Albert Einstein was arguably the most accomplished person of the 20th century. The editors of Time magazine accorded him that distinction—Person of the Century—after evaluating 100 nominees on the basis of global influence.[1] Yet he spent the last thirty-five years of his life pursing a goal—a grand unified theory of reality—that he never realized. By his own estimation, he died a failure, though his reverential modesty vis á vis nature afforded him some consolation. “It seems hard,” he commented wryly, “to sneak a peek at God’s cards.”[2]

Others who changed the world almost invariably did so with a sense of shortcoming or failure. William James, Harvard psychologist and philosopher, touched on this theme over a century ago: “Take the happiest man, the one most envied in the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.”[3]

To buttress his argument, James quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Luther, and Robert Louis Stevenson to the effect that they were weary of life and its ongoing disappointments. At age seventy-five Goethe wrote that his life had been a Sisyphean ordeal of rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again; Luther, responding to a friend who wished him another forty years of life, stated that he wished to die soon—even if it meant giving up his “chance of Paradise”; and Stevenson wrote that “whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.” To this rising chorus of negativism, James added his own voice: “Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation.”[4]

Yes, failure is part of the air we breathe. One might conjecture, however, that it is the oxygen component of that air, the part that keeps us alive and progressing. Our failures, our mistakes, “are a fact of life,” taught Elder Lynn G. Robbins. “Learning to skillfully play the piano is essentially impossible without making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million. To learn a foreign language, one must face the embarrassment of making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million. Even the world’s greatest athletes never stop making mistakes.”[5]

It is inspiring to note that while Abraham Lincoln lost many more political races than he won, he did win the big one for the US presidency, and that win, in most people’s minds, redeems all his previous losses. I suspect that most people, like myself, have failed significantly more often than they have succeeded. Professional athletes fail much of the time, and even the very best ones are often fortunate to break even in doing those things they do best. During Joe DiMaggio’s famous fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 (when he safely hit in fifty-six straight games), he failed to get on base nearly 60 percent of the time. Michael Jordan didn’t quite make 50 percent of his field goal attempts as a professional basketball player, and although he led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships, there were nine seasons in which his team failed to reach the championship playoff. His success, like our own, stands out against a backdrop of failure.

When I was young many of my teachers compared life to sports. We are here, metaphorically speaking, to score a touchdown or reach home plate against fierce opposition. What went unsaid was the necessity of opposition and the blessing of failure. Without either of these two so-called negatives there would be no positive: unrelieved success would soon become meaningless. And yet unrelieved success is baked into our conventional understanding of perfection. As we look back on our lives we often wish we could substitute witticisms and sparkling performances for all our mistakes, failures, lost opportunities, social blunders, embarrassments, and stupidities. But is this really what we want? Deeper reflection suggests that imperfection is part of the process of perfection. Each leans into the other, just as light and darkness do.

The 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been described as a “science-fiction horror film.”[6] It concerns a small town in California nearly taken over by an alien species from outer space. Spores drifting through space settle into the town and grow into large pods capable of producing bodies resembling people living nearby. Blank or featureless at first, each body gradually develops into a particular resident of the community—such as the police chief—while also assimilating that person’s memories and mannerisms. Then when residents fall asleep the alien look-alikes slip into their unconscious depths and subtract away their emotions. Soon the town is filled with pod people who, at first blush, look and behave exactly like their human originals. While conversing with them, however, real humans realize that something is monstrously wrong. Here are creatures with no emotions and consequently no tie to the pains, problems, and joys of everyday life. The pod people defend their way of being by saying it is simple and worry-free. It is better to live without pain and stress.

This is a horror film because viewers instinctively recoil from the prospect of a problem-free, pain-free life. Add up all the evil in the world and it would not come close to the pure evil of a flat, pod-people world. A world with no emotional ups and downs and no mistakes to regret and learn from. That would be the biggest mistake of all.

The Upside of Error

Denis Kirillov, a Russian concert pianist and composer, stated that artistic growth can’t occur without a willingness to make mistakes and sometimes to make them in public—to own them before others. Mistakes make one’s life and art interesting, he concludes. He added, however, that what you perceive as a mistake, others may see differently or not at all. We shouldn’t imagine that others see us exactly as we see ourselves, keying off the same slips and embarrassing moments.[7]

Others have embarrassing moments, disappointments, and insecurities of their own, and these often play into the formation of their most endearing qualities. My wife Janet and I met in a stake young single adults group in Idaho. Janet was one of the stake leaders and I was the young adult representative from my ward, callings that required us to meet with others in leadership councils. Being a stake leader, Janet often conducted the meetings, and one of the things I first noticed and grew to love about her was her shyness when asked to take charge. She was like me! Not only that, but she struggled courageously to act relaxed and comfortable. This quality—her courage—spoke volumes and heralded a willingness to embrace larger challenges, which she has done all throughout our married life together. What she might call a weakness is one of her strengths, made all the more appealing because it is rooted in a sense of weakness and commitment to the Lord, who makes weak things strong. Another divine coincidence of opposites.

