This book is organized around problems that never seem to go away. Indeed, these problems involve more than the simple ups and downs of everyday life. They strike us as regrettable features of the world, and we often feel that if we could just get rid of them, we would free ourselves from a great deal of unnecessary pain and worry. Maybe so, but I recall what a medical doctor once told me when I consulted him about a knee injury: “Pain is your friend.”

There is a lot of good in the world and a lot of bad, but if that was all there were, we would just bounce back and forth between the two. Reality, however, is not set up that way. Lehi taught that the world we know is “a compound in one” for some heavenly purpose (2 Nephi 2:11). Although singularly different from one another, good and bad are not miles or even inches apart. They intermingle or compound together, said Lehi, and this intermingling gives us a world that puts us squarely in the mix of things and sometimes mixes us up as well. A world where appearances can be deceiving, where bad can posture as good, and where what we deem as bad often turns out to be our friend. To find our way out of this maze of good and bad, we must embrace the fundamental principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“By proving contraries, truth is made manifest,” stated Joseph Smith.[1] William Blake similarly wrote, “Without Contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence.”[2] If we want to learn and grow, we evidently must be in the scrum of contraries where we risk getting banged up.

When Joseph Smith and William Blake spoke of the need for contraries, they imagined oppositional tension.[3] Love and hate, for example, do not obliterate one another; rather they structure existence through mutual resistance, like teepee poles that push against each other to form the frame of a teepee. The teepee is real (that is, useful and meaningful) by token of contrary forces, and a similar interplay of contraries situates us within reality. To push on something implies resistance or pushback; otherwise push has no meaning. Joseph Smith famously stated that he was, in large part, the product of oppositional pushback: “I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain; and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force” against all sorts of obstacles and even hell itself. Certainly this was not a pleasant experience, but the ultimate effect was positive: “Thus I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty.”[4]

The imagery is a bit violent, but it speaks to the down-and-dirty experiential character of the refining process. We are made better by the spiritual, emotional, and physical bruises we sustain as we tumble down mountains. Eugene England, who addressed this issue in an essay entitled “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel,” proffered this explanation of Joseph Smith’s claim that truth is made manifest by “proving contraries”:

By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true—as effective—as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us. The Church is true because it is concrete, not theoretical; in all its contradictions and problems, it is at least as productive of good as is the gospel.[5]

Not that the Church can be separated from the gospel, but it is another place where, to use Soren Kierkegaard’s language, we take a “people bath.”[6] If we go to church and accept callings, we have no choice but to deal with others, and there is a world of difference between sitting on the bleachers and being on the playing field. When I ran track in high school, I was bemused when well-meaning spectators urged me to run faster. The contradiction between their words and my pain almost seemed unreal, given that their words were so easily spoken and my ability to run faster was so limited by the pain of the moment. I also recall taking a fall while snow skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and tumbling uncontrollably down a mountain. What both amused and perplexed me was hearing my friends call out, “Stop rolling, Dave!” as if I could simply turn off gravity. They had one understanding of the situation and I quite another, but I was the one taking the beating and, I hoped, deriving the benefit. At the very least, I learned the difference between participating and watching, between firsthand and secondhand experience. Later it occurred to me that we are here on earth to gain firsthand experience—to tumble down the mountain sometimes, to feel things rather than merely watch them from a distance.

“For it must needs be,” declared Lehi, “that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). Otherwise, he added, nothing happens. Without misery, there can be no happiness; without darkness, no light; without pain, no relief from pain; without evil, no goodness. Life becomes tasteless mush, not even registering as life, and God’s purposes are never realized.

This too I learned from firsthand experience. I once spent three weeks in San Diego, California, living in the downtown YMCA while doing academic research at a nearby university. Because I had little money, I opted for one big meal a day where I would stuff myself to the gills. Not far from the YMCA I found an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet for just five dollars a meal. The first evening I tried it, I thought it was excellent. But by the third evening, I wondered if the quality had declined. Maybe a new cook. By the fourth evening there was no doubt that the food was inferior. Not that it tasted bad. It just didn’t taste like much of anything at all. I couldn’t tell whether it tasted good or bad. Then it hit me. This was a real-life illustration of Lehi’s teaching: without variation, life is flavorless. I decided to vary my eating routine.

Even the words on this page illustrate Lehi’s teaching. Without the black-white contrast of print and paper, nothing would register. In the Talmud, a Jewish commentary on the first five books of the Bible, God is described as delivering his message to Moses on Mount Sinai “as black fire on white fire.” Gerald Schroeder explains: “The black and the white are two parts of a single Divine message—the black fire being the recorded text of the Bible, the words that we read, and the white fire being that part of the message subtly held behind the text, sequestered in nature.”[7]

My aim in writing this book is to celebrate Lehi’s teaching, which, it seems to me, gets bigger and more wonderful the more one thinks about it. Ultimately it culminates in the realization that this is a pretty good world if one wants it to grow into the even better world we call heaven. We have everything we need right here—the good, the bad, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, which teaches us how to transmute the earthly dross of sin and hardship into heavenly gold. The difficulty is in the everyday application of gospel principles. Mortal life is littered with instances of imperfection, unfairness, uncertainty, and many other deficits that seem all wrong and counterproductive. But maybe these blights are here for us, not simply hit-or-miss happenings that regrettably blemish our lives. Maybe mosquitoes are part of the plan, along with noisy neighbors, lazy coworkers, rude drivers, and knucklehead politicians. Maybe they can help us on our way to heaven. And maybe, in fact, we would be worse off without them, because then everything would be secondhand experience. We would be able to talk a good game, but never actually get into the game.

In each of the chapters that follow, I pick out one or two features of the world that seem all wrong (or mostly wrong) and then try to show that they are part of God’s plan and are essential to our growth and happiness. The gospel, as we all know, turns things upside down. The first shall be last and the last first. The great and the mighty shall be humbled and the humble exalted. Those intending to breeze into the kingdom of heaven shall be delayed and commanded to repent. The nitty-gritty imperfections of this world, I argue in a similar vein, can be celestial stardust, the stuff we become as earth becomes heaven (see Doctrine and Covenants 130:9).

Notes

[1] Joseph Smith History, 1838–56, vol. F-1, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/. “Contraries” is the modernized spelling of the original “contrarieties.” Brigham Young similarly stated that “all facts are proved and made manifest by their opposite.” In Journal of Discourses (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855–86), 13:59.

[2] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793),” The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 250.

[3] For Blake, see Ishraq Bassam Al-Omoush, “Contraries in William Blake’s Poetry,” European Journal of Scientific Research 154, no. 2 (Oct 2019): 213–19.

[4] Joseph Smith History, 1838–56, vol. D-1, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/.

[5] Eugene England, “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel,” Sunstone 22, no. 3/4 (June 1999): 63.

[6] Quoted in Joakim Garff, Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 308.

[7] Gerald L. Schroeder, God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong about God All Along (HarperCollins, 2009), chap. 1, e-book.