Hard To Swallow
“Those who have died in Jesus Christ may expect to enter into all that fruition of joy when they come forth, which they possessed or anticipated here... I am glad I have the privilege of communicating to you some things which, if grasped closely, will be a help to you when earthquakes bellow, the clouds gather, the lightnings flash, and the storms are ready to burst upon you like peals of Thunder. Lay hold of these things and let not your knees or joints tremble, nor your hearts faint; and then what can earthquakes, wars and tornadoes do? Nothing. All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty I have seen it.” (Teachings of the Presidents of the Church Joseph Smith Chapter 3). Every good thing that we have ever had will be restored to us. Every good thing that we have hoped for will be ours. Every good thing that we cannot even imagine will be presented to us when we return home to our Heavenly Father. The Plan of Salvation is and has always been a Plan to save us and our families and make up everything that we have lost or have sacrificed or have had taken away. If we hold faithful and rely on the merits of Him who is mighty to save, then no matter how different our lives may have turned out if this or that thing had or hadn’t happened, the great unifying hope is that when we are exalted it will be impossible for our lives to have turned out any better. When we are in the midst of tragedy and sorrow, when we are driven and tossed by the storms of life, when we feel like God doesn’t care whether we live or die, we need not let our knees or joints tremble, nor our hearts grow faint. What can earthquakes, wars and tornadoes do? Nothing. All our losses will be made up to us in the resurrection, provided we continue faithful. It is hard to trust God’s promise that our grief and our pain and our loss and our sorrow, all of the good things we are required to give up and all of the bad things that we have no choice but to endure will all be swallowed up in the Love and the atoning sacrifice of our Lord and Savior. After all, it was hard for Him to swallow all of our pain and our sins and our ailments and afflictions. But He did the hard thing because He believed in us. He believed that even with all of the hard things He would ask us to do, all of the bitterness and the cruelty and the evil and the suffering that we would have to swallow, He believed that we would not give up, that we would turn to Him, trust in Him, rely on Him to get us through the good and the bad. God didn’t set all of this up just to watch us fail. He believes in us a lot more than we believe in Him. And if it sometimes overwhelms us, if our knees start to tremble and our hearts start to fail, we just have to remember that the Creator of the Universe bled from every pore and trembled because of pain and pleaded for another way. It took Christ, the greatest of all, three tries to accomplish the atonement and He had to be comforted by an angel partway through. But He did it. He did it because He knew that in our own small ways we could do it too. Christ laid down His life because He loved us and because He knew that so many of us would choose to follow Him down the hard road and give up more than we can bear and tremble because of pain and keep on anyway. Christ prevailed because He had his eye single to the glory of God. He could see that one bright moment when we are raised from death and hell and pain and sorrow and are all reunited once more as one big eternal happy family. When we are at our happiest, our most content, we can glimpse the tiniest sliver of that glorious vision. It will be better than we can possibly imagine.
