A Promise to a Piper

Earlier this evening, I saw a musical based on the fairy tale about the pied piper. In this tale, a town with a serious rat infestation hires a mysterious stranger (the pied piper) to deal with the rats. The pied piper lures the rats away with magical music, but, seeing how easy it was for the pied piper to clear out the rats, the town refuses to pay the pied piper their agreed price, so the piper uses the magical music to get revenge. The moral of the story is that it's important to keep your promises and agreements, partly because karmic and vengeful forces may punish you if you don't. Personally, I saw it more as a lesson to not make a promise you're not willing to keep.

Promises play an important role in our church, though we usually focus on a particular kind of promises: covenants. Covenants are two-way promises we make with God. When we hold up our end of the deal, He holds up His. These covenants often come with great blessings for keeping them, but there also sometimes great spiritual consequences for breaking them, hence my moral of not making promises you won't keep. A promise is a commitment. If you don't have the commitment, don't make the promise.

Of course, we're far better off making the promises and keeping them than we are not making the promises. Had the rat-infested town not agreed to hire the piper, they'd still have a rat problem. We have a host of spiritual problems and infestations that only Jesus Christ can heal, but there are certain things we need to do in order to access the healing power of His Atonement, which is part of what makes covenants essential. Through our covenants, we secure blessings that we couldn't get any other way. It's certainly important to make those covenants and secure those blessings. We just need to make sure  we're wise and committed enough to keep them.