Joy Is the Point and Last Friday Was Still Terrible

In the middle of 2 Nephi 2:11 there's a little clause I've skated past most of my life. "If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness." Lehi is deep in his argument about opposition and he stops to say who he's talking to. It's Jacob, and ten verses earlier he reminded Jacob that "in thy childhood thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren." So the best-known sentence in the Book of Mormon about opposition was said to a son who had grown up with some of it in his own tent.

Thursday I wrote about what I tell my kids God made us for, and I only took the first half of 2 Nephi 2:25. The second half is the one that makes a tired mother wince a little. If men are, that they might have joy, then why was last Friday what it was?

The Odyssey wouldn't start in the school lot at 3:20 with Ben buckled in and a line of cars behind me. David left work early with the jumper cables. Lily got in the back and cried over a library book she'd left in her desk, which meant nothing could be done about it until Monday. Pizza night turned into a frozen pizza at a quarter to seven, and Ben ate the crusts standing up and called it his idea. Nobody was hurt. It was still a bad day.

I went to bed wondering where the joy was supposed to have been.

Opposition in all things

Here is the sentence I had to read twice: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things." Then Lehi says what would be missing without it. Righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Near the end of the verse he gets to "happiness nor misery."

He doesn't call the misery good. A world with only one side of each pair wouldn't be a world at all, is how I take it. Verse 15 gets down to the garden and says there had to be "the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter." Read in the order the verse gives them, the sweet one is the forbidden fruit. I don't know what Lehi wants me to do with that. I only know it keeps him from offering a tidy picture where the good thing is also the pleasant thing.

The garden had no joy in it

This is the part I'd never put beside verse 25.

And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin.

2 Nephi 2:23

Children come first in that sentence, ahead of good and sin. And three verses earlier, right after Adam and Eve are driven out "to till the earth," Lehi says "they have brought forth children; yea, even the family of all the earth." The family is right there in the chapter on the Fall, in the same breath as the plowing.

So when Lehi says the garden had no joy, I don't think he means it was unhappy. I think he means it was finished. Everything stayed as it was created, and no one in it could be hurt or hurt anyone or carry anyone else's tired week. Then verse 24, one sentence long: "But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things." I don't read that as saying the dead battery was planned. My reading is that the arrangement was, the one where children and work and risk come as a set, and joy with them.

Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.

2 Nephi 2:25

Colleen

When Emma was about eight and we were in the Orem ward, there was a woman named Colleen who lived a few streets over. I went to her house one afternoon with a pan of something. She had a boy of about two on her hip. She'd had two miscarriages before him, and I knew about them only because she'd said so once in Relief Society, flat, like she was reading it off a card, and then sat back down.

I don't remember how we got onto it. The boy was pulling the cord on the blinds and she let him. She said something like, I didn't know what this was, him asleep on me like that, till I had the other two to measure it against. And then, and this part I remember because she wasn't smiling, she said don't you tell me it was worth it. Don't. I'm only saying that's how I know how big it is.

I said I wasn't going to. I think I held the pan a while longer than I needed to.

That was more than ten years ago and I still carry that conversation around. "No joy, for they knew no misery" is the sentence of Lehi's that I put next to it.

So where was the joy on Friday?

Not in the frozen pizza, and if joy means a good mood then Lehi has lost me, because by that measure the garden wins.

There was a stretch of twenty minutes in that school lot where Ben sat in his car seat saying "Dad coming" at every truck that went by, and then one of them was ours. I was sitting at the wheel angry about a library book, and I didn't take it in. I'm not saying it redeemed anything. It's just the piece of the day that I wouldn't have had in a world with no children in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does 2 Nephi 2 say hard things are good?

Verse 11 says opposition has to exist for righteousness and wickedness, holiness and misery to exist at all, and that's as far as it goes. It never calls the misery itself good, and I wouldn't tell someone in the middle of a loss that it is.

Did Adam and Eve have joy in the garden?

Verse 23 says "no joy, for they knew no misery." Lehi is describing what that state couldn't hold, and he isn't scolding innocence. If you're asking whether they were content, the chapter doesn't say.

Is this the same as saying everything happens for a reason?

Verse 24 says things "have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things," which is about the whole design. Lehi never says that a given dead battery or a given grief has its own reason attached, and I'd be careful about handing that sentence to anyone as a comfort.

What do I do on a day when I can't find any joy at all?

Eat something and go to bed, and I mean that as real advice from someone who has done it. Lehi's argument is about what life is for and was never a gauge you have to read at night. Some weeks the joy shows up the next morning and a day late, and that still counts.

What I'm doing this week

I'm going to call Colleen, whom I haven't talked to since Christmas, and ask if I told her story right. And on Friday, when Ben turns three, I'm going to stop sorting the day into good or bad before it's over.

with love, Melissa