Free to Choose

As my seven-year-old is preparing for 2^nd grade to start, she has expressed her fears to us and told us she doesn’t want to go.  She didn’t like 1^st grade because her teachers, according to her, often got upset with her too often.  So now she is afraid that she won’t like her teachers in 2^nd grade and that because of that, she can’t have a good year.  My wife has tried to teach her that whether or not she gets a teacher she likes need not determine whether or not she has a good year in school.  Only she can decide to have a good year.  It’s a simple principle and yet one that it so hard for all of us; even though we often can’t choose much about our surroundings or chances in life, we can always choose to do right.  And that choice ultimately is the choice to be happy, no matter what sorrows and difficulties are forced upon us by life.     

               The scriptures teach us that Satan “sought to destroy the agency of man” and for this cause he was cast out (Moses 4:3).  James Ferrell suggested that this agency is not the ability to choose anything we want; but rather it is specifically the ability to choose between good and evil.  We often don’t have the ability to choose some of the things that we desperately want in life but which aren’t given to us (or which we desperately don’t want and which are given to us), but we always have the agency to choose between good and evil.  Lehi put it this way in his famous teaching to Jacob: “Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself” (2 Nephi 2:27).  The agency God gave us was to allow us to choose Christ.  Jacob put it this way to his people: “Therefore, cheer up your hearts, and remember that ye are free to act for yourselves—to :choose the way of everlasting death or the way of eternal life” (2 Nephi 10:23).  When Samuel the Lamanite spoke to the Nephites he echoed the same sentiment: “God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free. He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death” (Helaman 14:30-31).  That freedom is not the ability to do whatever one pleases, but it is the freedom to choose between God’s gift of eternal life and spiritual death.  We often cannot choose the immediate circumstances of our lives, but we can always choose the ultimate destination.  Even those who have virtually no freedom can still choose how they internally respond to situations and how they love God.  The holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl put it this way: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

               The Lord told us that intelligence is “to act for itself” and that without this ability “there is no existence,” for acting for ourselves “is the agency of man” (D&C 93:30-31).  Existence is defined by our ability to act and choose for ourselves, and that existence becomes an “abundant” life when we choose good instead of evil, Christ instead of Satan, eternal life instead of death (see John 10:10).  One of our greatest challenges is then to make those choices for good no matter what else life brings upon us, for it cannot take away our ability to choose good—i.e. to choose happiness—unless we give it up.  It doesn’t matter who our 2^nd grade teacher is—we can choose “peace in this world, and eternal life in the world to come” (D&C 59:23).