Brilliance By A Thousand Cuts

If you pull a diamond straight out of the ground, it's going to look just like every other boring, basic rock. It is only possible to unlock the true brilliance and beauty of a diamond by making many precise cuts. These cuts can sometimes remove up to half of the carats of the original diamond, but again, if you don't do it, it's just a boring lump of rock. Jewelers have spent centuries honing and refining their techniques to cut diamonds with the perfect number of facets in the perfect symmetrical positions to maximize each diamond's luster, brilliance and fire. Joseph Smith compared himself to a rough stone: "I am like a huge rough stone...and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force...thus I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty." We all start off as rough, unremarkable stones, but if we can humble ourselves and put our trust in the Lord, He can transform us from rough stones into brilliant jewels. This will not be easy. The Lord is going to make cuts, cuts in places we don't want to let go of, places we firmly believe we can't live without. These cuts will bring us grief and pain and we will struggle as doubts and fears creep into our minds and hearts. Maybe God is cutting more than He has to. Maybe we liked it better when we were a rough stone. We may start to panic when we have already endured so much but we don't seem to be getting any more brilliant or beautiful, but just the opposite. But if we keep the faith and endure it well, we will find that when the Lord has finished His work, He will have revealed for all to see a beauty and a brilliance that we could not scarcely have imagined in even our wildest dreams and faintest hopes. We will find that we will be able to receive the Lord's light and His love and transform it into a scintillating fire within us and to magnify and shine it back out to the world a hundred times more dazzlingly bright. I know that the cuts hurt and they don't make sense and we seem to be losing and giving so much without fully understanding what lies at the end of the painful process. But I also know that when the Lord comes to make up His jewels, if we allow Him to make the necessary cuts to make us a part of those jewels, then we won't be able to help ourselves but to radiate pure joy as brilliant, cut, polished diamonds.