The God of Is

It’s an honor to be so kindly introduced by someone I respect and admire as much as Rosalynde Welch. And good morning to all of you. Thank you to J. B. Haws, Kim Matheson, Rosalynde Welch, Brigham Young University, and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for the invitation to speak to you this morning.

If you’re wondering how a guy like me ends up giving a lecture like this, all I can say is that there are risks and benefits to having J. B. Haws as your high school seminary teacher.

More to the point, as a teenager—and then especially in college—I eagerly awaited Neal Maxwell’s conference sermons and devoured his writing. He stood out among his peers as a wordsmith. If he sometimes couldn’t resist alliteration or a decorative turn of phrase, these rhetorical quirks reflected a love of the language he employed, the truths he explored, and the fellow travelers he hoped to enlighten and inspire.

If my speech today can gesture in some small way toward his legacy—or more importantly, toward the God he loved—I will be grateful.

I would like to begin by telling you two stories. All involved have given permission for me to share them in this way.

The first occurred just more than 15 years ago. I was living in Philadelphia at the time but had flown to Northern California to interview for a job. After arriving a day early, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove three hours east to Yosemite National Park.

Arriving in the dead of winter, I found the park nearly empty, every surface covered with a coat of new-fallen snow. The individual flakes retained their glimmer and their respective character, endlessly refracting the light pouring forth from a pristine, cloudless, azure sky.

Driving into the park that morning, I found myself descending into a canyon with snow-dusted pine trees standing sentinel on both sides, as far as the eye could see. At one point, the brilliance of the snow, the singing of the sky, and the abundance of the conifers conspired to weave a scene so incandescent that I pulled over to drink it all in, my breath nearly stolen away.

Wearing just a t-shirt and jeans, I stepped from the warmth of the car into the crackling cold of that January morning, letting the air prickle my skin and stand the hair on the back of my neck on end. Beauty had never so suffused the world, it seemed to me, and I stood at the side of an empty road, transfixed by the sanctity of one of nature’s greatest cathedrals.

Keep that scene in mind as we fast-forward to another that occurred about 12 years later.

Two years before my trip to Yosemite, I had met a woman who surprised me with her beauty, intelligence, compassion, and grace. We dated for a time, eventually became engaged, and—after dating for 15 months—we married.

Our marriage knew its share of challenges, and working our way together through the rigors of our respective medical training—she as a nurse, I as a physician—was never easy. But we sought to be equally yoked, and together we built a rewarding, beautiful life that eventually included three little boys.

About six years ago, however, my partner sensed within herself a growing unease with the life she had spent 35 years building. Over many months, and with great deliberation and care, she concluded that she had founded her life on ideas that no longer aligned with her deepest values.

Reaching these conclusions greatly taxed her, but after a great deal of study and prayer—and though she recognized she would likely be misunderstood—she made the decision to, in effect, dismantle the life she had built and begin anew.

And so, over many months, she first grew distant from me, and then in May 2022 she sent me a carefully crafted email explaining that although she would always feel respect and admiration for me as a friend, her call to this new life required that we end our marriage so she could begin again.

I want to be clear. As best I can understand, my then-wife was attempting throughout this time to hold fast to integrity, striving to follow what she understood to be the better angels of her nature. In doing so, she sought to embody grit and tenacity, even when the decisions she made were hard.

For my part, I recognized then and now my many mistakes and shortcomings. But I showed up with dedication, fidelity, and kindness. My love for her ran deep and true, and I remained devoted to her, our union, and our family until she unilaterally decided that our marriage should end.

Thus, without assigning blame or designating a villain, we can recognize in what unfolded the contours of a tragedy. Two people brought together across many miles, against all odds, whose union had shimmered with hope and promise, but who then found themselves drawn apart by fate, time, circumstance, and diverging paths—despite their mutual best efforts.

Two things can be true. On the grand scale of human suffering, the sting I felt as my marriage dissolved doesn’t command much attention. As a cancer doctor, I’m keenly aware of those scales.

