Leaving Paradise

This morning, I submitted my paper about leaving paradise. I wrote about how Adam and Eve had to leave the paradise of Eden in order to make progress toward the paradise that God has promised to all those who live faithfully. In our own way, we all have to do this. We all have to leave one paradise in order to progress toward another. We cannot make any progress if we comfortably remain where we are.

Granted, I'm not suggesting that we all currently live in paradises. Some people are between paradises right now. Some people are searching for any kind of paradise at all. Perhaps we can help them by leading them to any of the paradises we have found, by sharing with them any of the blessings we have found and teaching them how they can gain those blessings for themselves.

That said, some paradises are better than others, so while we try to lead people to better places than where they are now, we should also acknowledge that there are better places yet to find, and we often have to leave the comfort of where we are now in order to reach the potential of where we can be. The paradises we have already found are good, but we have to leave them behind us in order to find the paradises that are even better.