Palimpsest of the Soul

In the Middle Ages, they wrote mainly on parchment made from animal hides. Because this was expensive to produce, they would often reuse the parchment by scraping off the old writing so they could write something new. A parchment that had been reused in this way was called a palimpsest, and in some cases, you can still make out the original writing underneath the new writing. It says of Job in the Old Testament that after all the disasters that befell him, yet he retained his integrity. Job had written over and over again his faith and righteousness on the palimpsest of his soul so that when all of his wealth and his possessions, his children and family and friends, his health and his very skin had been scraped away, his trust in God remained. The reason that we pray and study the scriptures and repent and find ways to love and serve our neighbors every single day is so that each time we etch our faith and hope a little more deeply and a little more clearly, so that when tragedy strikes and scrapes away the top ten or twenty layers of our patience and our sanity, then, deeper down than all that we still have our trust in God that we do not suffer in vain, that He will not allow us to suffer more than we are able, and that His Atonement will make things not just right but better than we could have imagined in the end.