Still, even acknowledging the many forms of sorrow that outweigh my own, it is also true that, within the limits of my experience, for a long stretch of months that flowed into years, I struggled under a weight I often feared would crush and suffocate me.

I had spent many years cultivating an attitude of sunny optimism. I sought to drink the marrow out of life. I looked for light everywhere.

But with the arrival of that email, I found the sun suddenly absent, the marrow suddenly dry, the light entirely darkened. Food was ash, music noise, beauty gone from the world like water evaporated beneath a scorching sun.

I remember awakening from a troubled sleep at four a.m., staring at the ceiling and thinking with frightening force: “My gosh. I hate the experience of being alive.”

So even if my suffering pales beside others’, and even if prophets and poets have felt more fully and articulated more eloquently the transcendence of a Yosemite morning or the depths of human sorrow, nonetheless one fact about these experiences is unquestionable: they are.

And because they are mine, they constitute my curriculum in suffering and beauty.

These experiences, and others like them, have pushed me into my own interiority and forced me to confront life’s most vexing questions. And those questions have brought me to this conclusion:

Whatever we make of life, that making must account for both the transcendence of Yosemite and the agony of nights spent alone and confused.

In scriptural terms: any theology that deserves our attention must account for both the splendor of creation—what Thomas Berry calls the “Great Flaring Forth” of the universe—and the unrelenting suffering of Gethsemane—what Elder Maxwell called Jesus’s “axis of agony.”

In the crucible of this long night of my soul, I found deeper appreciation for aspects of my religion and its theology that, paradoxically, brought me comfort precisely because they did not offer easy answers.

The comfort did not come from having the questions resolved, but because the gospel shifted the center of gravity of the question itself, sending my pondering in new directions.

To understand this, we need to revisit the cosmological portrait painted by most of traditional Christianity—not to diminish those beliefs, but to create the necessary backdrop.

Traditional Christianity generally posits a God who knows no limits to power or influence—a God who is the unmoved mover, the creator of all things ex nihilo, and who must, in some mysterious way we cannot fully comprehend, be responsible for the salvation or damnation of every soul.

If God is the ultimate source of all reality and the mover behind every action, then God would also seem to be the source of all suffering, the cause of every sorrow, the reason behind every pain.

But the restored gospel gives us a different view.

Latter-day Saint theology turns this cosmology on its head by suggesting that God is not the sole unmoved mover. Instead, the restored gospel presents a universe where at least four other entities are co-eternal with God.

First, individuality. Doctrine and Covenants 93 suggests that something essential about us—our intelligence, our identity—has existed eternally.

Second, matter. D&C 93 likewise teaches that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Something about the building blocks of existence is eternal.

Third, agency. Eve exercised agency in Eden. We made choices in the premortal world. Agency appears to be inherent in our eternal nature.

Fourth, law. D&C 88 implies that some laws are as eternal as God—laws that structure reality and that even God honors.

This may strike us initially as counterintuitive or even blasphemous. But when we speak of the “demands of justice” necessitating the Atonement, we are acknowledging a law that God Himself respects.

The eternality of these entities fundamentally reorders Christian cosmology. And it sets the stage for the heart of today’s message.

The title of this lecture series is The Wonder of Scripture. The scripture I want to explore is 2 Nephi 2—specifically, Lehi’s counsel to his son Jacob.

Jacob has known little ease or happiness. He has been battered and abused by his older brothers. His family’s promised land has become a site of contention, disappointment, and moral failure.

And it is in this grim context that Lehi unfolds perhaps the greatest scriptural explanation of suffering.

“For it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. If not so… righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad… all things must needs be a compound in one.”

Here, Lehi introduces not just divine law, but the radical idea that opposition itself is eternal. It is not merely something God permits; it is woven into the warp and woof of the universe.

Opposition is not one program running on the cosmic computer; it is the operating system itself.

