Repentance Is Part of the Plan

Another thing that stood out to me may be difficult for me to describe. I tend to over-analyse things and worry too much about things. For example, I sometimes think too much about mortal life and its place in God's plan. I know that God's plan is perfect, but so much of mortality isn't. And when I think about my own life, it gets even worse. I'm sure God has a specific plan for me personally, but I have no idea what the plan is. I can't follow a plan I don't know about, unless God's plan is for me to do what I'm already doing, and I'm pretty sure it isn't. I know it's important to follow God's plan, but from what little I know about God's plan, I'm sure I've gotten off track.

With this being one of the major concerns in my life, something I heard in the Stake Conference really spoke to me. I can't remember the exact words of what I heard, but the feeling I got from it is that God's plan isn't that fragile. It isn't so rigid that it can be derailed by accident. God know that His plan involved working with humans, and He knew that humans make mistakes, so His perfect plan accounted for the mistakes He knew we were going to make. An example of this foresight and flexibility is that God knew that we were going to sin, so He made it possible for us to repent of our sins and get back on track. In fact, as long as we continually repent and try to improve, making mistakes like that doesn't derail God's plan much at all.

One of the main purposes of God's plan is for us to learn wisdom so we can make good choices. This can happen in multiple ways. Preferably, we would keep God's commandments and follow the guidance of the Spirit to learn the right things to do, and make a habit of doing them. That way, it's possible to learn the right way to act without having to learn the hard way. However, even if we make mistakes or even deliberate sins, we can learn from those experiences and hopefully gain the wisdom to avoid making those mistakes in the future. Thus, even when we make mistakes, we're still kind of on the right path, as long as we learn from those mistakes and repent of them.

Even though God's plan centers around imperfect people living in an imperfect world, His plan can still be perfect, as long as it accounts for every possibility, including the mistakes we make, and it does. In His wisdom, God made it possible for us learn from our sins and repent of them, so anything we might do to derail God's plan for us, even wilfully rebelling against it, can work toward God's plan, as long as we learn from the experience and eventually repent of our poor decisions.

I often make poor decisions. I usually try to be righteous, but I frequently find myself in need of repentance. And I worry that, since I'm not always perfect at keeping God's commandments, I'm probably also not doing very well at following God's plan. But God's plan is about us gaining wisdom from our experiences. Sure, it would be better for me to keep the commandments and learn that that's a good idea, but I can also gain wisdom when I break the commandments and find out that that's a bad idea. The goal is to gain wisdom and use it, and the interesting part is that if we don't have enough wisdom, we instead have experiences that help us learn wisdom. It's a system so foolproof that it works even when we actively work against it, and it's virtually impossible to completely derail by accident. For a long time, I've been worried that God's plan wouldn't work for me because I lack the ability to follow it, but now I understand that a perfect plan isn't one that can't go wrong, but one that has contingencies in place for everything that might go wrong, and God's plan is certainly at least as perfect as that.