Today marks the end of an online freshman writing class I’ve been laboring over since the end of May. I have a love/hate relationship with online classes: as a mother with young children at home, I’m a big fan of the convenience and flexibility. As a teacher, I struggle with the distance between me and my students, and the nagging sense that students, particularly in a writing course, might be better served in a face-to-face setting.

This semester, more than most, has been a lesson to me in agency (a theme we’ve been sounding recently at Segullah).  Right now (I haven’t scored the final paper), 10 of my 17 students are failing. Not because they’re poor writers—but because they simply haven’t done the work. As a formerly obsessive-compulsive student, I struggle to understand this.  Why would anyone pay good money for a class, and then not work hard at it? Or at least work at it? Don’t they want to succeed?

Sometimes I wonder if our Heavenly Father feels a similar sense of frustration when he looks at the choices we make. After all, when we look at the scriptures, the prescription for our earth life looks much like the syllabus for a course: the expectations and objectives are clearly laid out. Heavenly Father knows, too, that if we follow His course, our learning and growth will infinitely repay us for what we’ve invested in terms of time and sacrifice. And yet, so many of us choose not to follow the syllabus.

But I don’t think, ultimately, that God views our choices with the same frustration I view my students’ choices. After all, my frustration stems largely from my inability to separate my students’ agency from my responsibility. God, luckily, is smarter than that. I think he also has a deeper respect for us.  In “The Grand Inquisitor,” a fable from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Christ returns during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested. When the Grand Inquisitor presents Him with a list of His crimes, he includes this denunciation:

. . . Thou didst ask far too much from him [humankind]- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter.

What the Grand Inquisitor mistakes as a lack of love is actually an expression of that love: God lets us choose. He doesn’t force or compel us.

I imagine God’s attitude towards us is much more like that of a wise mentor I had in graduate school, who told me one time, “My students sometimes have priorities in their lives that are more important than my class. And I respect that.”

I’m still struggling to learn that kind of respect. By respect, I don’t mean necessarily that I agree with or celebrate the choices made—but that I respect the individual’s right to make that choice. This is a lesson begun on my mission, when I confronted the limitations of my own will for the first time: no amount of prayer, love, or effort on my part could make someone choose to embrace the gospel. As a teacher, I find myself relearning the same lesson: no amount of preparation or effort on my part can force a reluctant student to succeed. This is a lesson I’m hoping to master before I’m called on to exercise it with my own children, who are still fairly young (probably a foolish hope, but one I cling to nonetheless).

I’m coming to believe this kind of respect is critical to developing true charity and compassion, because we cannot, with our limited perspectives, fully understand the choices that other people make. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a remarkable speech given at the end of her career, argued before Congress that women should have the right to vote because, ultimately, before God’s tribunal, each woman is accountable solely for herself:

And yet, there is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of Eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Maybe—just maybe—if I can remember all of this, I’ll be less tempted to pull my hair out as I calculate my students’ final grades. Instead, maybe I can remind myself that my students, like me, face hidden challenges that don’t show up in a simple tally of work completed in an online course. The question of their success and failure is a much bigger question than my class.

How have you come to term with others’ agency? What helps you as you learn to respect the choices others make, particularly choices you don’t agree with?

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