In Genesis 18, the Lord tells Abraham that He intends to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham tries to argue that even if the majority of the city is wicked and corrupt, if there are 50 righteous men and women to be found, it would not be right to kill those 50 along with all of the wicked. The Lord agrees. Now, maybe Abraham had visited Sodom and Gomorrah recently and didn’t like his chances that there were as many as 50 righteous people living there. So he ends up bargaining the Lord down to 10 people. It turns out, there weren’t really more than about three and a half sorta righteous people so the cities ended up getting destroyed. We don’t typically think that negotiating with God is really an option. I mean, He commands and we’re supposed to obey. But I think that we end up negotiating with God all of the time. God is a big believer in great changes being brought about by small and simple things. Ideally we would give Him our whole souls without compulsion or reluctance and accept all that He has to give us without hesitation. But we’re not ready for that. Before we can run we’ve got to learn how to walk, and before we can walk we’ve got to figure out crawling, and before that, well, sometimes we just need to have our Savior carry us in His arms. If we can’t find 50 righteous things to do every day, then maybe we can start with ten, or even just one. As Alma says, if we can’t have faith yet, we can at least want to have faith, and we can let this desire grow within us until we are ready to believe (Alma 32:27). God’s ultimate goal for each of us is to be perfect, but He first wants us to just try to be good, in the smallest and simplest way that we can manage. If we feel we are too weak or too stubborn or too resentful to live up to every standard and commandment under the sun, then let us at least find one thing that we might do. And maybe one thing becomes five, and five becomes ten, and ten eventually becomes fifty. God didn’t want to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. He really tried to find at least 10 good people. And God doesn’t want us to be destroyed either. If we can find one tiny spark of goodness inside of us, God will encourage us to coax that little spark into a flame with whatever tiny and halting and half-hearted efforts we can muster, because He knows that if He can get us pointed in the right direction and actually moving towards goodness, then we will learn line upon line and grow from grace to grace and that little spark of light will grow brighter and brighter until the perfect day.
