“Yet you should have been faithful; and he would have extended his arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and he would have been with you in every time of trouble.” (D&C 3:8). I find it interesting that the Lord promises that if we are faithful, He will extend His arm to support us against all the fiery darts of the adversary. He does not say that He will shield or protect us from the fiery darts, but that He will support us. In the battle of good and evil, God will not rob us of our chance to face off against the enemy. He will not fight our battles for us. But when our arms are too weak to lift up our sword and shield, He can lift up our hands that hang down and support us and be with us in our time of trouble. When our legs have grown so weary that we feel as though we can stand no longer, He can be there to strengthen our feeble knees. With or without the Lord, the fiery darts of the adversary will find us just the same. The only difference is that if we are faithful, we will have the Lord’s support to keep pressing forward despite Satan’s every effort to bring us down. All of us have asked, particularly when struck by a particularly fiery and venomous dart, why do we still choose to stand up for what is right? But perhaps a better question we should be asking at such low points in our lives is, how are we still standing after suffering such lethal blows? The fact that we are suffering almost unbearable agony is not evidence that God has abandoned or forsaken us, but the fact that we are surviving and enduring and finding just enough strength to keep pushing forward is evidence that despite everything that is going wrong in our lives, the Lord’s arm is still extended to support us against all the fiery darts of the adversary and to be with us in every time of trouble.