If that is true, the implications are profound. It means God does not reign over a universe where He controls every variable at will. Instead, God works within a universe where agency, matter, individuality, and eternal law coexist with God—and where opposition is foundational.

In such a universe, the question is not: “Why does God allow suffering?” Because to ask that is akin to asking, “Why does gravity exist?” or “Why are atoms made the way they are?”

The real question becomes: “How does God respond to suffering—and how does God invite us to respond?”

Interestingly, modern biology resonates with this scriptural insight. Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, wrote The Language of God, arguing that evolution itself reveals divine beauty. And indeed it does.

But the same processes—mutation, replication, variation—that allow single cells to unfold into human beings, and that allow life to diversify into zebras and toucans and oak trees, are the same processes that sometimes go awry and create malignant cells: cancer.

The very mechanism that allows life to thrive also allows disease to flourish.

Evolution and cancer are twins. Development and destruction emerge from the same molecular dance.

Lehi’s point could not be more clear: Opposition is inescapable, foundational, and morally and existentially meaningful.

This duality appears everywhere—in nature, in morality, in our stories.

Think of The Giver by Lois Lowry. Jonah’s horror is not simply that his father kills an infant, but that Jonah’s father can do so without understanding the moral reality of his act.

The story teaches that an ultimate moral order exists independent of our perception, and that becoming fully human means learning to discern and conform to that order.

For Latter-day Saints, this fits seamlessly with the idea that eternal law and agency shape even God’s acts. God is not worshiped because He is powerful but because He is good—because He flawlessly conforms to the eternal moral order.

And so we return to the central question: In an oppositional universe, where suffering is inevitable, how do we respond? And even deeper: How does God respond?

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland once said that what the restored gospel teaches us about God’s response to suffering “reveals more about the character of God than any theological treatise ever written.”

He refers to Moses 7, where Enoch witnesses God weeping. Enoch is astonished. How can God weep?

God answers: “These thy brethren… are without affection, and they hate their own blood.”

God acknowledges the suffering that comes from meaningful moral agency. But God responds not with coercive power, not by overriding agency, but with love—grieving love.

Prophets in the Book of Mormon emphasize that Christ’s Atonement is defined not merely by legal satisfaction but by empathetic suffering:

that “his bowels may be filled with mercy,”
that He may “know according to the flesh”
how to succor His people.

So why does all this matter?

First, because it teaches us that God’s defining characteristic is not omnipotence but vulnerable, expansive, participatory love—love as deep, real, and eternal as the universe itself.

Second, because once we accept that suffering is inevitable in an oppositional universe, and once we see how God responds, the purpose of discipleship becomes clear:

The purpose of Christian discipleship is to learn to answer suffering with love.

We may begin discipleship thinking the point is to achieve happiness. But scripture gives no evidence that righteousness guarantees happiness in mortal terms. Jesus suffered beyond measure. Every righteous person of whom we have scriptural record passes through deep waters.

If we expect that righteousness will ensure happiness, we will often be disappointed.

And so we return to the stories with which I began.

The transcendence of Yosemite is no longer as vivid as it once was. The crushing sorrow of my divorce has eased with time. But both experiences live in me. Both teach me. Both form my curriculum in beauty and suffering.

And both illuminate the question: If discipleship is not about happiness, then what is it about?

King Benjamin gives the answer.

After describing Christ’s transformative love, he says we will know we have been truly converted when we:

succor those who stand in need, administer of our substance to the needy, and never turn away the beggar.

I believe it is no accident that Benjamin’s crowning image is the beggar. Where else are we more tempted to forget Lehi’s teaching about the universal plight of suffering?

Benjamin reminds us: We are all beggars.

We depend wholly on God’s mercy and grace. And because we understand our shared predicament, our conversion is revealed not by perpetual happiness but by how we respond to others’ suffering.

When we see a beggar—any beggar, of any kind—we respond with mercy, kindness, and love.

That is the work of God. And therefore, it is the work of discipleship.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.