All Things - Good and Bad - Will Work Together

One of Satan’s most effective lies is that we no longer qualify for the healing power of the atonement. We have sinned too deeply, too often, and too recently for us to expect that the Savior will still want to look at us, let alone help us. We may be tempted to feel that we have squandered any opportunities for growth and development and redemption. We may feel that certain paths are now closed to us due to the choices that we have made. Believe in God. Believe that He has all power, both in Heaven and on Earth. Believe that though the winds and the waves beat upon us, though the hail and the shafts in the whirlwind threaten to drag us down into a gulf of misery and endless woe, the Master cares whether or not we perish and has the power to say to the winds and the waves Peace, be still. To whatever depths we’ve sunk, Christ has gone lower. And if Christ has the power to rise from depths far blacker and more terrible than we can possibly imagine, bearing with him as He rises all of the weight of the sins and the sorrows of the whole world, then He has the power to pull us up from the meager depths to which we’ve sunk, even burdened down with the miniscule weight of mistakes that we have made. The important point is that none of it is wasted. Our good decisions and bad decisions. Our moments of strength and our moments of weakness. Our triumphs and our tragedies, our successes and our failures. All of these things will work together for our good and they will give us experience. This isn’t an invitation to kick back and relax, to eat, drink and be merry for God will beat us with a few stripes and at last we will be saved. We never have an excuse to procrastinate the day of our repentance, but nor need we ever fear that the day of our repentance has passed us by. The time to repent is now. It’s always now. This moment, right now, is the time to repent. And in one second, it will again be the time to repent. And the second after that. We always have need of repentance, but more importantly, we always have the opportunity to repent. We do not need to be haunted by the specters of what our plans for our life from yesterday or last year or ten years ago, because through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, He has the power to make our lives not only better than they are right now, but better than we could have possibly imagined at any time in our past. We strive to choose the right in the hopes that God can make something beautiful out of our lives, but we will be in awe of the beauty that God will be able to make of the times that we chose poorly. We expect God to magnify our goodness, but we will be surprised at how God can weave together all of the good and bad moments of our lives into something of far greater majesty.