The Sacrifice of Not Dying

Something someone in Sacrament said yesterday caused me to view the Atonement in a completely different light. The Savior should have died from the pain He endured while suffering for the sins of the world. And not just once. He suffered an infinite amount and therefore should have died an infinite number of times. Jesus Christ was partly mortal. He had the capacity to die and the suffering and pains and afflictions of all living creatures should have crushed the life right out of Him. But Jesus Christ was also partly Divine. So He had to make the choice over and over and over again to use that Divinity to hold in the fragile mortality that was being squeezed out of Him. It is not just a miracle that One who was God died for our sins. It is a miracle that the Son of Man, a mortal, did not die when His heart, His mind, His body should have exploded from the weight of billions and billions of souls. Every time His mortal heart broke, His blood vessels burst, His brain aneurysmed from the horrible, terrifying soul crushing weight of the world, He used His divine power to hold himself together a little longer and pay for a few more sins. Every time He nevertheless partook of the bitter cup, He chose to live on when His body should have died. We should always honor and respect and reverence the great sacrifice Jesus Christ made when He died for us, but we should also honor and respect and reverence all of the billions and billions of times He chose to not die just yet in the Garden of Gethsemane, but chose to keep treading the wine press, His garments soaked in His own blood, with none to help Him as He lived through and beyond mortal wound after mortal wound after mortal wound and did not shrink from the impossible, terrifying task of living on through the pain of all of His brothers and sisters, not as a God, but as a mortal man. That divine power that Christ used to keep Himself alive and conscious so that He could experience in every exquisite detail in His own flesh and blood the precise pains and aches and agonies of every living creature from Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to the Great and Terrible day of His Second Coming and beyond - that same power is available to each of us, and can sustain us and hold us together so that we can survive the trials and afflictions that should probably kill us. The Atonement may not always stop the pain, but it can help us to live through it. The very best way we can show our gratitude to our Savior is to follow His example and endure the trials that we face and choose to live through them, choose to embrace that divine power to hold us together through the stuff that should probably kill us. By choosing to live with and through and beyond the pain we are following in our Savior’s bloody footsteps. Unlike the Savior when He pleaded for the bitter cup to be taken from Him, God will often remove the cup from our lips. Nevertheless, if He wills that we should drink a little more, He will give us His divine power to stay alive and keep drinking. I thank and honor and praise my Brother and my Friend for loving me enough to choose to continue living through the many wounds and the many deaths my sins and my sorrows and my pains heaped upon Him.