A Culture of Struggles

                

               In recent months, I’ve seen a trend that troubles me. Most of these incidents happen in fast and testimony meetings, which in LDS culture is an interesting sounding board from which one can gather many candid opinions on life. The trend that is disturbing me is that everyone seems to talk often of struggles, trials, and challenges in these meetings. I’ve heard many well-intentioned people who want to be realistic about their lives get up and say things like “Look, I know life is hard for you—it’s been hard for me—but the Gospel has helped me through the hardships, and it can help you too.” The theme that I’ve been hearing is this idea that life is a constant struggle, and left unchecked, everyone would be wallowing in sorrow and depression. I am in no way trying to criticize what’s been said over pulpits under the influence of the Spirit. Several of these very testimonies have touched my heart. But there are also a great many times when people have looked over the crowd and said “I know that life is really rough for all of you” where I’ve started to squirm a little in my seat. I’ll ask myself if life is really that hard for me, and I would venture to respond negatively, and I don’t even consider myself that good at being a happy person. Why does “life is hard for everyone” have to be the fundamental premise of these testimonies? I’m starting to think it’s becoming a cultural norm for us here at BYU to assume that it’s normal, natural, and realistic to perpetually be struggling with despair. And that mindset worries me.

                In a verse from 2 Corinthians 4, Paul beautifully teaches a concept I think directly opposes this trend I’ve been seeing: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair;” (emphasis mine)

 When I think about these truths that Paul is teaching, I can’t help but be filled with hope. I think that we are meant to be hopeful. In fact, Preach My Gospel explains that through relying upon the Atonement “we can be filled with joy, peace, and consolation.” (PMG, 52). But yet it seems like there is a cultural idea that life will always be difficult, turbulent, and draining. I’m not attempting to say that bad events don’t happen in life—they do and they always will—but I’m saying that if we really understand and believe Paul’s teachings, we ought to think twice before we accept “life is hard” as a fixed truth. What’s wrong with the “life is hard” mentality? I think it boils down to matter of perception.

What is “hard”? What is “easy”? You and I might define the most recent calculus test we took as “hard”, while the genius next to us who hardly studied and aced the test would say it was “easy”. That difference can exist because at root, the words “hard” and “easy” are words based in perception, not in reality. The exact same event can be perceived as life-altering by one person yet be viewed as simply routine from a different viewpoint. It’s all a matter of where you stand. And the beautiful thing is, the perspective we take is largely determined by what we know and how we apply what we know.

This is the essence of that 2^nd Corinthians scripture. Paul is trying to inspire hope by reminding us that because of the glorious reality of the Atonement, the objective events of life don’t have to make us subjectively unhappy. The facts that we got a low score on a test doesn’t mean that we need to be beating ourselves up because of it. We can still be single yet with patience not be despaired because our goal of marriage hasn’t been fulfilled yet. We choose to take an eternal perspective, at which point any bad day, no matter how low, seems rather inconsequential.

There’s a second eternal truth at play here that also backs Paul’s teachings, found in 2 Nephi 2:27. That scripture reads as follows: “Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man.” (my emphasis added) Look at that underlined phrase for a second. “All things are given them which are expedient unto man.” Given the scripture given just two verses earlier (2 Nephi 2:25), which explains that “men are that they might have joy”, we ought to understand that joy is something that God finds “expedient”. In other words, we are promised that we will be given circumstances which can lead to our happiness. What Lehi is teaching is that we don’t have to wait for this semester to end before we can be happy, and we don’t have to wait for a terrible day to end before we can feel peace. This verse is a divine promise that at any given moment in time, we will have all of the tools available to us with which to build joy. Conversely, we will also always be given all of the ingredients for misery at any given moment of time. The difference is that we get to choose what we make.

My point is this: there is a very real difference between bad events in life and going through struggles. Thanks to the agency Lehi explains in 2 Nephi 2 and the supplementing power of the Atonement that Paul teaches in 2^nd Corinthians, we can experience setbacks in life and still see life as enjoyable. When we say something like “life is hard for everyone”, we are assuming two things: (1) that everyone has problems, which is true; and (2) that everyone is being brought down to despair by those problems, which doesn’t have to be true. We need to get out of this glass-half-empty mindset and start to rely upon the Savior more so that we can smile more and really enjoy life as we are meant to.   

Perhaps a personal example could illustrate this. Last Monday, I was asked multiple times how my weekend had gone. I could have easily answered:

“Terrible. My intramural basketball team forfeited the rest of our season, I did poorer than expected on several tests at the end of last week, I spent Valentine’s Day very much single and alone, I had to work most of the day Saturday, I came down with a cold, and I really didn’t get to enjoy any of the good weather.”

All of that would have been true. If you look at the facts, all of those events happened. They were bad events. But I subscribe to a simple philosophy: “No problem is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse.” I believe that despite what challenges I ran into last weekend, there were still positives. So I would answer with something like this:

“It was a good weekend. I got to go to a great stake conference, spend some time relaxing, and play basketball for a long time on Monday. It was a really good weekend.”

Friends, there is no need to despair when going through life. There are bad things that happen in life, but that doesn’t mean that life has to be hard. There is joy in every moment of every day if we have the eyes to look for it. There is no need to assume that life will always be difficult. Let’s build each other by talking about the positive more, instead of only sharing the bad in life. Let’s take upon ourselves an attitude of positivity and rejoice as we walk through this life together.