spiritual muscle memory. It's possible that we spent so much time learning and practicing spiritual techniques that our spirits may still subconsciously remember how to do them. This may be where we get such talents as singing hymns or saying meaningful prayers. Of course, I'm only speculating on this. It just seems unthinkable to me that we would spend an eternity preparing for our lives on earth without at least some of that preparation carrying over to being of use in our mortal lives. I'm sure that some of our pre-mortal training stuck with us in one form or another.

We may not consciously remember what we did during the thousands of years before we were born on this earth, but just as how we spend our time here will have a big impact on how we spend the rest of eternity, I'm sure that the training we experienced before our births can be of some benefit to us now. That training must still be helping us somehow, even though we currently don't remember any of it.