Father of Multitudes, Struggles, Joys

Many times in the Scriptures, our Heavenly Father is referred to as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I was thinking about the names of these three patriarchs, and I think their names in some respects lay out our purpose in life. Abraham means ‘Father of multitudes’ or ‘Father of many nations’. We are children of The Creator and we have inherited his creative abilities. We have been given the capacity to increase and multiply our influence across multitudes and many nations. We have a responsibility to all of our brothers and sisters in every nation of the world to work with all of the time and talents and resources that we have to improve the world we share with them and to make their lives easier and more enjoyable and as we waste and wear out our lives in this work, we will find ourselves richly rewarded such that our mortal lives will be blessed with joy and a sense of accomplishment and the eternal reward awaiting us after we die will be even greater.This leads us to Isaac. Isaac means ‘He laugheth’. God created us so that we might have joy. Joy is the reason that we exist. It may not always be our purpose or our mission, but if we dig deep enough, it is always the reason behind anything we do that is good. For as many times as Jesus wept or groaned within himself for the wickedness and tragedies he faced during His mortal ministry, there were at least as many times that he laughed for joy. Joy is not necessarily our constant companion and there may be times where its light may be so dimmed by pain and misery that we may be tempted to believe that its brilliance never existed except in our imagination, but joy is never as far away from us as we sometimes fear it to be. And now we come to Jacob, who was renamed Israel. Israel has various interpretations but one interpretation might be one who prevails or struggles or overcomes with God. God created us so that we might have joy but He also created us that we might struggle and overcome misery. When taken together, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, we go out to multiply our force for good in the world by prevailing over unfairness and misery and in spite of our shortcomings and our pain finding joy in the struggle.