The birth of experience

I want to articulate something that I am beginning to see and understand. It has come with hindsight and in particular with seeing my children become adults and begin to struggle with the real forces of life. As I have prayed for them individually a picture has begun to materialize.

Life is a series of births. Each new segment of understanding, of wisdom, of knowledge is begotten by our agency and gained by the labor of experience. We aren't sitting in the classroom listening to the lecture and taking notes on the birth process. I think that took place before we came here. Now we are in the real deal. Fully participatory. What is most valuable is gained through the struggle of experience. We don't really "know" something until we have experienced it. (A scriptural term that comes to mind is "and Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived...")
Complete knowing is an act of experiencing.

I don't think this life is a process of just jumping through the hoops. We are creating something living and unique as we move forward. It's not always (if ever) a piece of cake. In our limited vision of the moment however we sometimes want the end results right now. We want to skip at least part if not all of the labor. We want Someone to just tell us what to do or to wave the magic wand and have things materialize. But our Parent isn't using the "because I told you so" method or the "let me do it for you" program. If we arrive too soon at a destination, if things come too easily, we may have our answer but the birth of real knowledge is aborted. We won't be able to receive the end result because we won't understand how it was gained and upon what foundation it was based. How else but through our own experience will we "know to refuse the evil and choose the good?" (Isaiah 7:16) Like the people of Alma in the Book of Mormon who are in captivity and praying for deliverance we must wait upon the Lord's timing. We pray for strength to bear up under the labor. We seek enlightenment, direction and guidance. We place our trust in Him. When the labor of a particular situation is complete and the time of birth has arrived, deliverance will come and we will burst forth into the light. We we see and discern with our understanding that which we could not see before. We will have taken one more step in our climb towards eternal life.

We must perform the labor. There's no skipping from A - Z. All of nature is evidence of this truth. We can however gather around each other and give the needed support and encouragement. We can be kindly midwives who hold hands and say "You can do it! It will be worth it! "

(Picture from a French website Siviero News - I can't decipher who the artist is.)