“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6:34). I’ve always read this verse as instructing us not to let cares or worries about tomorrow crowd in on the life we are living today. That is definitely a big part of what the Savior is teaching here. But I think that this verse is also a great lesson in repentance. Whatever evil happened today, that is enough. We made mistakes, we experienced heartbreak and tragedy, we inflicted our own hurts on others. Let’s not take any of this with us when we get to tomorrow. Let’s leave the evil where it is today because tomorrow we’re going to have a whole new set of evils to confront, and they will be more than sufficient to occupy all of our time, energy and attention. We don’t need to be dragging along with us into tomorrow the evils and mistakes that we made today. I think if we did a lot better job of each day acknowledging with unflinching honesty the evil that happened for that day, accepting that it happened, embracing the fact that we have gotten everything we possibly could - all of the pain, all of the lessons, all of the heartbreak and growth - and then not taking any of it with us for tomorrow, then we would find that repentance is not some scary or onerous process but a continuous, daily, severing of the burdens that we have been carrying throughout the day and which we can then stop carrying when we get to the end of the day. Yes, we will get a new set of burdens and face a new set of evils tomorrow, but we are only punishing ourselves unnecessarily if we take any of today's thoughts and evils into tomorrow. I know that thanks to the Atonement of Jesus Christ we can leave today’s evils behind every single day and we don’t have to take any of it with us for tomorrow.
