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This was a phrase used at the tail end of a terrible prank people were pulling on each other when I was at summer camp 30 years ago. This is how it works….Person A tells unsuspecting person B, to ask confederate C [who is in cahoots with person A] a question. Person A makes it sound like it’s going to be a fun experience, that will work out just fine.
The question that person A tells unsuspecting Person B to ask of Confederate C is “Person C, how does your mother dance????”.
Confederate C replies, with a sudden fallen, serious face “My mother’s dead”, and then walks away looking hurt.
I was person B once. It was not good for my relationship with Person A at all, who I trusted in asking the question, and believing it would work out just fine. It was also not good for my relationship with Person C either. If I found out they were in on the cruel joke, I would not trust them either. If I never found out Person C was in on the “joke” I would think I’d offended them and had hurt the relationship.
Since we have been talking about revelation that blows up in our faces, I see this situation as an allegory for it. Person A is God, person B is you or me, and person C’s response is the outcome of the “revelation” that Person B acted upon, at God’s bidding.
I find this hurts our relationship with God, who has foreknowledge of all things. He KNEW the outcome was going to be negative (whether engineered, or not), and the way it plays out seems very cruel to person B. Particularly since we are supposed to trust God, who is our father, our benefactor, and who is supposed to love us.
What makes it even worse, is when Person D, an onlooker tries to justify the situation with statements like “maybe you were supposed to learn something”. Maybe this was to teach person C a lesson, or some other unknown purpose that stems from pure, Godlike motives on the part of Person A, or God himself.
For me, revelation that doesnt’ work out, and really hurts us, simply hurts your relationship with God. AS a perfect being, I find it hard that God would use these tactics.
The only rational justification I can see for this is if God is trying to teach us a very potent lesson about the dangers of relying too much on him, without thinking through the consequences ourselves. For example, in this allegory, perhaps the lessons learned are:
a) Don’t make jokes about people’s mothers or family situation without first knowing what that situation is, or how the person might take it.
b) Don’t be a conduit for other people’s messages unless there is a good reason for it.
c) Be cautious about communication that doesn’t seem to serve a practical purpose.
d) Don’t trust person A without doing your homework first.
The problem with all these learning points, is that they come at the expense of your relationship of Person A, who you would be wise never to trust so explicitly ever again — when He is always telling you to trust him on pain of negative, eternal outcomes!!!!
Thoughts on this??? Does it really serve a good purpose for God to provide a strong revelation to act a certain way, knowing full well such action will lead to unexplained hurt and anguish on the part of Person B?
Good analogy and good question, SD. Since I have disclosed this issue as the issue in my own FC I certainly relate to it. I agree that such scenarios do damage our relationships. There is no question my relationship with God was different during my FC (essentially non existent) and a great deal of the anger I felt was directed at God. I often said during my FC that if God was supposed to be showing he loves me He certainly had a strange and unwelcome way of doing so. I would also say that if this is what God is like I wanted nothing to do with Him. A large part of my crisis was this cognitive dissonance relating to why God would do such things. There were times when I could have punched the next person who said something like “God must have something for you to learn” or “God must have a plan for you” or even “When one door closes another opens.” (FWIW, no door has opened yet.) I can’t say I ever totally stopped believing in God, but I certainly didn’t know what I believed God to be and was agnostic at best.
Along came the faith transition. An early major turning point was the realization that God is not what I thought Him to be – not the LDS version. (Disclaimer: I now realize that what are apparently widely held beliefs about the nature of God are not universal among latter-day saints.) For me the only way to overcome my former faith damaging beliefs was to construct new ones which are not damaging. Since I can’t believe that a loving God would do things to hurt us and I don’t believe God needs to or desires to test us (since he already knows the outcome) I went with the belief that God is much more hands off than we are commonly led to believe – hence my Deist approach to God. In my mind God can now be an all powerful creator who may or may not be interested in us humans and takes a hands off approach to us. Such a God fits perfectly into LDS theology regarding agency (think child abuse, Hitler, etc.).
Your real question was about the purpose of revelations that might lead to bad results for us. I still struggle with that part. I have concluded that I probably misinterpreted the revelation (which was/is part of the faith crisis because if I misinterpreted that one how do I know I didn’t misinterpret others – even all of them? I am dubious (putting it mildly) of any feelings/promptings I have. I do not believe God would or does provide revelation that hurts people as there would be no useful purpose in doing so.
I will say that in some ways my faith is stronger after transitioning, but in most ways it is not. Were I to believe in the commonly held LDS version of God I would of necessity see Him as a destroyer of faith rather than a builder, Shiva as opposed to Vishnu.
SD – Don’t do that to me again! :wave: I don’t have anything of substance to say on the topic.
I do not like jokes involving pregnancy for this very reason. DW tells me she is pregnant. I am excited. She reveals the joke and I am deflated and hurt. My emotions were toyed with for entertainment.
DW tells me she is pregnant. I am not excited. She reveals the joke but is hurt at my poor reaction to the possibility of another child. She may feel that this signals a flaw in me, my love for her, or the health of our relationship.
I do not see a positive outcome.
I’ve been subject to similar jokes in my marriage. If not jokes, intimations that pregnancy is a possibility even under questionable circumstances. Drives me nuts. Two of my friends have died recently, and as the saying goes, “these things comes in threes” – I got a call about the third person half an hour ago.
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