Our mistakes, failures, and insecurities can become our strengths, our launching pads to surprising accomplishments, if we are courageous enough to put our trust in the growth experience that mortality offers us. Think of a child learning to talk. Mistakes are the raw material from which articulate speech eventually emerges. And even then, adults often jumble their words. Life is a trial, not just in the sense of being a test of character, but also in the sense of offering us opportunities to improve. Even when so-called practice is over and we are performing for an audience, we are still practicing, still reaching for the sky. The big moment, the big game, is just practice at a higher, riskier, more consequential level.

In addition to this rather everyday observation, there is the gospel insight that mistakes are part of the plan because our being here is the consequence of a mistake or irregularity that opened new vistas for Adam and Eve and their posterity. We do not believe that our first parents sinned by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; rather they transgressed the bounds of their idyllic existence in order to learn and grow. It may have seemed like an irredeemable mistake at first, but they came to understand it as an incomparable blessing. “And in that day Adam blessed God and was filled, and began to prophesy concerning all the families of the earth, saying: Blessed be the name of God, for because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh, I shall see God” (Moses 5:10). To which Eve added, “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11).

Adam and Eve’s transgression, portrayed as a sin or error by many Christians, was a blessing, although probably a very scary one at first. It projected them into a larger, more adventurous world—a world adapted to their yearning for growth and posterity. Underlying all this was “the joy of redemption” springing up from God’s love for his children. This they never should have known had they not transgressed.

Our errors may similarly be regarded as transgressions of a given routine that open new vistas and make us who we are. Biologically speaking, we are the product of millions of years of felicitous genetic error. Most genetic mutations, owing to their harmful effect, do not persist for long because the affected organisms tend to die before being able to reproduce. But a mutation or error that confers survival advantage is likely to get passed on to offspring so that over many generations it settles in as a defining characteristic of a species or subspecies. Hence, “life itself can be considered a mistake, or rather, the result of a lot of mistakes,” wrote Sam Slote. “Biological evolution—the slow accumulation of alterations in the genetic code—could be characterised as an erroneous transmission of information across generations and across domains, kingdoms, phyla, and so on. If there hadn’t been erroneous—that is, imperfect—transmission of genetic data, then human life would never have evolved. It’s not just that error makes us human, but rather, error made humans.”[8]

For some Christians, evolutionary biology is less authoritative than the biblical creation story. In both cases, however, error is part of the narrative. It helps explain who we are and how we got here. Further, in both cases, error possesses two aspects—it is bad and good. That is, when viewed more comprehensively, error’s downside is also its upside. One way or another, whether by genetic mutation or Adam and Eve’s transgression (or perhaps both), it bequeathed to us the life we know, which is something all, or nearly all, people (and plants and animals) want to hang on to for as long as possible.

Falling Up

If a mad scientist tried to produce a formula for life, he would probably never think to include error in the formula. That, however, seems to be an essential ingredient. As Charles Peirce observed, there must be moments when nature goes “sporting” and “swerves . . . from any definite formula”; otherwise, everything settles down to mindless repetition.[9] Mistakes and failures are part of the plan of salvation, because the plan, when followed, turns such into occasions of growth and happiness. Like Adam and Eve, we can, to our surprise, “fall up” into the joy of redemption.

Occasionally we physically fall up. For example, when we catch a toe on a stair and stumble up to the next step while regaining our balance. The stair or obstacle literally trips us up. The same thing may happen spiritually: when we stumble, repentance lifts us up over the obstacle. Spiritually speaking, repentance is an anti-gravity principle, or at least a way of taking flight while flapping our wings. In the everyday physical world, we take it for granted that “what goes up must come down,” referring to rocks, baseballs, and the like. The gospel rounds out this half-truth with its complementary opposite: those who humbly go down of their own volition always come back up. And coming back up coincides with redemption and the joy of redemption.

