Secret Combinations

The Book of Mormon warns against the dangers of secret combinations. And as harmful as these can be in the sense of a secret brotherhood of organized criminals, there is a different way in which "secret combinations" can be harmful. A lot of us secretly hope that there is some secret combination of how we can live our life that can protect us against any and all future hardships, like a cheat code or magical solution that if we could just crack we could finally stop struggling so much. The idea of secret combinations is incredibly tempting. After all, none of us like going through tests and trials, and since we so often fail or at least do much more poorly on these tests than we would have liked, there is nothing more appealing than a guarantee that we never have to be tested or feel uncomfortable or inadequate again. Secret combinations are dangerous because if they did exist, it would destroy the whole reason that we are in this mortal experience to begin with. We came to Earth to be tried and tested, to be challenged and change for the better, to persevere through setbacks and sidetracks towards perfection. A secret combination or a shortcut that bypassed all of these tests would deny us of the hard won knowledge and wisdom and experience and faith that these tests are designed to bring out. But the greater danger is that since they run contrary to God's plan, and God's plan will not be thwarted, and thus by definition they can't possibly exist, we therefore waste our time and our energy in pursuit of something that at best distracts us and at worst blinds us to the truth, deafens us to the whisperings of the Spirit, and hardens our hearts to receiving the lessons intended for us in our many tests and trials. By obsessing over trying to find a non-existent end to our tests, we make them harder to endure and next to impossible to benefit from. There is no secret combination, no tower of Babel, no get Saved quick scheme that can help us to skip over the hard parts that lay ahead of us. The best we can do is put our trust in our Heavenly Father and follow the simple, unhidden, unsecret steps of the Gospel and do our best to soak up as much light and truth and joy and virtue from every trial that we face.