A New Heart

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, or so the saying goes. Everything that the old lady tried to do to solve the problem ended up creating a new problem of its own. Her problems started out as the size of a gnat, but pretty soon she was having to swallow things that were the size of a camel. This is what it looks like when we try to fix our problems on our own without asking for or accepting our Savior's help. Whatever solution we come up with on our own, however seemingly brilliant and apparently effective at eliminating our problem in the short term, because we thought of it on our own and did not include our Savior in the planning or the execution, it is doomed to fail. We are not smart enough to anticipate all of the cascading consequences of our actions, and even if we were, we are not powerful enough to ensure that any ripple effects don't come back to bite us. This is OK. We're not supposed to devise and implement the solutions to all of our problems all on our own. Our Heavenly Father's Plan is not called the Plan of Individual Excellence; it's called the Plan of Salvation. And it's called the Plan of Salvation because we need saving. All of us. Pretty much constantly. If we find ourselves in a situation in which we are not smart enough or strong enough to find our way out all on our own, then everything is going according to plan. In the Plan of Salvation, Jesus Christ's role is to save, and our role is to be saved. Which isn't to say that we can't have an active role in our Salvation. Christ needs us to do our part, as much as we can do, all that we can do, in fact, but "all we can do" does not look like us doing everything by ourselves without His help. When we try to go it alone, we end up like the old lady who swallowed a fly, and then a spider, and then a bird, and then a cat. Each "solution" became more ridiculous and did more damage than the problem it was trying to fix. If we keep trying to do everything on our own, then we are going to just keep piling broken solutions atop broken solutions, scar tissue atop scar tissue, until all we have left is this giant, confusing mess of a granite hard heart. But if we turn to the Savior, what does He promise us? "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God. I will also save you from all your uncleannesses." (Ezekiel 36:26-29). At the end of the day, it is much better for our Savior to take our old heart, with all of its calcified traumas and deeply rooted pains and entrenched betrayals, and replace it with a new heart, one that doesn't have layer upon layer of unsolved problems and inadequate and insufficient and infective solutions that inevitably lead to worse problems. The real power of the Atonement is its ability to short circuit our proclivity to get caught up in a downward spiral of chasing after problems that seem to us like solutions but are in reality only bigger problems. To choose to embrace our Savior and His power to save us is to quit doubling down on our problems and to give up on the illusion that there is any part of our lives that we should attempt to confront without Divine assistance. Let's give up our old, broken hearts and let our Savior give us a brand new heart, and fill us with His spirit so that we can have the wisdom to recognize that the answer to having swallowed a fly is not to then swallow a spider. I know that our Savior is neither put upon nor in any way surprised when we need saving, but is ready and willing and eager to swoop in and save us the very nanosecond that we let Him, and that however often we through foolishness or neglect or outright rebellion damage our hearts beyond repair, He is always ready with a fresh, new heart to give us.