Thoughts on Obedience

My youngest daughter and I, now and then, have had conversations about her actions that included my observation that she was choosing to disobey. This really aggravates her. She sees herself as obedient and prefers that I change my demands to what she wants to do so that she can be obedience. It reminds me of the king in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince who only makes reasonable decrees so that all the universe obeys them. He will only decree that the sun rise in the morning because to command otherwise would be unreasonable. Thus, the sun obeys his every command. The childlike Little Prince recognizes the absurdity in this.

What is obedience if commandments don’t require something other than a default action? If God will only require that his children do what they already want to do, can I have any more respect for my God than the little prince had for that king?

Am I willing to say God can ask me to change my actions? To change the inclinations of my heart? And, if so to what extent? I wonder if some commandments are meant just to challenge us and our commitment to obedience.

The book of "Moses" in the Pearl of Great Price tells of Adam’s response to an angel’s question: “Why do you offer sacrifice?.” He said he didn’t know. In light of the things I had been thinking about, I asked myself again: do I obey only if I understand why?

I watched a documentary last week called Buck. It followed Buck Brannaman, the man who inspired the movie called The Horse Whisperer, and told of his childhood and methods for training and working with horses. Buck said he didn’t like the term “breaking a horse” because it resulted in too many brutal methods of training horses. Nor did he bribe horses with carrots or other treats. He said it made them surly and contemptuous. He did use consistency and required obedience to a lot of seemingly capricious commands. Eventually horse and rider trusted each other and seemed to love what they learned to do together.

One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie is when a woman brings a horse to Buck to train. It wasn’t older than others he worked with but instead of being with other disciplined horses, it had been allowed to run wild with other studs. It was a dangerous horse and attacked anyone who attempted to work with it. The woman came to understand that the freedom she had given the horse had made it useless – worse than useless. It was so dangerous that the only responsible option was to destroy the horse.

There were amazing lessons in that movie. Life lessons. When I watched some of the exercises he put the horses through, I thought, if I were the horse I would stamp my foot and say, "Make up your mind!" "What are you trying to accomplish here?" "This doesn't make any sense!"

The sacrifice that God asks of us is our will. The "broken and the contrite heart" is our giving ourselves over to God. Is my trust in God less than the trust the horse has for the horse whisperer?

We might debate whether allowing our will to “bend” is the same as relinquishing it but I believe that we are born with will and it cannot be extinguished. We can discipline our will to obey or we will let it run wild. By choosing obedience we are bending our will until finally, it is aligned to God’s. The Book of Mormon teaches that the goal is to make our will the same as God’s.

Thinking of the horse and rider, the horse learns to sense what the rider has in mind. But is that the same as the horse knowing, on its own, the will of the rider? Would such a horse decide to round up cattle without a rider? In our own lives, the rider, our Father in Heaven, is not visibly on our backs. Aligning our will to his means sensing what he wants us to do. If we assume that it means we can judge as he would and make choices based on the same perspective, it brings up the question: Once someone reaches that place, is there any obedience?

I think we can flatter ourselves that we have reached the point where we have aligned our will with the will of God and, it follows, that whatever we want is God’s will. That allows us to ignore conventional wisdom, to judge the choices of others, to critique the counsel of priesthood leaders, and to reinterpret doctrinal scripture. This is truly a “devil’s playground”.

It would have been easy for Abraham to dismiss a commandment to sacrifice his son. After all, he knew something of human sacrifice from his earlier life. He might have reasoned that based on his experience with revelation and his past accomplishments, his will was aligned with God. He could have decided this commandment wasn’t coming from God at all. But ultimately, he knew the voice and chose obedience.

I want to know God's voice that well.

I do not believe in a god who only makes “reasonable decrees”. I am not shaken by the concept that "life is not fair". Life isn't --but I believe that what follows it is. I am willing to believe that God's understanding about what I need and should experience is better than my own understanding.

I choose to trust the Lord the way a well-trained horse trusts his rider and although I may not be so well-trained as to sense the will of God without an occasional spur to the side, I recommit myself to obedience, whether I understand the reasons or not.