I'm wondering if greater joy and happiness are built on increasing sorrow and pain. The scriptures teach: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad." "And it must needs be that the devil should tempt the children of men, or they could not be agents unto themselves; for if they never should have bitter they could not know the sweet" John Taylor related this comment from the Prophet: "You will have all kinds of trials to pass through. And it is quite as necessary for you to be tried as it was for Abraham and other men of God, and (said he) God will feel after you, and He will take hold of you and wrench your very heart strings, and if you cannot stand it you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God." Brigham Young said of Joseph Smith: "that he suffered more in thirty-eight years than many men could in one thousand; that loosing one thousand hounds on Temple Square after one jack-rabbit would not be equivalent to the "boiling over" of opposition he faced from his boyhood; but that he was more perfected, more sanctified, more glorified because "every wave of Adversity only wafted him that much closer to Deity." As a parent, I know that much pain and suffering comes from watching children make mistakes, but that experience makes their successes all the more sweet. Does God experience more (vicarious) pain and suffering than any other being because of what He sees and understands, but does that pain and suffering enlarge his joy when men repent and progress ? We sometime think that eternal bliss is our goal, but are we really in for more opposition, pain and suffering (in the next life) as we seek to become more like the Savior ?
