I am going to do my best today to keep this post optimistic.
It has come to my attention that the overall feeling of my blog is somber at best, so I
want to apologize and say that is not the intent of my posts. The purpose of this blog is to share
with you some of my thoughts, feelings, and struggles and also offer you my
testimony and some of the precious truths I am learning from day to day.
Luckily, I have been looking a lot more on the optimistic
side of things lately. Counting my blessings and being grateful for even small events that go well for me in my life is how I’ve been able to stay
positive lately. I am also learning a little bit more about how to really look at our
trials. Let me explain by starting with a story offered by Jeffrey R. Holland,
one of the leaders of the LDS church.
“Having grown up in
southern Utah and enjoying all the wonders and beauties of southern Utah and
northern Arizona, I wanted to introduce my son to that and I wanted to show him
places that I had seen and enjoyed when I was his age. So, his mother packed a
little lunch for us, and we took his grandfather’s pickup truck and headed
south onto what we call the old Arizona Strip.
“Noting that the sun
was going down, we decided that we’d better get back. But we came back to a particular fork in the road, really the only one
that at that point was absolutely unrecognizable. I asked my son to pray about
which road to take, and he felt strongly
that we should go to the right, and I did as well. And we went to the right, and it was a dead end. We went four or five
or six hundred yards and it was an absolute dead end, clearly the wrong road.
“Turned around, came
back out, and took the other road. And clearly the road to the left was the
correct road.
“Somewhere along the
way, Matt said, ‘Dad, why did we feel,
after praying about it, that the right road was the proper one to take, the
correct one to take, and it wasn’t?’ And I said, ‘I think that the Lord,
His wish for us there and His answer to our prayer was to get us on the right
road as quickly as possible with some reassurance, with some understanding that
we were on the right road and we didn’t have to worry about it. And in this
case, the easiest way to do that was to let us go 400 yards or 500 yards on the
wrong road and very quickly know without a doubt that it was the wrong road
and, therefore, with equal certainty, with equal conviction that the other one
was the right road.’
“I have absolute
certain knowledge, perfect knowledge that God
loves us. He is good. He is our Father and He expects us to pray and trust and be believing and not give up and
not panic and not retreat and not jump ship when something doesn’t seem to be
going just right. We stay in, we keep working, we keep believing, keep
trusting, following that same path, and we will live to fall in His arms and
feel His embrace and hear Him say, ‘I told you it’d be OK, I told you it’d be
all right.’”
I placed in bold the parts which really sum up my situation
lately. I especially love the last part, and feel that it sums up the hope
which we should all have within us when we experience these trials of our faith. Are we going to stay
strong? Or are we going to fail? Are we going to let our trials beat us, or are
we going to rise above and win the fight? Whether we like it or not, we are all
going to face trials. It’s my personal opinion that God will make each of us go
through the trial that is going to bring us literally, or figuratively to our
knees. In a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine, I told him, “I
would GLADLY get into a car accident and become a paraplegic or lose a limb, or
allow some other awful physical ailment to come upon me, if it meant I did not have to go
through this trial.” My friend's response was, “Well, if you know that, then God
doesn’t need to test your faith with that trial then. He apparently DOES need
to test you with this trial.” It stung a little to hear, that God would allow
something awful happen to me, but it makes sense. Rarely has God asked of his
people, or allowed to happen to his people, things that were easy. He
knows each of us, and will test each of us in a very different and specific
way, the things we need to learn to get back to Him again.
Another example I have seen is when the early members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were asked to construct a temple in
Kirtland, Ohio and then another later in Nauvoo, Illinois. The early church
members, by commandment of God, built these two sacred buildings, gave all they
had and worked diligently for years to construct each one. In the end, after
all the effort and sacrifice, the early church members where driven from both
of these places by the anti-Mormon persecution that surrounded them. I’m sure
these people had similar sentiments that I had, and that Matthew Holland from
the story felt: I did everything I was asked to do, and I did my best, and the
Lord told us to do something specific…. But things still didn’t turn out the
way we would expect a direct answer from God to turn out. I want to repeat what
I learned from the final paragraph of the above-mentioned story.
“I have absolute certain knowledge, perfect knowledge that God loves us. He is good. He is our
Father and He expects us to pray and
trust and be believing and not give up and not panic and not retreat and not
jump ship when something doesn’t seem to be going just right. We stay in, we
keep working, we keep believing, keep trusting, following that same path, and
we will live to fall in His arms and feel His embrace and hear Him say, ‘I told
you it’d be OK, I told you it’d be all right.’”
I am grateful for the lesson I am learning on this principle
of faith. It is my prayer that we all can first seek His will, get the answer,
and then do it. Most importantly, that we remember
what we felt when we were given revelation or any other inspiration regardless
of whether the path we end up on is difficult, dark, or seemingly wrong. We
need to retain the faith that we will be “redirected” to the path God wants us
to be on, even if He leads us through thorny ways first. Personal revelation is
a precious gift which, if we are not careful, the adversary will try to mislead
us into thinking we didn’t get it at all. The adversary will try to make us
believe that there is no God, there is no inspiration, that we can’t understand
how to interpret the spirit, or many other lies to convince us that what we
feel is from God is not true. I, for one, am thankful for the power of personal
prayer and the strength that personal communication with God can bring. I hope and pray for the continued strength to remember these lessons
and hold to what I know to be true.
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