Contradictions intrigue me. Opposites intrigue me. Basic examples include light and dark, love and lust, black and white, seminary and school, married and single, tall and short, night and day (which is a great movie, btw), boy and girl, fruits and vegetables, sleeping and waking, Eminem and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, pride and humility, time and eternity, Christ and Satan, and agony and joy. By the design of nature, it seems most things come in couplets. Two by two, something borrowed, something blue. Even the rhyming schemes prevalent in archaic and modern poems employ couplets of words or meter.
What is it that seems primal to humanity that things come in couplets, manifesting a dual nature, or even opposites? A Book of Mormon prophet, Lehi, expounded on the theory of opposites. He opens by telling Jacob, his firstborn in the wilderness the following,
“…In thy childhood thou hast suffered affliction and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren. Nevertheless, thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain. (2 Nephi 2:2-3).”
By way of his introduction, he gives the underlying reason for opposition: afflictions and the greatness of God. Other scriptural examples include the missionaries Ammon and his brethren in Alma 28:8,
“…and this is the account of Ammon and his brethren, their journeyings in the land of Nephi, their sufferings in the land, their sorrows, and their afflictions, and the incomprehensible joy.”
Christ, fulfilling the mortal experience, underwent a similar pattern of emerging from affliction to joy. He sweat as it were great drops of blood in Gethsemane, pleading with the father to “remove this cup from me.” He took upon himself the greatest of all suffering,
“Which suffering cause myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would not that I might not drink the bitter cupper, and shrink— (DC 19:19).”
A short time later, he visited the peoples of the American continents, and gathered the little children around him. He blessed them. He called them forward to feel the wounds in the hands and the feet of an immortal God. Which, btw, could have been erased by the power of complete resotation. Maybe Christ choose for a reason to keep those wounds, as a testament to his agony. He invited angels to encircle them. It was only after the agony of Gethsemane AND the meeting of his disciples and blessing of their children that he said, “My joy is full.” It was after agony and after joy that he declared himself perfect, a state equal to that in which his Father in Heaven exists.
What, then, is it about agony and after experiencing agony finding a consequent fullness of joy? Must we always have sadness before we experience true happiness? Adam and Eve sure believed so. Eve said to Adam, “We it not for our transgression we… never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient (Moses 5:11).” Back to Lehi’s discourse on opposition; he says, “having no joy, for they knew no misery (2 Nephi 2:23).”
It seems, therefore, like the natural coupling of sin and righteousness, life and death, corruption and incorruption, sense and insensibility, misery is necessary for happiness (2 Nephi 2:11). Sister Barabara Workman, the wife of a counselor in the MTC presidency told her missionaries the following,
“Joy is an emotion of the spirit. It comes through righteous living. It is not a casual or shallow feeling, ever. If we equate fun and pleasure with happiness, we may think pain must always be equated with unhappiness. But that is not true. Joy is no stranger to pain. We may not feel deeply enough to know joy unless our hearts have been hollowed out by sorrow. A heart may not be big enough to know real joy until it has be stretched and pulled by trials and hard things.”
This does not mean we run around trying to find misery or agony or despair. Goodness, there is enough of that around! The key to using our pains and sorrows toward joy is to righteously endure them. To allow our trials to bring us closer to God. Elder Donald Halstrom in the April 2010 General Conference quoted the Saviour in teaching us how to righteously endure our trials to we could come to greater happiness,
“The Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, extends His grace with the invitation “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). He further promises, “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you” (John 14:27).”
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