Find The One Suffering The Most
The Son of Man descended below all things. Christ took upon Himself our pains and our afflictions and our temptations that He might know. He said that what we have done to the least, we have done unto Him. When we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God. I’m putting all of these different scriptures together for a reason. Christ is the great exemplar. He dined with sinners and publicans. He touched lepers with His bare hands. He was showing us that service isn’t about getting brownie points in heaven and it’s not about making ourselves feel better about how good we have it compared to the people who are really in trouble. Christ descended below all things so He could know what it’s like to be naked and hungry and sick and in prison. Whoever was the least, He was right there with them, only half a step even lower than that. If we want to find God, all we have to do is find the person who’s suffering the most and that’s where Christ is, knowing in His flesh and in his bones that great crushing hopelessness of being all the way at the very bottom. Christ is inviting us to climb down into that pit with Him, to help Him help our fellow beings, the least and worst off among us. When King Benjamin said that when we are in the service of others we are only in the service of God, this isn’t some metaphysical transitive property abstraction where like, there’s a little bit of God in each of us, and so when we help someone, we’re helping God. This is real. Christ is down in the pit with His arm around our brother or sister and He’s trying to help them climb out of the pit, and if we jump in and put our arm around them too, then we’re helping our suffering brother or sister, but we’re also literally helping Christ by taking some of the burden on ourselves. One of the best analogies for describing how gravity works is to take a rubber sheet and stretch it tight, and then put a bowling ball in the middle. Gravity is like that bowling ball warping the rubber sheet so that if you put anything that weighs less than the bowling ball, it’s going to fall down the sheet and into the well created by the bowling ball. If you can imagine evil and pain and suffering as being a little like that bowling ball, dragging everything around it down, then we can imagine the Atonement as being like Christ getting under that bowling ball and pushing it up so that the rubber sheet is no longer warped and everything doesn’t fall into the well. If we find the person that’s the most weighed down that we can find, and if we go with a sincere desire to understand and take on some of their pain, and if we go with the knowledge and conviction that the Savior is right there beside us helping us push up and off that weight, then not only will we be serving our fellow being and our God, but also ourselves because we will be less likely to fall towards evil. You see, when we take on someone else’s suffering, when we see the hell that they’ve been going through, when we really know what that pain feels like, then we’ll be a little more motivated to not increase the pain and suffering already present in the world. So with every ounce of pain that we help take off the shoulders of our brothers and sisters, we’re also helping to avoid some of the weight of future misery that had been headed our way before we changed our point of view. It’s easy when you're clothed and fed to not be as careful with your clothes and your food, but when you know what it’s like to be naked and hungry you’ve got a different perspective. People always say that the amount of evil and pain and suffering in the world makes it hard to believe in a loving God, but our Savior is getting rid of as much pain and suffering as quickly and completely as He can and if we all just pitched in a little more, we could help Him get rid of it a lot faster.
