More Sunday thoughts...

Our lesson in Relief Society today was about adversity. We looked at it from every angle, discussing what it is and why it happens, what we get from it and how we deal with it, etc. At one point the teacher asked, "Why does Heavenly Father allow us to suffer adversity?" (And some adversity involves actual suffering!)

For some reason, the board game Chutes and Ladders popped into my head. I played the game only a handful of times when I was babysitting in my neighborhood as a kid, so I had no idea I had actually 'learned' something from it. I didn't know it was stored away in my memory somewhere.

In the game Chutes and Ladders when you land on a square with a ladder on it, you can skip a whole bunch of other squares and climb the ladder to the next row, closer to the object of the game, which is called Home. On the other hand, when you come to a square with a chute on it, you slide backward and have to start over from the square you eventually land on.

Adversity can be like a ladder, providing a shortcut to learning true principles and developing important attributes. Growth happens almost exclusively when we are outside of our comfort zones, enduring things we would rather not have to endure. When we overcome any adversarial situation in our lives, our understanding increases and our empathy expands. We emerge from the trial with greater compassion and strength.

Adversity can also be like a chute, causing us to slide backward, making it difficult for us to find our footing.

Usually I think adversity is a little of both -- we slide backward initially, then we catch ourselves and remember.

Remember, remember - that word keeps surfacing in my study of spiritual things. It's difficult to hold all of the many divine attributes we want to emulate in our heads at one time. It's hard to remember all of the commandments, let alone live them. Thank goodness our lives are sufficiently long if we just keep making incremental progress...and avoid falling into slippery chutes.