A Million Dollars and a Chocolate Cake - The Ultimate Personality Quiz

This afternoon, in Gospel Essentials class, we briefly talked about why it was necessary for us to be born, and specifically why it was necessary for us to forget our pre-mortal lives. I forgot the exact words that were said, but as I recall, the idea was something like this: Part of the reason we're here is so we can prove whether or not we'll do what's right under various circumstances. It's a test of heart. We're frequently faced with tough moral decisions. Naturally, we're supposed to do what's right just because it's the right thing to do, but we also have another reason to choose the right. Blessings are given to the righteous. If we could remember for sure that heaven is a real place and if we could remember how wonderful it feels to be there, that would provide a powerful incentive to be righteous. But would that really be righteousness? If a person chooses to be righteous just so they could get a reward, that's not so much righteousness as it is selfishness. If you give a person two options, but they know that they'll get a million dollars and a chocolate cake if they choose Option A, that makes the decision a lot easier, and not much of an actual test.

God means to actually test us. He wanted to give us the opportunity to prove that we would choose the right, so to make this a real test, He withheld our memory of what we'll get if we pass it. Of course, we've got a vague idea that heaven is worth jumping through a few hoops, even if that's not what we'd normally do, but without our memory of heaven to contrast against the world we have here, I don't think we really have any idea of what we're missing out on while we're down here, and what we'd miss out on permanently if we choose Option B.

Because we don't really know for certain what results our actions will give us, that makes this life a true test of what we would choose to do. While we are influenced by promised blessings, I think that that influence is carefully balanced against the temptations of the world, so which option we choose is more a reflection of our personal choices than of which set of rewards is more attractive. The blessings of heaven are definitely far better than anything we could stand to get here, but as long as we can't really remember that, we'll only swayed by it about as strongly as we're swayed by worldly temptations, and the decisions we make will say more about our character than about which choice we think will get us a better set of rewards.