Again, Christ is our exemplar. He ascended above all things by first descending below them. Accordingly, those who try to take a shortcut by exalting themselves prematurely are sent to the back of line and asked to try again. Christ taught, “But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (Matthew 23:11–12).

Often it is not easy to humble oneself, particularly when culture and social expectation dictate otherwise. A couple years after my mother died in 2017, one of her granddaughters (my niece) made a long road trip to visit my wife and me. At the time she was in her mid-thirties and processing memories of her childhood and adolescence. Her father had died when she was a baby, and she and her brother, a year younger, were raised by her mother, a single parent. Fortunately, my parents lived nearby and threw themselves into the lives of their two grandchildren.

My niece related that when she and her brother were teenagers, my mother, by then widowed, took them rafting on the Snake River in Idaho. It was an exciting day, but the memory that stuck most vividly in my niece’s mind after twenty years had nothing to do with rafts or rapids. It was my mother choosing to sleep on the floor of the motel room so that her two teenaged grandchildren could sleep in the beds. My mother was in her seventies at the time and didn’t move around very well. Had she taken a bed on account of her age or limited mobility, or simply because she was the one financing the trip and paying for the room, no one would have protested. In fact, that would have struck her grandchildren as fair and right. But my mother transgressed social expectation and, whether intending to or not, planted a memory of Christlike love in her granddaughter’s mind.

I doubt my mother thought much about it; she just wanted her grandchildren to have a good time. Nevertheless, her kind act continues to echo, and according to the promises of the gospel, will redound to her exaltation. Upon putting her grandchildren’s happiness before her own comfort, she humbled herself. Adam and Eve did the same thing. Catching sight of the possibility of growth and posterity through a glass darkly, they humbly and courageously left their comfortable existence in the garden. Only after experiencing the pain and hardship of their new situation, however, were they able to grasp the magnitude of their transgression: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11).

The transition or transgression from garden to lone and dreary world was no less wondrous than our transition or transgression from physical womb to everyday earth life. Each was a birth into a bigger, more demanding, more soul-stretching world. But to those who remain faithful throughout the transition (“all the obedient,” Eve says) God gives the joy of redemption and eternal life.

Adam and Eve’s story and all stories patterned thereon are instances of celestial serendipity: choosing to embrace the hard, humbling opportunity that leads to growth, persevering faithfully, and then experiencing the surprising joy of salvation as Christ redeems us (buys us back) from seeming oblivion. Without the descent or fall, there would be no joyful rescue because there would be nothing to be rescued from. “But where there is danger,” wrote Friedrich Hölderlin, “a rescuing element grows as well.”[10] Only amid extremity can we experience saving relief and joy.

Our part involves risking our present comfort and happiness for something infinitely greater. This is not easy because the risk is real, not a contrived circumstance we merely endure for a while. Not like toughing it out in the dentist’s chair knowing that soon the treatment will be over; it’s rather more like feeling, as Joseph Smith did in Liberty Jail, that God is not near and takes no interest in our plight: “O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:1). It’s feeling abandoned, so much so that, like Jesus, one might feel pressed to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). In other words, real danger in a world charged with the real possibility of failure. This is what makes the rescue utterly real and meaningful. “For His Atonement to be infinite and eternal,” taught Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, “He had to feel what it was like to die not only physically but spiritually, to sense what it was like to have the divine Spirit withdraw, leaving one feeling totally, abjectly, hopelessly alone.”[11]

A Personal Experience

The feeling of failure and abandonment is part of our education here on earth—Mortality 101. The promise, however, is that those who humbly go down will sooner or later joyfully come back up. When I was a young father, I tried hard to find a good job to support my growing family. I had a master’s degree, and my goal, following others, was to land a white-collar job. After months of trying, and while working temporary minimum-wage jobs in the meantime, I got a job teaching English in Japan. The pay, however, was barely enough to get by on, and so after eighteen months and another baby, we returned to the United States. I was desperate and felt that I had suffered enough, but I still couldn’t find a good job and went back to picking up short-term, minimum-wage work. Living near BYU, I also went through a program to become a seminary teacher, but after several weeks of class instruction and a week of student teaching, I was rejected.

With the rejection, decisions from my past came into focus. I had mostly suppressed my own deep interests while studying at BYU. My two best friends were very business minded and I had convinced myself that I needed to be more like them if I wished to succeed in life. After leaving BYU, though, I couldn’t capitalize on a Master of Public Administration degree, while they had already moved smoothly into the job market with bachelor’s degrees. It was all very confusing to me and eventually my thoughts turned to the army. After talking with a recruiter, I felt some slight satisfaction with the assurance that this time I would not be rejected, but the bigger consideration was a steady job and cost-free medical and dental care for my family. All the same, it was a hard decision because I didn’t feel I had a military bone in my body.

