Wednesday, January 17, 2024

walking into the middle of a three-act play

Our Father’s plan of happiness for His children includes not only a premortal and mortal life but also a potential for eternal life, including a great and glorious reunion with those we have lost. All wrongs will be righted, and we will see with perfect clarity and faultless perspective and understanding.

Church leaders have compared this perspective with someone walking into the middle of a three-act play. Those without knowledge of the Father’s plan do not understand what happened in the first act (or the premortal existence) and the purposes established there; nor do they understand the clarification and resolution that come in the third act, which is the glorious fulfillment of the Father’s plan.



Quentin L. Cook

"Be Peaceable Followers of Christ," General Conference October 2023


See Boyd K. Packer, “The Play and the Plan” (Church Educational System fireside for young adults, May 7, 1995 [printed 1997]), 2: “In mortality, we are like actors who enter a theater just as the curtain goes up on the second act. We have missed act 1. … ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ is never written into the second act. That line belongs in the third act, when the mysteries are solved and everything is put right.” See also Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (1979), 37: “[God] sees the beginning from the end. … The arithmetic … is something we mortals cannot comprehend. We cannot do the sums because we do not have all the numbers. We are locked in the dimension of time and are contained within the tight perspectives of this second estate.”

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