Canyoneering

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the cusp of greatness, like something huge is just around the corner or something great is about to happen but I can't quite grasp it yet. And then other times I just feel like I'm plodding along in the lone and dreary world, not really making progress.*  I think that happens when Satan gets me to look down and back instead of up and forward. Lot's wife (who got turned into a pillar of salt) had the same problem:

Just what did Lot’s wife do that was so wrong? As a student of history, I have thought about that and offer a partial answer. Apparently, what was wrong with Lot’s wife was that she wasn’t just looking back; in her heart she wanted to go back. It would appear that even before she was past the city limits, she was already missing what Sodom and Gomorrah had offered her...It is possible that Lot’s wife looked back with resentment toward the Lord for what He was asking her to leave behind...So it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future.

Josh Moody spoke in church this Sunday and he made an awesome analogy relating the plan of salvation to canyoneering.  He talked about how when we come to earth it's like being in the bottom of a slot canyon, like this one:

It's muddy, dim, and not very comfortable, but we can still see a little piece of the sky through the crack at the top. 

We can't see it all, but we catch glimpses of the sun, moon and stars as the earth turns. We know that's where God is and that's where we want to be too. So we start to climb even though it's hard and it takes effort and other people laugh and have fun together in the mud at the bottom. 

The covenants we make with God through baptism and the temple are like the rope, harness,  caribiners , and SLCDs to keep us safe as we climb through life. Sometimes we get to a ledge and decide to rest, and it feels so nice that we stop climbing. We feel good because we can look down and see how far we've come and we think "Well at least I'm not down there playing in the mud." We stop progressing. We stop moving up because Satan got us to look down and back (like Lot's wife) when God wants us to look up and forward.

...look ahead and remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives...So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently, she thought that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as what she was leaving behind.

I think that's what happens to me on the plodding days. But when I really think about it I realize that all God has been trying to do for the last few years is raise my vision--raise my vision of who I am, of who I can become, of what I can do, and of what kind of person I can be with. That's what He's been doing since I moved out to BYU. Only up from here, right?

God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go...Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the “high priest of good things to come” (Hebrews 9:11).

 Elder Holland "Remember Lot's Wife" Jan 2009 (the best BYU devotional I've ever been to)

Edit:

*Sometimes in our repentance, in our daily efforts to become more Christlike, we find ourselves repeatedly struggling with the same difficulties. As if we were climbing a tree-covered mountain, at times we don’t see our progress until we get closer to the top and look back from the high ridges.

-Neal L. Anderson "Repent...That I May Heal You" General Conference Oct 2009

Sometimes we need to stop and look back from that ledge to get perspective. We just can't stay there.