The Lord helped me through the process, however, even though for a while it seemed the heavens were silent. Shortly before my thoughts turned to the army, I hiked up a mountain behind our apartment in Springville and prayed for most of the day. I wanted a revelation, but nothing happened, and so at nightfall, I went back home. In retrospect it seems the Lord was closing off every possibility but the army, because after I finally enlisted in the army, some sunlight peeked through the clouds. Prior to enlisting, I saw the army as a “spanking” for having squandered my educational opportunities on subjects I had little or no interest in, and I promised myself that should I have another opportunity to go to school, I would not repeat that mistake. The post-enlistment sunlight came in the form of a temple experience that blessed me with a love for the young men I would soon get to know in boot camp. They also were coming into the army with anxiety and fear. One difference was that I was, in one way or another, in a different demographic. Once I began to get acquainted with them, however, that didn’t seem to matter. My bunkmate, for instance, was 18 years old; I was 28. He was from Lake Charles, Louisiana; I had grown up in Montpelier, Idaho. He had just graduated from high school and was single; I had a master’s degree and a wife and three children. He was Black; I was White. Despite our differences, we got along like brothers and even corresponded for a while by mail after leaving boot camp.

Although the training itself was generally not enjoyable, I often marveled at how comfortable I felt with the other twenty-three trainees in the open-bay barracks to which I was assigned—not that I became friends with all of them, but it seemed that I could see their humanity even as they acted tough and unafraid. One young man from Tennessee liked to tell “Mormon jokes,” but I took that in stride. Some of his jokes were actually pretty funny.

Basic training set the tone for the rest of my time in the army. I didn’t enjoy much of the training and what I perceived as silly loyalty to military protocol, but the people I got to know were wonderful and highly memorable.

After eight years in the army, I had decided that I would probably stick it out for another twelve and retire with a pension. But then the Lord intervened. When I enlisted, the recruiter told me that the army would pay for evening classes at local universities should I choose to take them. This was true in principle but generally not in practice: the army kept one too busy with field maneuvers and other assignments to let one even think about going to night school. But when we left Germany in 1985 and rotated to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, a magnificent opportunity opened up. While nearly all soldiers of my rank and background were assigned as instructors in a program that involved overnight field training, I was asked to develop tests for other Russian linguists. To do this I had to work with classified documents, all of which were controlled by civilian employees who quit work at 4:30 p.m. This meant that my evenings were free. Harvard University, about forty miles away, beckoned. The night school offered courses in a variety of subjects at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and I chose to study history of science at the graduate level. My first course from I. B. Cohen, a prominent historian of science, hooked me, and after that I took eight more courses. In the meantime, as my enlistment drew to a close, I applied to several full-time graduate programs, and my wife and I planned our transition back to civilian life.

We landed at Indiana University, which housed a highly regarded history and philosophy of science program. Throughout my study at Indiana I worried about my job prospects. The pain of my pre-army struggle to find a good job was still raw. Unbeknownst to me, my wife, Janet, was praying that I would be surprised by a good job offer. If I had known about her prayer, I probably would have invested little faith in it. Not only was it hard to find jobs in academia at the time (just as it is now), but I was not well connected in the profession. I knew no one at any of the BYU campuses, nor did I have the confidence to market myself aggressively. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Lord was about to reverse the pattern of my job seeking. Whereas before I felt like I would approach a door leading to a good job only to turn the doorknob and find it locked, now the door would swing open while I was still some distance away.

Just after I completed my coursework and passed my qualifying exams, I got a call from Lance Chase, a faculty member in the BYU–Hawaii History Department who had learned of me through Joe Nichols, a former member of my ward in Indiana and recent hire in BYU–Hawaii’s English Department. The call was a complete surprise, and it led to eight wonderful years for my family and me in Laie, Hawaii. Then long after we had settled into the idea of spending the rest of my career in Hawaii, I got a surprise call from Cody Carter, chair of the Philosophy Department at BYU in Provo. Soon we had bought a house in Orem and were back in the familiar mountains of Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, twenty-two years after having left them. One small incident highlighted the closing of the loop.

About a year after I began teaching at BYU, I got an email from the Religion Department asking me to fit a Book of Mormon class into my teaching schedule. This surprised me, but I reasoned that this was probably an invitation sent out to all non-religion faculty and that I was free to decline it. So, feeling busy with other responsibilities, I said no. When the same invitation showed up in my email a semester later, I again said no. The third time this happened, however, the secretary of the Religion Department replied that I was obligated to teach the class and could not keep refusing the request. Confused, I talked with my chair and learned that the Philosophy Department had an ongoing obligation to teach one Book of Mormon class a year. He had given my name to the Religion Department as a possible instructor, and they had approved it but evidently had forgotten to contact him so that he could brief me on my new assignment. After things got worked out, I taught Book of Mormon at BYU for six years.

What struck me as indicative of the Lord’s sense of humor, and his way of blessing his children, is that about twenty-two years earlier I had earnestly—with considerable prayer and fasting—sought to become a seminary teacher. The Church, or a representative of the Church, however, said no. This setback, more than any other, led me into the army and on a roller-coaster ride as my family moved eleven times in twenty-two years and expanded from three to six children. Now, another representative of the Church was insisting that I fulfill my obligation to teach a religion class at one of the Lord’s universities. The dead end I ran into years earlier had become an open expanse, and Janet and I couldn’t help but note the contrast and reflect on Lehi’s teaching that opposition lies at the heart of all meaningful experiences. In our case, a few years’ journey in the wilderness had made the milk and honey of the promised land taste so much better.

Our experience is one of many variations on the gospel promise that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). Not that they always work out as we would like them to, but they work together for our growth and blessing, and we generally can’t control the timeline. But however long or short the trial, we do not endure it alone. When I was in boot camp, I got acquainted with a young man who had enlisted in the army after graduating from college. He was a devout Christian and occasionally we discussed religion in the evening. He told me that his decision to join the army fell into place when Jesus Christ told him that he—Jesus Christ—was joining the army, and so to continue his walk with the Lord, he needed to join the army as well. I had never thought of trials that way, but we know that we cannot pass through any trial that Christ has not already endured and, by virtue of his boundless compassion, continues to endure on our behalf.

In the Wine Press Alone

For a while in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was strengthened by an angel. In the end, though, he pressed on alone, and this where his great trial diverges dramatically from ours. “I have trodden the winepress alone,” he states in scripture (Doctrine and Covenants 133:50; see Isaiah 63:5). Luke writes that “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44), while King Benjamin and Christ himself state that he bled from every pore (see Mosiah 3:7; Doctrine and Covenants 19:18). Coupled together, the two images—winepress and blood flowing from every pore—suggest that his body exuded blood as grapes exude juice while being crushed in the press. So great was his agony, and so magnificent his love for his Father and his determination to carry on without murmuring, that he was both the one treading the winepress and the one trodden underfoot.[12] With this motif in mind, George Herbert wrote “The Agonie,” his 1633 poem celebrating the unfathomable depth of God’s love: “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine; which my God feels as bloud, but I, as wine.”[13]

In scripture we read, “And I [Christ] looked, and there was none to help [in the winepress]; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation to me; and my fury, it upheld me” (Isaiah 63:5). Why the concern with others’ absence from the winepress? Because almost by definition winepress labor was group labor. Andrew Skinner explains: “Several people would get into the press, a rock-lined pit with a mosaic or plaster floor, and, holding onto one another, smash the grapes or olives with their feet until the fruit turned into a thick pulp. Unless one held onto others in the press, it was almost impossible to lift one’s feet in the thick sludge to tromp the grapes into juice. It also became very slippery, and without others in the press to hang onto for support, it was very easy to fall.” It was here, adds Skinner, that “one Man suffered for all men—the greatest contradiction in the history of created things.”[14]

And what about Christ’s fury, mentioned again and again in passages that bear on his suffering in the winepress? Let me draw again from my own experience. I was once asked to talk at a fathers and sons’ campout about forty miles from my home. I agreed to the request even though my two sons were grown and living away from home. Since two other brothers in my neighborhood also had to be at the campout, I kindly (so I thought) invited them to ride both ways with me, thinking they would at least offer to help with the cost of gas. When neither of them did so, I began to steam but said nothing.

With this story in mind, you may well appreciate my very human initial conjecture that Christ’s fury was a consequence of his having to suffer for sins he never committed, not to mention his having to suffer through the ordeal with “none to uphold” him. It was utterly unfair. He alone had paid the price of our salvation, just as I alone had paid the price of gas for two “slacker” brethren. If my unfair payment had made me angry, surely his far-heavier payment would have provoked him to fury.

