Changeable God?

I had a big post written and it kind of went off topic, so I will save it as a draft and see if I want to use it later. I was reading something today about God not changing yet he does things differently from time to time. That elicited a thought, that it is not God that changes, but man that changes. God is the same yesterday, today and forever, but fallible man forces him to adjust his plan to suite our needs.

Many people will cite the fact that God does not change to criticize changes within the church. The post I read earlier specifically mentioned polygamy. Other topics could be Blacks and the priesthood, changes in the temple ceremony, reorganization of church leadership structures and most of all perceived changes in doctrine. All of these can be explained another way, man has changed so God must adapt.

The first hurdle is determining exactly what God want to say to us. Strangely, that really isn't always easy. Even in the scriptures their are things that sometimes seem to contradict each other. As men, we sometimes don't listen or understand. God calls holy men as prophets, but even they are subject to the weaknesses of mortality. They do their best and seek to better understand God. God has promised that he will not let them lead us astray, but he does not promise that they will tell us everything or even that they will be told everything all at once.

While we should listen to the prophets and heed their counsel, we should not abdicate our responsibility to seek communication with God. The prophet is not there to be our go-between, that is Christ's role and we should seek truth from God through Christ under the direction of his prophets.

Sometimes, people will attribute things to the unchanging laws of God that really aren't a part of them. They will say that something cannot be changed because it is God's law, but in reality it is not. It is simply our finite, mortal, flawed human understanding of the eternities. A good example is the changes in the temple ceremonies. They teach eternal principles and have eternal consequences, but the exact practice of them is being tweaked on a fairly regular basis. In many ways the mechanics are changed to make it more accessible to more people while the principles taught remain unchanged.

The biggest problem is that man is not constant. We change our minds and wills throughout our entire life. We are learning and growing. We do not have the wisdom and eternities of experience, in our mortal state, that God does. Though we lived before we were here and we will live again after death, we started this mortal experience with almost nothing. We are learning from scratch here. We cannot hope to obtain the Godlike wisdom and perfection in the mere 80 or so years we live here. Thus, we are in need of constant direction.

That direction changes to our needs. It guides us to help us live the eternal principles and even to help us learn what those principles are. Our limited ability to perceive the will of God makes life a circuitous path rather than a straight one. God has allowed us to live the eternal principle of agency, that means he has to deal with that choice. So we won't be perfect. God knows this and has planned for it already. We should not despair, rather celebrate that we have the chance to learn by our experience, even if God has to change his instructions to meet our needs once in a while.

Did they really fall away?

Who has fallen away? What does it really mean to fall away? Are those that are struggling really falling away?

I have had struggles in my day with the gospel. I have had my doubts from time to time. However, those times of struggle became a strength to me. It is where I learned to hold to my testimony. It is where I learned to become a better person and treat others with more respect.

Perhaps we should stop looking at people that "fall away" from the church with such pity. They are just hear learning the lessons of life. I think that God knows exactly where he placed them and what they are experiencing. He has not given up, he is teaching them.

Through all of the dark times of my life, I have never felt truly alone. I have always felt guided as though I had something to learn. It was hard at times. Now when situations come up, instead of despairing at my lack of faith, I look for the lesson and I find the light again.

Civility

While going through several of my draft blog posts, I found this one that I wrote shortly after the last General Conference. I thought it was time to share it.

I wasn't going to do it! I was going to stay out of the fray and let other battle out their very deeply held convictions and feelings about a certain talk at General Conference. I have resisted. I have ignored Facebook group requests and postings by friends on both sides of the issue. But, I can't any longer. I am tired of the lack of civility in discussing anything.

Elder Boyd K. Packer's latest General Conference Address (text link coming soon) has caused quite the stir. I'm not going to comment upon my opinions about it other than saying I was not offended by it and found it a well prepared, well thought out civil discourse. There was nothing hateful, mean, spiteful or said as a personal attack. While all may not share his opinion (Even I don't subscribe to everything he said), he did not present them in a way that degraded people.

Why then do we have to debase ourselves in uncivilized discussions? Why do we resort to ad hominem attacks at each other. I'm not complaining about just those that oppose what he said, but those that are in support as well. Why can we not accept that when someone thinks differently than us, they are not necessarily stating that we are bad and evil?

Civil discussion is the only way that we will begin to bridge the gaps, heal the wounds and move forward.