Parable of the Fifteen Virgins

I’m gonna get the book a bit, in this episode of The Empty Soda Can. Hopefully if you’re totally irreligious, you’ll still be able to follow this; if not, just let me know and I’ll try to explain.

I was out mowing the lawn, this morning—ah, the beauties of setting one’s own schedule!—and I got to thinking about the Parable of the Ten Virgins. This Christian parable is found in the Biblical Book of Matthew: specifically, chapter 25, verses 1-13. In short, there are ten virgins that know the bridegroom is on his way to a wedding they’re supposed to be attending. Since ancient Jewish weddings were often delayed due to dowry negotiations, etc., the virgins don’t know when he’ll get there. When the bridegroom finally shows up, it’s the middle of the night and five of the virgins—the “foolish” ones—have some oil in their lamps, but not enough. They beg the other five—the “wise” ones—to share some oil with them, but the wise ones don’t have enough for both of them. The foolish virgins spend so much time trying to find someplace to buy oil in the middle of the night, they can’t get to the wedding in time.

This parable is extremely popular in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because the ten virgins represent the members of the Church that have been invited to commune with the Bridegroom (our Savior, Jesus Christ). The oil represents our spiritual preparation: in other words, you can’t live on borrowed light. While we are obviously saved by the grace of Christ, His grace and atoning sacrifice on my behalf will be for naught unless I fully and completely accept Him as my Savior. You can’t accept Him on my behalf; I have to do it myself. This, then, is the difference between the five wise virgins (those that already accept the Savior) and the foolish ones (those that sort of accept him, but have allowed themselves to put off their full acceptance).

So, back to the lawn: the reason I got to thinking about this is our garden. For decades now, the Lord, through His prophets, has been encouraging each family to plant a garden. Anna and I have never taken this counsel before (read: foolish!), but this year, we decided to repent of this lack of diligence and do something about it. Anna has been hearing about square-foot gardening for years, so I went down to Home Depot and picked up the supplies for a 10-ft² garden. After a morning of building, laying soil, and planting, we had ten 12″×12″ plots:

• tomatoes
• cherry tomatoes
• zucchini
• cucumbers
• green beans
• peas
• green onions
• lettuce
• cabbage
• spinach

We had the kids help us plant, so they could have some fun while also having a very real-world lesson on the Law of the Harvest (“as ye sow, so shall ye reap”). We watered it for weeks and were quite excited when the seeds started to germinate. Within a month and a half, all ten plots had germinated and we were understandably pleased with our unprecedented success.

As time went on, though, things happened. Plants that had originally broken forth suddenly stopped growing. David mischievously uprooted the tomato plant. Several of the “vegetables” we thought we had turned out to be weeds, which we didn’t pull until probably August because it took us that long to figure out what was going on. We’re now at the end of September, and all we’ve been able to harvest are a couple of cucumbers (one normal-sized, one tiny) and a slew of cherry tomatoes that have all split, presumably from overwatering. Now, don’t get me wrong; I understand that this is all a result of our own ignorance. However, I think it serves to prove a point: even having oil in your lamp isn’t necessarily the best solution.

Let’s head back to Christ’s parable for a moment, but transplant it to our day. There are still five virgins with no oil in their lamps; they’re obviously in trouble. But what of the five virgins that do have oil in their lamps? Well, first of all, they’ve got to figure out where the heck they can buy an oil lamp and then drop beaucoup bucks on it (not to mention the oil). Then they’ve got to figure out where to store it all, so their little nieces and nephews don’t break the lamp and stain the carpet when they come over for dinner. If they’re really being honest, they’ve got to call their respective insurance agents and pay a premium for storing incendiaries on the premises. When all is said and done, they’ve each blown a nice chunk of their life’s savings on a stupid oil lamp. Frankly, I think the five really wise virgins are the ones that just drop a few bucks on a decent rechargeable flashlight. It all comes back to what the Apostle Dallin H. Oaks called Good, Better, Best: sometimes even doing “better” isn’t really the best choice.

So jumping back to the garden: obviously our decision to follow the prophets’ counsel was “better” than not doing so, even though we were already trying to be “good.” What blessings, then, did we receive from following the prophet? Well, to be honest, I don’t know of any besides experience. Perhaps we would have suffered some unspeakable ill had we not planted a garden… but probably not. Perhaps our children have learned something about the aforementioned Law of the Harvest… but given the results, probably not much. We’ll probably never know of any specific blessings we received for it, save only for the experience. What we do know is that we spent over $100 on about five bucks’ worth of organic produce, which doesn’t seem like a particularly “wise” investment.

Will we plant a garden again, next year? I expect so. Will it yield better results? I certainly hope so. But excepting the experience we’ve gained, it would seem, at face value, that the better choice for this year would have been to buy the produce as we needed it instead of spending a lot more money with very little to show for it. The best choice, of course, would have been to be more diligent: do more research on watering; ask someone “in the know” if certain plants are vegetables or weeds; keep little boys from yanking tomato plants out of the ground; that kind of thing. Perhaps if we’d done that, we’d have had a much better experience and be that much farther ahead, next year—which itself serves as a type for learning a lot in this life, so we’ll be that much farther along the path when we pass over to the next.

I’ll finish up this post by reminding everyone that this coming weekend, we’ll have an opportunity to hear the words of not one, but many prophets of God, each speaking for our day (and thus able to address rechargeable flashlights in their parables). ;-) The four general sessions of the Church’s 179th Semiannual General Conference will be broadcast at 12:00–2:00 p.m. and 4:00–6:00 p.m. EDT each day, Saturday and Sunday, 3 and 4 October 2009. There’s a lot of “Good, Better, Best” opportunities inherent in both the meetings and the truths taught therein, so I’ll allow you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions on that one.