Scripture, however, does not support this conjecture. When Christ returns he “shall be red in his apparel, and his garments like him that treadeth in the wine-vat” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:48). Red, of course, symbolizes his blood shed on our behalf. Additionally, however, the blood of unrepentant sinners also stains his garments, and this is what kindles his fury: “And I have trampled them in my fury, and I did tread upon them in mine anger, and their blood have I sprinkled upon my garments, and stained all my raiment; for this was the day of vengeance which was in my heart” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:51). Clearly he is speaking of those who choose not to repent, for in the next verse the tone changes abruptly as he speaks of those who have repented—his redeemed: “And now the year of my redeemed is come; and they shall mention the loving kindness of their Lord, and all that he has bestowed upon them according to his goodness, and according to his loving kindness, forever and ever” (Doctrine and Covenants 133:52).

Repentance is all important because it allows us to bring the power of Christ’s Atonement into our lives. In March of 1830, the Lord commanded members of the Church to “preach naught but repentance,” and the commandment is prefaced by a searing description of Christ’s sacrificial sufferings and the fury he feels toward those who do not repent: “Therefore I command you to repent—repent, lest I smite you by the rod of my mouth, and by my wrath, and by my anger, and your sufferings be sore—how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not” (Doctrine and Covenants 19:15). The imagery is arresting, even violent, but it drives home the point that the biggest mistake we can make is to refuse the gift of God’s atoning love. That gift is precious not just by virtue of its incalculable inherent worth, but also because it was, as Elder Holland stated, “purchased, paid for, at an excruciating cost symbolized by the blood of the Lamb who shed it.”[15] Repentance is our thank offering to the Lord, vanishingly small compared to what he endured, but nevertheless an earnest and sincere acknowledgement of his magnificent gift—a heartfelt “thank you.”

Back to my little story. What really aggravated me was the failure of either brother to at least offer to help cover the cost of gas. Granted, I am very human and probably too transactional in my dealings with others, but I couldn’t help but compare what happened that day with another, much earlier experience. I was an undergraduate student at BYU and drove home for Christmas break with three or four other students from my hometown—a two-hundred-mile trip. When one girl offered money for gas as I picked her up at her apartment in Provo, I declined the offer and expressed thanks. The trip was uneventful and completely forgettable except for the two dollars I found after dropping everyone off at their homes. It was on the back seat where the girl sat. Two dollars isn’t much today, but in 1972 when the average price of gasoline was 36 cents a gallon, it was a generous offering. It is the only reason I remember the trip.

Most people, I think, are like me: they appreciate heartfelt thanks and remember kind acts. If we make the mistake of not thanking God by repenting, we alone bear the crushing cost of our broken and sinful nature. A huge mistake, really, because in the winepress he alone covered that cost for us on condition of repentance.

Notes

[1] Frederic Golden, “Person of the Century: Albert Einstein,” Time, December 31, 1999, https://time.com.

[2] Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives, ed. Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 68.

[3] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, rev. ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), 127.

[4] James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 127–28.

[5] “Until Seventy Times Seventy,” Ensign, May 2018, 21.

[6] “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Wikipedia, https://www.wikipedia.org.

[7] See Russian with Anastasia, “Russian Conversations 35: With Musician Denis Kirillov,” YouTube Video, 6:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T5XR62CKmk.

[8] Sam Slote, “‘A Man of Genius Makes No Mistakes’: Joycean Misapprehensions,” OUPblog, February 2, 2022, https://blog.oup.com/.

[9] Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” Philosophers of Process, ed. Douglas Browning and William T. Myers (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 7.

[10] From the opening lines of his 1803 poem “Patmos.” An English translation can be found at https://www.poemhunter.com/.

[11] “None Were with Him,” Ensign, May 2009, 88.

[12] John F. A. Sawyer explains this notion of Christ treading the winepress while being trodden underfoot as “a bizarre but popular interpretation” of Isaiah’s winepress imagery, “which goes back to the Church Fathers. . . . Christ, the True Vine (John 15:1), is imagined as ‘the first cluster [of grapes] in the winepress.’” The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 96.

[13] “The Agonie,” https://www.georgeherbert.org.uk/archives/selected_work_34.html.

[14] Andrew C. Skinner, Gethsemane (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2010), loc. 148 of 190, Overdrive.

[15] Jeffrey R. Holland, “The Ministry of Reconciliation,” Ensign, November 2018, 79.