{"id":243,"date":"2016-03-20T14:10:59","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T21:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/?p=243"},"modified":"2016-03-20T14:10:59","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T21:10:59","slug":"adversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/adversity\/","title":{"rendered":"Adversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today at stake conference, our stake president spoke on adversity. It brought to mind a lot of memories. I heard a snippet of short story on the radio about a man’s memories of a chess teacher. 1<\/a><\/sup>One quote that stood out was that chess was only interesting when it was challenging. \u00a0I don’t normally think of a game\u00a0as adversity, but it’s a useful metaphor for why having adversity in life is desirable.<\/p>\n

It also brought to mind another stake president’s talk about adversity that I had seen adapted into a play.2<\/a><\/sup> What has stuck with me all of these years is how in a single specific instance of tragedy and adversity, blessings and growth can still be found. I fear such tragedy, but take comfort in knowing that others have weathered it.<\/p>\n

Finally, I look at Lehi’s teachings in 2 Nephi 2 a little differently than I used to. “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition\u00a0in all things.” This opposition isn’t just punishment for sin, but I think it also refers to the adversity that Lehi mentions in the first verse. Bad things that happened as a result of being in the wilderness, and suffering at the hands of Laman and Lemuel.<\/p>\n

We often imagine how nice life would be without adversity; but every so often we should pause to imagine how vapid life would be without it as well. It would be life without happiness or misery. The only reason such a life sounds happen is because we’d be carrying with us the memories of the adversities we’ve already overcome.<\/p>\n

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  1. Stephan Enter’s “Resistance” which aired on NPR’s Selected Shorts<\/a> on March 8, 2016 ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. The talk was ‘The Uses of Adversity” by Carlfield Broderick and the play was Maror by James Goldberg ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today at stake conference, our stake president spoke on adversity. It brought to mind a lot of memories. I heard a snippet of short story on the radio about a man’s memories of a chess teacher. 1One quote that stood … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burnhamup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}