After The Fall

In an episode of the TV Show Modern Family, Claire Dunphy tells her husband Phil that she feels like it's her job to make sure none of her family ever falls and feels unequal to the task. Phil makes the observation that maybe her job isn't to stop them from ever falling, but to be there to help pick them up after they fall. God actually does have the power to stop us from falling. In fact, a lot of our most fervent prayers are centered around a plea to stop us from falling and failing. But God doesn't always stop us from falling. He didn't stop Adam and Eve from falling in the Garden of Eden. He could have. He could have surrounded the Tree of Knowledge of Good and evil with a hundred foot walls and a moat of lava. But if He didn't allow Adam and Eve to fall, then the whole Earth would have been filled with exactly two people wandering around in a garden, knowing no good and knowing no evil, never having fallen and never having had to learn to pick themselves back up. It is the same with each of us. Despite the fact that God has unlimited power and despite the fact that God loves us infinitely, God allows us to fall, over and over again. In exasperation, we may be tempted to ask, If God won't stop us from falling even when He can and even when His greatest desire is for our eternal happiness, then what good is He, really? Well, if God's purpose isn't to stop the fall from happening, then He must be holding His power in reserve for after the fall. He knows that there are lessons that we can learn only by allowing us to fall, but He never intended for us to try to recover from our falls all by ourselves. Our Savior is desperate to help us the very nanosecond that He is able, and if that help doesn't come quite as quick as we would like, we would be prideful unto folly to reject His helping hand as soon as it is offered. We only prolong our misery by insisting that we pick ourselves back up all by ourselves. The more times that we fall and then learn to trust our Heavenly Father's wisdom by repenting and applying the Atonement in our lives, the better we will get at walking the gospel path and and the less likely we will be to fall and the less likely we will be to delay in reaching out to our Savior Who is right by our side to help us the moment that we fall. I know that there is wisdom in everything that our Heavenly Father suffers us to suffer through, and I know that Jesus Christ is right there beside us, falling and suffering right alongside us, helping us to pick ourselves back up the moment we let Him.