"You May Do According to Your Desires"

Alma 55:12 And Laman said unto them: You may do according to your desires.

When I blogged about this verse five years ago, I focused on how we can safely accept that offer, so long as the desires we act on are good. Tonight, I want to focus on the fact that we can accept this offer, period.

We have moral agency. Neither man nor the devil can take it from us, and God never will. We have to ability to make our own choices, to "do according to [our] desires," and we always will.

The catch is that there are consequences for every action. We can choose what we do, but we can't avoid the consequences that come as a result of what we choose to do. Still, those consequences aren't always negative, and even the negative consequences don't actually prevent us from making the choices that lead to them. We can still do what we choose to do, regardless of what happens next.

We have been trusted with a great deal of freedom, the freedom to do basically whatever we want, the freedom to "do according to [our] desires." It's our responsibility to prove worthy of that trust, to use that freedom for good, and to "let the consequence follow."