The Pros and Cons of Pre- and Post-Fall Earth

Moving forward with my lesson planning as though there's nothing else going on in the world today that's worth blogging about, one thing that's always bugged me about lessons on the Fall of Adam and Eve is that, in contrasting the conditions of the pre-fall and post-fall versions of the world, we usually only talk about the pros of one and the cons of the other. I think it may be important to address both the pros and the cons of each.

The pre-fall world was perfect in that nothing was trying to kill anything else. Everything was immortal. There were lots of flowers and fruit, and no thorns or noxious weeds. It would have been a lovely place to live, except that nothing ever changed there. There was no progress being made by anything, which was troublesome because the concept of eternal progression is the whole reason the Earth was made.

After the fall, mankind began to make some progress. We started making mistakes and learning from them. We started gaining experience and learning to become more like God. But there was a downside to all this. Our learning comes at a price. We have to have experiences, most of which are unpleasant, if not downright painful. Yes, good comes from it, but pain comes first.

Interestingly, heaven will not have any of the problems Earth currently has. There won't be any death or disease or any physical pain or suffering. It'll be a veritable paradise. Yet, it will also not have the drawback of the Garden of Eden. The progress we started on Earth will continue in Heaven. I wonder how that'll work. Maybe I'll ask the class and see if they have any ideas.

I'm looking forward to teaching this lesson. I think it'll be a good (and not painful) experience. It's been nice focussing my blog posts on a specific topic for a change. Thankfully, I'm giving a lesson next week, too, so this trend will continue. Plus, I really should get back to blogging about General Conference before the next one happens. It's funny that I usually feel like I have nothing to blog about, but actually, the list of things I have to blog about is pretty long.