Faith in Both Plans

Did you know there were two plans?

I mean two real plans - not the counterfeit plan of the destroyer - no, no. I'm talking about two plans that involve getting you and me - the fallen humans - back into the presence of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

The first plan is THE plan- what the scriptures refer to as the plan of salvation, the plan of redemption, the great plan of happiness. It's the Big One - the overarching plan of our God to make us clean again after experiencing the filth of the fallen world which is the classroom of our mortality.

The Main Plan centers in Jesus Christ - the Lamb of God - Father's perfectly obedient Son who came to pay the price of all our learning experiences - experiences which, ironically, and without Him - impossibly disqualify us from ever entering Father's presence again. Without Jesus Christ, God's glory is simply too much for a fallen human to abide - to tolerate.

"For he who is not able to abide the law of a celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory." (D&C 88:22)

Without Jesus Christ to sanctify us and help us become holy, God's glory is simply too much.

But with Him - we can be clean again. Because of Him, we can change. Even people who have never heard of repentance - anyone who decides to make any changes in their lives to learn and improve and climb... Even if they don't believe in Jesus Christ now, those hardy folk will one day recognize that growth and progress were - and are - and will be only possible because Jesus Christ shed blood to pay for the mortal school of experience for all of us.

Faith in Jesus Christ and the Main Plan are talked about a lot at church and in home gospel lessons. While the finer points distinguishing salvation and exaltation are often muddy, most rank-and-file members of the church will tell you that because of Jesus Christ, we will be resurrected as He was, and can potentially live eternally in the presence of God.

But the other plan... the other plan is much harder to nail down.

The overarching plan is somehow like the blueprints of an exquisite building. Let's call it a mansion. The foundation and framework are all in place. Everything is finished to perfection. Nothing has been left to chance; every detail has been considered and planned for.

But the other plan - it's uniquely yours, and yours alone. It's the plan for your life, tailored to your intelligence and spirit, and designed to give you the ideal testing experience for your optimum growth - exaltation.

It was the plan roughly sketched with you and Father before this life, thanks to foreordination (NOT predestination! Let's not go there). This plan is filled out in more detail as the days of your life unfold, choices are made, and mortality does its work in your curriculum to teach you all the things Father sent you here to learn and become. He was - and IS - personally, intimately involved in this plan as surely as He was the Author of the overarching plan that applies to all of us.

At the risk of revealing too much, I feel to ask: is it just me, or is your plan super messy, and seems at any time to be completely off the rails? Do you feel like it's a bit of a train wreck on any given day? Do you feel like you're struggling with the same test questions over and over and over again, like a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day? Is it ever challenging to see the hand of God in this sketched out plan that's still being written in mortal time for us here - and hard to see any eternal value and purpose in any of it?

Sometimes it feels like this beautiful template of the Main Plan doesn't fit over the vague, still-being-written, smudged and tear-splattered blueprints of my life. How is this all going to turn out? The worst of these times is when I'm waiting: for answers, for my own growth, for someone else's - and dang, that means their agency to change as well - for relief, for healing, for different outcomes, for a harvest of any fruit at all after years of planting, digging, and pruning.

Waiting means that making sense of my blueprint and reconciling it to the blueprint of the Main Plan often creates a cognitive dissonance that seems completely irreconcilable. If it were a movie, these are the parts where we muttered in the dark theater, "This is never gonna work out."

I would humbly submit that having faith in this space is the very most challenging - and crucial - faith to develop. This is faith inside the space of that cognitive dissonance - in the space between our faith in the Main Plan and the uncertainty we feel on any given Tuesday about it all working out and showing up in our plan.

I'm learning - slowly, glacially slowly learning - that this space is the most sacred ground I walk. If I can hang on to God when I don't know, when I'm sure I've wrecked everything, when there is no fruit in spite of planting, then I enable God to help me in developing unshakable faith that He can do amazing things with.

This is where miracles are born.

And sometimes, the miracle isn't... the miracle. Sometimes, the miracle is what God forges in the waiting. Sometimes, it's learning to thank God for the miracle... in advance of the miracle, trusting the Giver of all good things, knowing this is a Father who gives bread and stones - fish and serpents. (https://www.laureensimper.com/post/let-me-tell-you-about-my-god-how-much-more)

Something is being built while we wait, while we don't know the answer, while we get it wrong, while we weep. If we weep with Jesus, He'll weep with us. He'll stay with us, and quietly creates a bond to lend us His strength to get through all of it. He promised: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." (John 16:33)

The challenge in having faith in both plans is putting into the proper light the purpose of both, and trusting the architect of both. Here is the perspective of two of my favorite writers, thinkers, and disciples in all the wide, wide world.

Neal A. Maxwell reminds us of the importance of patience in the waiting:

"Patience is a willingness, in a sense, to watch the unfolding purposes of God with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than pacing up and down within the cell of our circumstances."

(Neal A. Maxwell, Patience, BYU Devotional, November 27, 1979)

(https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/neal-a-maxwell/patience/)

C.S. Lewis (who saw that coming??) reminds us of why we wait in the discomfort and sorrow of mortality:

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.

"But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.

"You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."

(C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

God is up to building humans, in covenant partnership with Him. From everything I see of what He's built, I trust He's up to something quite beautiful when He's finished, in spite of the oh-so-raw material He started with. Thanks to Jesus.