Falling out of alignment with God

Living in alignment with God is a consummate activity. You are always either increasing towards God or decreasing away from him— always growing or always decaying. You either reconcile your beliefs, desires, and actions to what you understand is best, or you don’t. Turning away from God is both a decision and a process. The decision to turn away from the path toward God in any way at any time removes us from it. Recall that this is precisely how honesty works, because honesty is just one facet of the path to God, and each facet follows this pattern.

Failing to acknowledge and live up to your idea of what God would do in your place will always result in the diminishment of your ability to see and know what is right with the same accuracy and to the same extent that you previously could:

3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is in the image of God, should shine unto them. (2 Corinthians 3)

When you disconnect yourself from the True Vine¹ in anything , you distance yourself from him in everything . All at once in one way and by degrees in another, you join the spiritual walking dead. Despite how normal some aspects of the lives of these people may sometimes seem, the signs of their internal misalignment from God quickly become apparent as soon as you get to know them. They are recurrently depressed and riddled with anxiety. They are stressed to the point of overwhelm by reasonable regular life events. They have no goals for the future, and if they do, they have no reasonable path of concrete steps to attain them. The only happiness they know is short-term pleasure, completely controlled by the chance circumstance in which they find themselves. Instead of providing an inexhaustible battery of confidence and meaning, their past choices cause nothing but guilt and regret. These symptoms in life predict the still worse condition that awaits them in death:

Now this is the state of the souls of the wicked, yea, in darkness, and a state of awful, fearful looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God upon them; thus they remain in this state, as well as the righteous in paradise, until the time of their resurrection. (Alma 40:14)

The more fully we align with the light, the more fully we can grow into the light. The more we retract from the light, the less we can grow into the light, the more we will attenuate in our vigor, and the greater the risk we place ourselves in of dying. Anything less than full alignment results in a degradation of the light in a person. This darkness increases in intensity until it is all that remains.²