Come, Follow Me

Yesterday morning I took my two oldest children to the elementary school for their first days of 4^th and 2^nd grade.  My three-year-old daughter was quite certain she was going to school too.  She grabbed her backpack, insisted that I put her lunch in it, and came out the door with us.  As we walked to their rooms, she asked a couple of times if this classroom or that one was where she was going to go.  Her older siblings were going to school, and she was bent on doing the same!  I had to gently tell her that her time was not quite yet, but I was impressed by her strong desire to follow and do what her siblings were doing.  I believe we all have a similar yearning to follow others; we have a natural mimetic desire to be like those we see and to do what they are doing. 

               I contrasted that experience with my daughter to watching my youngest child, who is 18 months, as he ran around the park we went to in the evening.  I tell people that his theme song is “Don’t fence me in”—he is usually very determined to follow his own path and do what he wants to do.  I marveled as I chased him around the park at his ability to make decisions about where he wanted to go; he would go this way and then that, and when I would try to guide him one direction instead of where he wanted to head, he would have none of it.  His little spirit knew the places he wanted to head for reasons unknowable to me, and he didn’t want me to get in the way.  It was yet another witness that the God-given ability to choose—our agency—is something we are born with.  Even though he can barely communicate with us yet verbally, he can choose for himself with no problem.

             These two experiences yesterday caused me to ponder these two traits that are sometimes at odds with each other: we want to follow others and yet we also want independence and want to choose for ourselves.  In the gospel context, both are vital: we are all “free to act for [ourselves]—to choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life” (2 Nephi 10:23).  But the Lord has invited us to use that agency to follow Him: “And he said unto the children of men: Follow thou me….  Wherefore, follow me, and do the things which ye have seen me do” (2 Nephi 31:10,12).  God summarized the great test of mortality in these words: “we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them” (Abraham 3:25).  In essence the great purpose of mortality is to see if we will use our agency to follow the Lord.  The Savior told the rich young ruler in mortality to give up trying to follow the world by selling his things and to “come, follow me” (Luke 18:22).  That specific phrase is the name of the Church’s study program for individuals and families—interestingly, the only place it occurs in the scriptures exactly is in this verse in Luke in the context of the rich young ruler needing to give up his riches for the Savior.  Surely for us to follow the Savior completely in our day we need to be able to make similar sacrifices; we have to stop following after the “vain things of the world” and seek after following the Savior (3 Nephi 6:15).  In the great plan of our Father in Heaven, we all have the freedom to choose the path we will take, for “men are free according to the flesh.”  Our test in this life is to see whether we will with that agency choose to follow the “great Mediator of all men” or to follow the temptations of the devil (2 Nephi 2:27).  I hope earnestly that I can do that and that my children will use their determined spirits and strong desire to follow to choose the way of eternal life through the Savior.