“Behold, I send you out to prove the world, and the laborer is worthy of his hire.” (D&C 84:79). God’s work and His glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of His children. One of the interesting implications of this endeavor, assuming that God’s success rate is greater than a single child, is that there won’t just be one path to exaltation. Of course, Jesus Christ is the way, the only way, to eternal life. But while we must each bend our knee and confess that Jesus is the Christ, the specifics of our individual interactions between our agency and the Lord’s grace on the proving ground of this mortal journey will absolutely be unique. Imagine how much chaos might be generated if billions of people who have been given the power to work out for themselves what the good is engaged in constant, often unsuccessful, experimentation. Well, we don’t have to imagine it. We’re living through it. I was listening to a podcast and someone brought up the question of why we couldn’t have only good restaurants, and the answer he came up with was that in order to have even one good restaurant, then the number of bad restaurants had to be not zero, as people with limited experience, limited resources, or limited imagination tried to make good restaurants and didn’t always succeed. We all chose to embark on this journey of becoming more like our Heavenly Father but none of us really know exactly how to be like Him, even when we’ve been fortunate to be given scriptures and guidebooks and prophets who try to lead and guide us. We still have to work it out for ourselves. We still have to go out and prove the world. We often talk about “tests” and “trials”, and I think we usually approach this topic from the perspective not as testers but as the ones being tested. It is clearly the case that we are subject to all kinds of tests and tribulations so that God may prove whether or not we will obey Him in all things. But while there are many tests that we would never participate in willingly, if we assume we are only mere objects to be acted upon then we deny our own role in this whole testing process. We can blindly stumble from one test to the next, always bemoaning our cruel fate and abdicating any sense of responsibility and denying any possibility of change or improvement. Or we can keep our eyes and our ears and our minds and our hearts open and pay attention. We can try something and then analyze the results. We can test out different paths forward and learn to distinguish the good from the evil. We will get it wrong most of the time. We will start off down a thousand paths that don’t lead to immortality and eternal life. But we will only arrive at the ultimate good if we are first allowed to work out through many, many trials and errors what that one correct pathway is. We can follow the good examples of others, and the example of our Savior Jesus Christ most of all, but we will not achieve exaltation until we have labored ceaselessly and tirelessly to prove the world and find that one path to eternal life that is unique to our own individual combination of gifts and strengths and weaknesses and trials and errors and a healthy dose of grace and forgiveness. We are all on this earth to be tested, but we will only truly pass the test once we have become the testers ourselves.
