Happiness verses Comfort

This week we had a very interesting talk with a less active here in Tlahualilo, and its something that applies to me so much. We were talking about happiness and comfort. While we are here on the earth we become beings that are constantly searching for both comfort and happiness and one thing that is very quickly evident is that they are not the same and actually in a lot of cases they are opposites. Before this world we were happy in a very real sense. As we enjoyed the presence of our perfect Father we knew what it was to be happy. Our eternal nature is to become like Him to enjoy such a state of happiness as He does. In the life before we learned from Him how to become like Him and we longed to do so. Satan tried to tempt us into choosing a plan in which it would be impossible to sin but also it would be impossible to progress to the state of our Father.

Luckily our Father protected us from such a plan for all those that chose to follow His. The plan of Satan sounds pretty good at first, not one soul would be lost, but to be forced into obedience and to never progress by our own choices would also mean we would never be exalted either. And so we come into this world but this time with three things we didn't have before, a physical body, the lack of our Fathers physical presence, and without the memory of what we were before. And so here we are, we come into the world as something a lot different than we were, in a physical body and without the presence or memory of Perfect Beings we all of a sudden don't think about eternal happiness and start thinking about immediate comfort. What is eternity for a temporal being?

The natural man that we are in this world doesn't like to be uncomfortable, above all else if the natural man is uncomfortable than automatically we gotta find a something to make us comfortable, at any cost, emotional, physical, mental, and yes spiritual. And so the natural man becomes both an enemy to God and to himself, as he selfishly looks for the things that bring comfort and loses the things that bring happiness.

One huge truth I have learned on the mission is that if the natural man is comfortable, nobody cares if the divine part of us is miserable. I have talked to so many people on this mission that have openly confessed that "Yes I am miserable, but I am comfortable, so why change." It's crazy how easily we settle for the comfortable in place of happiness. How quick we call it quits on God in the minute that He lets us pass through some hard times. We accepted such trials before we came and now that were here we are understanding the price of exaltation - that to truly be happy...we have to be uncomfortable in the natural man sense. Haha and that's hard!

When I started the mission I was the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my life, haha literally nothing was the same, and so the natural man was screaming, and crying and whining and suffering, haha I had fed him for twenty years and now that he had to be starved he wasn't going down without a fight. I so often felt like I was happier before the mission happier before I accepted the Lords will before my own, now a year latter I look back and I realize I was very very comfortable, I had never really done anything I didn't want to do in my life, and here I was having to sacrifice everything for the greater good.

Why did Christ come into the world without any worldly comforts? Why didn't he have a house, or money, or anything in terms of the world? Because He knew what I am learning every day, that to be happy is to be uncomfortable in the natural man, to progress is to starve out the natural man, to deny yourself and do whats gotta be done. One of my favorite teachings of Christ is found in Matthew 10:38-39

 38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

 39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life  for my sake shall find it.

To avoid our the crosses in our lives is the mission of the natural man. To find our own life, pursue our own comfort is what we have come here to overcome. Christ wouldn't have been the Savior unless He was willing to give up everything that is comfortable to the natural man, and sacrifice all that our Father required. He did it, and is our Savior, now we, as disciple of Christ, gotta learn how to do the same, one selfish struggle after another....