Tea or Poison?

Last night, I played The Question Game with a few members of my family. For those of you who don't know, to play The Question Game, each person writes a question on a slip of paper, and then everyone gets a random question and writes an answer on another slip of paper. The questions and answers are once again shuffled (separately), and everyone gets a question and an answer. The players then take turns reading questions and answers that don't go together, usually with humorous results.

One of the questions I wrote was "Delicious Tea or Deadly Poison?" This was a reference to Uncle Iroh, a character in Avatar: The Last Airbender, who finds a plant that either makes delectable tea, or is poisonous. Having a great lover of tea, he struggles with the choice of whether or not to make tea out of the plant and potentially poison himself. He chose to make the tea and it did turn out to be poisonous. However, he quickly found another plant which would either cure the poison or make him blind. His nephew and traveling companion, Zuko, took the second plant from him, declaring "We're not taking any more chances with these plants!" resolving to take him to an actual herbalist. My brother used the line about not taking chances to answer my tea or poison question last night, but since then, I've thought more about that question and about the moral implications of choosing either. Suppose you had to choose between drinking delicious tea or deadly poison. Which would you choose?

For most of the world, this question would be a no-brainer, but for those of us who are commanded to live the Word of Wisdom, which involves complete abstinence from some drinks, including tea, the question is much harder to answer. The question for us becomes "would you rather die or do something you believe to be a sin?" Phrased that way, the question again appears obvious, but now with a different answer. It is better to die than to sin. It's better to lose your life (which you're going to get back through the resurrection) than to lose your soul.

Then again, this is tea we're talking about. Tea is, by most modern and ancient studies, harmless. Drinking tea is my go-to example for a sin that we have no idea why God has condemned it as a sin. In terms of how serious a sin it is, it's probably on par with other violations of the Word of Wisdom, like eating too much meat or eating fruit out of season. Potentially, it's as bad as drinking coffee or alcohol, or smoking or doing drugs, but none of those sins measure up to a far more serious sin: taking a human life. If no one were forcing you to drink either tea or poison, but you still had to choose to drink one or the other, I'm pretty sure most people, including God, would prefer that you drank the tea.

But in my hypothetical situation, I kind of took it as a given that you were being forced to choose one or the other, that those were the only two options, and  basically, if you didn't drink the tea, you would die. In that case, it still might be better to drink the tea because if you die right now, you won't live long enough to do any more good for the world. You have lives to bless and hearts to touch. If you died, you wouldn't be able to fulfill your purpose as a human being. Drinking the tea may be a sin, but it's a sin by which you might enable yourself to do a lot of good. Then again, it's still a sin. And knowing that it's a sin to drink it makes it that much worse of a choice to make. You can repent of sins, of course, but repenting of a choice that you willingly made, despite knowing that it's a sin, is a lot harder than repenting from a slip-up.

Unfortunately, I'm out of time to continue discussing this with you. I have to get to class. Maybe we'll pick the discussion up again later, but probably not. If I had to choose now, I think I'd drink the tea. Yes, I know it's a sin. Just add it to the pile. I have worse sins than that to repent of, and I'd rather face my Maker having drunken tea once than still carrying the sins that trouble me now. If there's still hope for me to repent of those sins in this life, I would rather drink tea than poison.