"A"gency...You CAN Choose

Agency is an interesting thing. The right to choose. Choose what we want, what we want to do, what we don't want to do.

There are times in our lives where the Agency we have is limited in scope. That time of life where our Mom and Dad or your kids seem to control much of what we do. I had been known to tell my daughter that, "Our house isn't a Democracy, it is a theocracy and you don't have to right to make certain choices." Now... I know that isn't really true, well, maybe a little bit. But I am here to tell you that a 6 year old doesn't have the right to chose to fly off the roof and a 16 year old with a newly minted driver's license better not chose to drive 300 miles with her friends to go to the hot springs. Ever. I am much more lenient about agency with my Dimples than I ever was with Curly. I have learned that there is much less that will do permanent damage and what does damage her will generally heal just fine.

However... as someone who has crested and is well on the downside of the hill of life, I have come to realize we always have the ability to choose. Even as a little child we chose. We cannot always protect our children from bad choices any more than we can always protect ourselves from making them, though we can make their environment safer. Say, remove the ladder from the side of the house. No matter how many times I tell Dimples to stop moving around the dining room table hopping or rolling from one chair to another, she is going to keep doing it. Unless I tie her to the chair. She manages to fall off a chair every couple of weeks. Eventually she will figure out on her own it isn't a good idea.

What we can help them learn is the law of Consequences. Dimples is learning about the law of gravity every time she falls off of that blasted chair, it is a consequence to dancing around the table from chair to chair. Curly learned if she went somewhere she wasn't supposed to go (and I always found out...) the consequence was the loss of said driver's license for a while. Consequence will always follow action or inaction.

I have learned after much living and repenting, that there are always consequences. Good or bad, every time we exercise our right to choose, there is a resulting effect. For ourselves or for someone else. For our community, for our country. We may see it, we may not. It may be immediate, it may show up much later. Everything we do effects something or someone somewhere.

We received our Agency from a Father that loves us so much he will let us make the decision and fall off chairs. Now, maybe a split head requiring a trip to the emergency room to get stitches seems somehow different than making the decision to not follow the advice of a Prophet, but the scars left from some decisions could require painful repentance and sometimes carry a lifetime of regret. The repentance process our Father gave us is like us hugging the crying child who fell off the chair after you told them a hundred times they were going to hurt themselves. We have been told what to do and not do. Multiple times, by multiple people from multiple sources. Stop doing "whatever". You are going to hurt yourself. As well as the admonition to do 'this or that" and you will be able to make the good choice. But the Agency is ours. We can always choose. It is our God given right to learn the easy way or the hard way to be better and be more than we think we can be.

Sometimes you have to fall off a chair a few dozen times to understand the law of gravity completely, hopefully you don't need to go to the hospital because of it.


How do you help the young people in your life understand the gift of Agency?