Letting People Fail

Sometimes it scares me how blessed my life is. I see people I love dealing with things like abuse, divorce, chronic medical problems, mental illness, addiction, tragedy, etc. And I wonder how I got so lucky. And then I wonder what awaits me in the future. My greatest suffering in life has come through loving people in pain, rather than suffering my own tragedies. In many ways, that’s harder for me than dealing with my own trials.

See, I have complete confidence in my own salvation. I get that I can never be complacent. But I trust God. I trust my savior. And I trust my ability to follow Him. I have no fear that I won’t endure to the end, or have the help I need to get through whatever comes. I have complete control of my own agency. That is not where my doubts and fears lie. When it comes to my own trials and my own pains, I will deal with them.

But I hate watching other people hurt, especially when the pain is avoidable. I get the need to learn from experience and mistakes. And I’m OK with that… to a certain point. I’m OK with letting someone fail a test, back into a lamp post, fall off a bike, or bomb a job interview. But how far do I have to let it go? What about things like sinking into an addiction? Incarceration? What about committing suicide? I truly believe that the Atonement of Christ can heal even that. But it’s heartrending.

In Elder Holland’s April 2015 conference talk, he told the story of two brothers who went climbing without any safety equipment and hit an obstacle. The older brother was able to boost his younger brother to safety and then sent his younger brother away so he wouldn’t be there to see if the older brother failed in his attempt to leap to safety. The older brother jumped and couldn’t hold on. As he was sliding to his death, his younger brother grabbed his arms. “He would not let me fall.”

I want to be the younger brother. I always want to be the younger brother. I want to stay there even when you try to push me away and hold on and refuse to let you fall. I want to save you.

But I’m not Christ.

I want my love to be enough to save someone. I want my effort and my strength to mean something, to make a difference. The thing that terrifies me most is watching tragedy and being unable to stop it. Lucifer fell. Cain killed Able. David lost his exaltation. I don’t think God just stopped loving Lucifer, or Adam and Eve just stopped loving Cain.

There are investigators from my mission that I still pray for. There are people I wake up in the middle of the night and hurt for. Confession time: I read ahead in books. When the author leaves you in anxiety at the end of a chapter and doesn’t address it in the next one, I go “forget this” and skim ahead until I’m satisfied that they’re able to save the one who got captured, or the couple ends up back together, or the misunderstanding that would ruin everything gets cleared up. Then I go back and read the book properly. I do that even with authors I trust.

But I don’t get to do that in life. And I hate it. I trust the atonement to work for me, because I know what I’ll choose. And I want to believe in other people just as much. But how long do I have to wait? Five years? Ten? Thirty? Will it happen in this life? At some point, I have to trust Christ. I know He loves them even more than me. I have to trust that he’ll tell me when he needs me to wait by the edge of the cliff. I have to trust that he’ll take care of them when I can’t.