Improving Our Time

Learning to Love Our Broken World

My faith was born in a moment of crisis as a young man. Having finally relented to try prayer and obedience as I approached my eighteenth birthday, I leaned on God to help me after the tragic loss of my oldest brother to a suicide. During the years that followed as I worked at mending my wayward teen ways, God was a source of comfort and strength. He reassured me with promises of a heaven where life’s injustices would be redressed and of his power to help me to overcome myself so as to get to that heaven.

I attend church and the temple with the same regularity as always, and I continue to depend on divine power and find hope in divine justice. As I am about to begin my seventh decade, however, I notice that something has shifted in me. I find myself less anxious about my worthiness before God and my prospects for salvation and more concerned about what I can do to make life better for others. Making exaltation my singular obsession, it seems to me now, risks too much self-focus and judgment of myself and others. Besides, I don’t know why I would want to be in a place where I am asked to be content with the fact that others cannot be included. In fact, I don’t believe God wants such contentment in me; to walk with God, it seems that I need to be, like him, in relentless pursuit (to paraphrase Elder Kearon) of universal human flourishing. This shift is akin to the difference between seeing God as my emotional mainstay and seeing him as someone to love and emulate. It is the difference between seeing church and its teachings and ordinances as ends in themselves or as means to the end of universal human flourishing and happiness. Exaltation starts to look a lot more like an extension of an abundant life of serving and healing now in this world, of bringing heaven and earth, God and humankind, closer together.

When I was in the throes of my growing faith and self-reform, I met Lowell Bennion. I remember him telling me that he was not all that interested in his own salvation; all he wanted in the next life was the chance to keep serving alongside Christ. At the time, given my own battles with myself, this confused me; I worried that it seemed disrespectful of the great gift of eternal life, perhaps even shortsighted or secular. But Lowell’s point, I now see, was to honor the great work and glory of God “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). To Lowell, the restored gospel was the grandest project of human development, ennoblement, and flourishing the world had ever seen. He insisted that we are “here to develop [our] potentialities as children of God—that [we] might find joy.” He added: “The purpose of life will be found in life itself. That toward which man aspires is more life—abundant and eternal life.” Happiness is the Latter-day Saint quest of selfhood and it begins here on earth: “The beginning and end of life is to experience it deeply in all of its finest expressions. Self-realization or self-fulfillment—to be what nature and God intended us to be—appears to be the ultimate meaning of life. Salvation is a process of becoming, not a reward given us at the end of our journey or on judgment day.”