God Doesn’t Need Excuses
When you have a teenage son you spend time trying to boil down your inchoate thoughts and high flown thoughts about manhood into simply pithy counsel for the young man.
One of those is on the question of excuses. His excuses have been bugging me, even when plausibly justified, and what I eventually told him was that men were about success or failure. Excuses are for children. There is no curve and no grade. Only the deed and the outcome.
So I’m musing a bit about it. There are three ways to never have to offer excuses. The first way is to never screw up. Unrelenting perfection, all variables accounted for. This is probably beyond any mortal.
The second is to screw everything up so comprehensively that minor failures along the way don’t matter.
The third is to dare so greatly and succeed so fully that minor failures along the way don’t matter. So greatly and so fully that all former failures are revealed to have been minor.
It occurred to me that God has chosen the third.
There is no good answer to the problem of evil in this life because it hasn’t been answered yet. It will be.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Zen
October 28, 2026
Interesting!
There is a document – I think it is the one Pres Nelson quoted in Conference, called the Discourse on Abbaton. This is a document recording what the Savior taught in His 40 ministry, after his resurrection.
My details might be off, but at one point, Peter asks about the Problem of Evil. And instead of a logical, theological, philosophical answer, the Savior tells the story of Creation and of his Atonement. He ends by telling Peter that He wants him to know that it is He that saved him.
If I recalled that correctly, then that really is your third option. In which case, our eternal reward, and even our temporal ones, are part of the Savior’s atoning work. He will make those up, as part of his great work.