“But this much I can tell you, that if ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God, and continue in the faith of what ye have heard concerning the coming of our Lord, even unto the end of your lives, ye must perish. And now, O man, remember, and perish not.” I’ve always interpreted this scripture as being delivered almost like an ultimatum. You better watch out or you’ll be sorry! This isn’t really a wrong interpretation, but it does seem incomplete to me. I don’t think that King Benjamin is only counseling us to watch out for danger or for problematic words or actions. I think the heart of this message is that we need to be constantly watching how we interact with the world, and how the world interacts with us. We need to watch what kinds of things cause us to react, and what kinds of reactions we reflexively reach for. We need to watch what kinds of consequences result from our thoughts and words and deeds. Too many of us stagger through life, reeling from one moment to the next, never giving any thought to how our thoughts, words and deeds make our lives easier, more peaceful and more enjoyable or harder, more chaotic and more painful. We do things the way habit and environment have conditioned us to do them. We have gotten good enough at avoiding the worst kinds of mistakes, and we have filed off our ambitions enough that the pain from dreams deferred does not haunt us too noticeably. In doing so, we sometimes allow ourselves to drift in autopilot and are pleasantly surprised when things work out in our favor and impotently bemoan our terrible fate when they do not. But the Lord did not place us on this Earth merely to become objects to be acted upon. If we are to effectively employ our agency to the best of our talents and abilities, then we have to be constantly watching ourselves, and our thoughts and our words and our deeds, evaluating and reevaluating what works and what doesn’t, what brings us happiness and success and what brings us misery and failure, what draws us closer to our Heavenly Father and to fulfilling our unique mission on Earth, and what stops us from fulfilling our calling. The more we watch, the more we will notice, and the better we will be able to navigate the tests and trials we face.
