Time and the cardinal attribute of enduring (Elder Neal A. Maxwell) In the April 1990 General Conference, Elder Neal A. Maxwell shared a touching message titled, ‘Endure it Well’. He has some great discussion about the benefits of time that is worth reviewing on MostMovedMover. This post should be read along with my two other posts about Elder Maxwell’s views on time (7/19 post and 3/20 post). As we work through his quotes, I highlight a couple of questions about progression, endurance, time, and mortality.

I previously asked, What did Elder Neal A. Maxwell think about time and God? and proposed that he may have tempered his views on fixed future omniscience based on conversations with Blake Ostler. However, I have since found a few more quotes from Neal A. Maxwell after 1984 that are still fairly forceful and I want to add to the record on mostmovedmover.com about his views in this additional post. I hope to be respectful to his words while discussing how they relate to an openness view of God’s future.

More than once in the last year, I have encountered a space-time explanation from friends when we are discussing the topic of God and timelessness. In almost every instance, there is a phrase, something like, “Time is just another dimension. God can just step outside of it. Like in the book Flatland.” Often, they leverage time as a human construct that does not relate to God because one of our leaders talks about timelessness1 and Einstein taught us about space-time.

If you Google ‘LDS views on time’ the first article that comes up is an article in LDS living by C. Robert Line titled ‘How Does God’s Time Work? How Can He Listen to All Our Prayers at Once? Robert initially wrote the article in September 2015. Robert repeats quite a few quotes out of context that we have discussed previously. See the following posts as a more detailed and alternate view of how he is referencing a few quotes and scripture.

His and our attribute At times we discuss attributes that we must have to progress in the kingdom of God, but we limit the conversation to us and forget that God also holds the fullness of those attributes. I will review scripture and latter-day prophet’s words on meekness to see if we can understand God’s meekness. In a later post, we will examine what the perfected attribute of meekness implies about our relationship with him.