Agency. We talk about it so much, it has become common place. What do you think of when you think of agency? Until the last couple months, I thought of agency as refusing to drink or rejecting Satan's temptations, but now I see it as so much more.
There is too much stuff to put it all in a blog post and not have it be extremely long-winded and boring. But there is one idea in the scriptures that hit me hard: God will not force a man to Heaven. We see this idea whenever resurrection or sanctification is mentioned. We also see it in Moroni when God talks about how both He and Satan entice men one way or the other, but never force them. It is one of the reasons we don't take the Sacrament unworthily. It is why God lets us make stupid mistakes, and lets some of His children leave Him forever. Our ability to choose for ourselves is more important to Him than getting all of His children back, and it is more important to us (or was when we understood what that meant). That sounds horrible, but it boils down to what happened in the pre-mortal life: Satan's plan to take our free agency was rejected by everyone who is currently (or ever has been) on the Earth in favor of the Plan where we retained our agency, knowing full well that that meant some of us might not return.
As I've thought more about this idea, it has become ever more clear to me how much (1) agency matters and is important and (2) how much God trusts us. He trusts us to not only get ourselves Home, but to also bring as many of His other children with us as possible. My hope and prayer is that we will use this gift of agency, over which a war was fought in Heaven, to choose to come Home and choose to help as many of our brothers and sisters as we can make it Home, too.
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