Background:

My nephew shared this amazing podcast from the Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University of a conversation between Terryl Givens and Steven Peck. You can watch the video of the podcast below or read the full transcript.

I have included a few impactful parts of their conversation that relate to our discussion here at mostmovedmover.com. As I was sharing ideas from this podcast with my daughter, she shared D&C 133:17 and D&C 65:1 where the Lord asks us to ‘make his paths straight.’ I had never thought about how that verse was an invitation from the Lord for us to create with him. It lines up well with the first section of the podcast that I highlight below.

It is not about choosing the right it’s about creating the right

This part of the conversation resonates with me. I like how Givens and Peck help us realize that we have a grander obligation than obedience. God wants us to create beauty in ourselves, our family, and His kingdom. He has given us this excellent opportunity to create.

PECK: … so much of life, in dealing with our kids, in trying to navigate the difficulties of relationships, of jobs, of everything, require us to act immersed in a situation that’s utterly unique and utterly in need of our best thinking, our best imagination, and our freedom. A lot of times we try to line it up and say “okay I’ve got to choose between two evils,” when in reality, as she describes, we need to navigate these waters. It’s not when we’re on a ship that, you know, these waves are evil and this wind is evil or good. There’s benefits and non-benefits, but we have to steer. And there are directions, there are places we want to go there, are places we want to get to—
GIVENS: But there isn’t a script.
PECK: There’s not a script, yes, yes, yes.
GIVENS: That’s what I like about what you’re saying. I think you’re trying to endow Mormon conceptions of agency with more heft by saying it’s not about choosing the right; it’s about creating the right.
PECK: Yes. Exactly.
GIVENS: We’re here to paint a portrait, not to memorize a script and act out a role.
PECK: Right. Our lives are works of art. They’re not a monopoly game to try to get to the end and make the right moves. It’s, “what am I going to creative of myself, what am I going to try to create to glorify God?”
GIVENS: Yeah. I think this is one of the most beautiful things that Marilynne Robinson says in her novel Gilead. She has the preachers say, “I believe in a God who will judge us maybe in terms of how beautiful our life was.”

GOD AND SURPRISE

During this section of the podcast is where they highlight that God can have awe. He can enjoy the results of collaborative creation. He can be surprised by what His agents create. In my previous post, ‘Can God be surprised?’ I try to bring this point out as well with the story of the Brother of Jared. He can be awe-surprised. I don’t think he is ever fear-bewildered. He can’t be caught off guard concerning his plan.

GIVENS: Kind of like the first days of creation too where he discovers … you were saying this earlier to me, “It’s good.”
PECK: Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. This is marvelous you know you couldn’t even catch one of these, let alone make one! Try to get a hook in this baby. It’s too big. I kind of see in that my own delight and wonder, and I’d like that to be an attribute of God; the discovery of what’s unfolding, and when God saw a giraffe he had the same reaction: “Would you look at that weird thing? That is just wonderful!”
GIVENS: I’m going to quote you again. You wrote, “If God cannot be surprised then he cannot laugh and if he cannot laugh then he cannot weep and if he cannot weep then we are nothing but reel after reel of a motion picture.”
To my mind-Fiona and I have written about this-God’s capacity to weep is not what reduces him; it’s what magnifies him as a being worthy of our worship and adoration. And if I thought I couldn’t do anything to surprise God, then what’s the use of any of it?
PECK: To me that kind of God is so much more awe-inspiring. The fact that God can experience awe is marvelous to me. It, as you described, it’s what makes him worship-worthy. If God is just a part of a grand machine that’s tick-tocking through repeated bouts of things it’s not very interesting.
GIVENS: It’s never occurred to me until this moment but doesn’t that always also suggest that if we want to worship a God who only exists outside of space and time and history and temporality, then aren’t we diminishing creation? Aren’t we saying, “Oh this is all just window dressing that we’re going to pass through in order to get to the real stuff”?

We only have to believe what is true

GIVENS: My two favorite expressions in this regard from Latter-day Saints, one is from, I think, Henry Eyring the senior, “The Lord will never require you to believe anything that isn’t true.” If we would just remember that. And the second, deep and profound wisdom from Elder Holland, “just take a deep breath.” He said this to people who get so worried about challenges to traditional models. Just relax. We’re not going to have to accept anything that isn’t true.
PECK: And let things unfold. We get in a hurry. I think we want all our truth all at once. Sometimes in science we don’t find the answer for a long, long time.
GIVENS: Well the Restoration wasn’t an event. It’s ongoing.
PECK: Yeah. It’s part of science. [laughs]

Conclusion

I love that God wants us to create with Him. He wants to empower us as agents. The gospel topic essay, ‘Becoming Like God’ provides a glimpse of this idea as the essay communicates the problem with the derisive phrase shared about Latter-Day Saint belief of ‘having our own planet.’ They explain the creative potential that God wants to endow upon us and that this earth is a preparatory state for this endowment.

A cloud and harp are hardly a satisfying image for eternal joy, although most Christians would agree that inspired music can be a tiny foretaste of the joy of eternal salvation. Likewise, while few Latter-day Saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet, most would agree that the awe inspired by creation hints at our creative potential in the eternities.

Latter-day Saints tend to imagine exaltation through the lens of the sacred in mortal experience. They see the seeds of godhood in the joy of bearing and nurturing children and the intense love they feel for those children, in the impulse to reach out in compassionate service to others, in the moments they are caught off guard by the beauty and order of the universe, in the grounding feeling of making and keeping divine covenants. Church members imagine exaltation less through images of what they will get and more through the relationships they have now and how those relationships might be purified and elevated. As the scriptures teach, “That same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.”

I hope that we will also remember that our lives and His kingdom are important to Him. That whatever we do according to the will of the Lord is the Lord’s business.

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