Eternal Perspective Imagine you are attending a football game. The teams seem evenly matched. One team has been trained to follow the rules. The other, to do just the opposite. They are committed to cheat and disobey every rule of sportsmanlike conduct. While the game ends in a tie, its determined that it will continue until one side wins decisively. Soon the field is a quagmire. Players on both sides are being ground into the mud. The cheating of the opposing team turns to brutality. Players are carried off the field. Some have been injured critically. Others, its whispered, fatally. It ceases to be a game and becomes a battle. You become very frustrated and upset. Why let this go on? Neither team can win, it must be stopped. Imagine that you confront the sponsor of the game and you demand that he stop this useless futile battle. You say..its senseless and without purpose. Has be no regard for the players? He calmly replies that he will not call the game. You are mistaken. There is great purpose in it. You have not understood. He tells you that this is not a spectator sport. It is for the participants. It is for their sake that he permits the game to continue. Great benefit may come to them because of the challenges they face. He points to players sitting on the bench suited up, eager to enter the game. When each one of them has been in. When each has met the day which he has prepared for so long and trained so hard. Then and only then will I call the game. Until then, it may not matter which team seems to be ahead. the present score is really not crucial. There are games within games you know. Whatever is happening to the team, each player will have his day. Those players on the team that keeps the rules will not be eternally disadvantaged because they keep the rules. They may be cornered or misused, even defeated for a time. But individual players on that team, regardless of what appears on the scoreboard, may already be victorious. Each player will have a test sufficient to his needs. How each responds is the test. When the game is finally over you and they will see purpose in it all. May even express gratitude for being on the field in the darkest part of the contest. Then in providing a bit of interpretation for this remarkable parable, Elder Packer added, I do not think The Lord is quite so hopeless about whats going on in the world as we are. He could put a stop to all of it at any moment, but He will not. Not until every player has a chance to meet the test for which we were preparing before the world was. Before we came into mortality. - Elder Boyd K Packer
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:36:21 +0000
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