Introduction
(Inspired by the Holy Spirit on November 22, 2022)
We are all of noble birth. Every human on earth is the spirit child of God. He first formed our individual spirits from spirit elements. When we desired to come to earth to be tested and tried, He placed our spirits in bodies formed from earthly elements. We are His, and He gave us the opportunity to grow into celestial beings like Himself and like our Heavenly Mother.
The covenant path is the way He provided for us to return to Him in His celestial kingdom, to sit at His side with His Son, Jesus Christ, the co-creator of all things. The best of us, the most faithful and true, those who endure to the end, will be exalted on high, to rule and reign with Him over new worlds for all eternity.
This circular motion — from God, through our earthly trials, and back to God — is another meaning of “one eternal round.” The covenant path is straight and true, but our mortal trials may turn it into a maze through which we wend our way, sometimes coming to a dead end and through obedience and repentance, finding our way back to the path that leads to celestial glory. It’s meant to be hard. It’s meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. It’s meant to create gods.
But the covenant path has its beginning long before we come to earth as immortal spirits in mortal bodies. It begins the moment we are born as spirits, immortal beings of intelligence and love.
Love is intelligence. Intelligence is love. We may exercise our God-given agency to employ our intelligence in order to promote something other than love, even to promote anger and hate, but when we do so, we become unnatural beings, defying the purpose of our creation. If we persist in this unnatural course and do not repent, we will be cast into outer darkness at the final judgment.
Repentance is the gift of Christ’s Atonement, the greatest gift ever given. Only Jesus Christ, in all the infinite universe, could offer this great gift, because He was mortal and divine at once, in a way that no other could be: the son of mortal woman and immortal godhood. Because of His special status and His boundless love for all of creation, His willing sacrifice satisfies the demand for justice, tempering that demand with His mercy for all of us in our weakness and sin. Without Christ’s Atonement, we would be left forever in a state of misery.
To receive Christ’s mercy through His Atonement, all we need do is repent of our sins, be baptized, and set our feet on the covenant path that leads back to our true home. It is simple, but it is not easy. This world lays many snares and stumbling blocks in our path. It must be so. There must be opposition in all things because this mortal life is our trial and our test. We progressed as far as we could in the spirit realm, and then we were given the chance and the choice to come to earth, receive a mortal body, and be tested and tried to see if we were worthy of exaltation in the highest kingdom of our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.
We had to be brave to come here. We were given to know something of the trials we would face, but not all. Mortal life can be fully understood only in mortality. Certainly, there was strife and contention in the spirit realm, and each of us had our own personality and intelligence there. But only in this mortal world is that fallen spirit, Lucifer, known here as Satan, or the adversary, allowed to tempt us to follow him, to choose the way of the fallen instead of the covenant path. We are given our agency so that we may choose for ourselves which way we will go, which path we will follow through this mortal existence.
But we are not left without a guide. We are born with the light of Christ embedded in our souls. If we let it, that light will lead us to the true path. Because we have the light of Christ, we instinctively know it is wrong to lie, steal, and murder. Because we have His light, we know there is something beyond ourselves and instinctively reach toward Him, toward the Savior we know is there, even if we don’t know Him yet.
His light can be dimmed by the things of the world. It can be nearly snuffed out by pride, greed, or mistreatment by others. One of the greatest sins in this world is the attempt to snuff out the light of Christ in an innocent child.
The inevitable sorrow and grief of this mortal life can also dim the light in our souls, especially if that light hasn’t been carefully nurtured by parents and other caretakers who comprehend the true nature of life and understand its eternal framework. Absent an understanding of that framework, we can be overcome by our losses and the grief that follows them. We can be led astray, into that Far Country from which it is hard to return.
Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter 