The Man with the Plan

“As man now is, God once was; as God is now, man may be.” -Lorenzo Snow

I'm always amazed when people criticize what they claim to be this so-called "ridiculous" statement of President Snow's and of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, scoffing at the very idea that any human being would dare to claim that such might be the goal of our existence. In fact, I heard a non-LDS friend of mine say so over the previous weekend.

Very well, then. Before I go further on this point, let's take a look at the other side of coin.

What do most other Christian denominations think the afterlife is going to be like? I have been acquainted with a large number of them in my travels, and a surprising quantity, in spite of what the Bible and their churches teach, don't believe in any afterlife at all. The ones who do believe in an afterlife have broken it down into two starkly contrasted perceptions:

1) Hell: where the bad people and L.A. Lakers go to roast forever in the fires of damnation and sorrow, much like a typical August day. All the while, compounding their torture and misery, they are forced to listen to death metal and must attend planning meetings. (Well, that's hell to me.)

2) Heaven: where the good people go to get fitted with a pair of wings and a halo, then spend eternity playing a harp and walking around on clouds and . . . well, that's really about it.

I believe that the Buddhists, for example, have a much cooler belief of the afterlife than do these other Christian churches. The idea of building up good or bad karma and then being reborn into a new life or as a new kind of animal has far more appeal to me than sitting around on a cloud playing a harp all day, every day - because at least it's progression of one kind and not stagnation.

By contrast, there is a Man with a plan, and he has revealed through his Latter-day prophets that there is much, much more for the faithful to do, and there is much more awaiting them in the great realms beyond than playing stringed instruments.

Not that there's anything wrong with stringed instruments. Because there isn't.

At any rate, the LDS idea of eternal progression is a mindboggling one for me. I don't know that I fully grasp the concept at this point. Nevertheless, however long it may take - in my case, we're talking tens or thousands of years at the very minimum - the goal of each of God's children is to one day, however far off, become like him, just as caterpillars are reborn as butterflies and puppies grow up to become dogs.

Not cats, though. They belong in hell.

Lost and Found

I'm a believer in the old saying that "what goes around, comes around." What I take this to mean is that we tend to become the benficiaries of others' good deeds when we also do good deeds in life, and that the converse is true with regard to bad deeds. Call it karma, if you will. We reap what we sow, or maybe it is the Golden Rule.

Uhh . . . let me check. Yeah, that's it. I'm all out of mottoes and catch phrases for this particular point.

Sometimes, this aspect of life becomes clear to me in a very real, concrete way. Such was the case just the other night, when I walked to my car in the parking lot and spotted a $20 bill lying there on the ground.

It didn't take me long to look up from the $20 bill on the ground to realize that it probably belonged to the man sitting in the car next to me, talking on his cell phone and apparently oblivious to the fact that the 20-spot lay there on the asphalt.

I picked the bill up and tapped on the man's window, and since he was busy talking on the phone, I tried to gesture that it was probably his and may have fallen out of his pocket. He opened his window and thanked me more than once, saying that it had probably fallen out as he was getting his keys out to unlock his car door.

No sooner had I opened the door of my own car and I sat in the driver's seat when I impusively looked at my left wrist to check the time and realized that my watch wasn't there where it normally was. I had left it at the gym, which was my previous stop before going to the grocery store. (Side note: Do not go grocery shopping when you've just been to the gym.)

I drove the half-mile back to the gym and found that my watch was not in any of the places I had been while I was there. My only hope left was the lost-and-found box at the check-in desk, and, fortunately, a good Samaritan had picked up my watch and had left it there for me to retrieve.

My two experiences of finding a lost item, as well as having one of my own returned to me, occurred within a 15-minute timeframe of each other. I had helped someone else find a lost item, and someone had done the same for me. I was grateful at that moment when it hit me, in a very real sense, that, when all is boiled down, people are still good, honest, decent, outgoing, and kind at heart. Our society is not yet doomed.

It would have been very easy for me to have scooped up that $20 bill and to put it into my own pocket - think of all of the curly cheese fries I could have bought with it! - without the man who had lost it realizing that fact until later in the evening (kind of like me and my watch!), but I'm glad I didn't.

The watch, by the way, cost me more than $20, so if anything, I was the one who lucked out.