“Verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness;” (D&C 58:27). There is not a single person in the world that does not believe at least on some level that things could be better than they are now. Not all of us actually try to do something to make things better, but we all agree that things should be better. For those of us who move beyond our apathy, laziness, or fatalism, one of the traps that we fall into is that everything can be reduced to a single problem with a single solution. Even if this were the case, which it isn't, we would all find pretty quickly that our real world efforts do not measure up to the utopian ideals that our imaginations conjure up. Either the steps we take fail to generate the solutions we intended, or, worse, they generate a whole set of new problems that leave us with a worse situation than we started. That is why we must utilize our free will to do many things. We can't always know beforehand which visions and plans and actions will result in a net positive and which will result in a net negative. But if we do many things, we will discover for ourselves the ones that do the most good while simultaneously causing the least harm. But finding a good cause is not enough. Merely paying lip service to a good cause will do little to bring about the vision for a better world that such a cause has embedded in it. We have to be engaged in a good cause. We have to pledge our time and talents and resources, even our very lives to the realization of that good cause. We should be so dedicated and focused on bringing this good cause to fruition that we actually start to feel anxious about it. Our eagerness for the realization of our vision for a hopeful future should be so intense that we start to get a little afraid that we won't have as much time and energy as we need and want to get the job done as thoroughly as quickly as we want. Everyone wants the world to be better, few of us will take the time to try many things out until we have actually found some good causes, and fewer still will become so dedicated and engaged in actually bringing to pass our righteous vision that we will get anxious that we're not doing enough or moving fast enough. I hope we can find some good causes to which we can truly be anxiously engaged.
