The Lord Needs Us Just As We Are

I imagine that the sons of Mosiah spent many sleepless nights agonizing over the mistakes they had made and I bet that there were times that they wished they had never stepped off the straight and narrow and that their lives and the world might be much better off had they never been disobedient, and perhaps that is true. However, in all of the hundreds of years that the children of Lehi had been living in the Americas, there are almost no examples of successful missionary work between the Nephites and Lamanites. The sons of Mosiah went to go teach people who had their servants executed or tried to murder their own children. Perhaps it worked out for the best that the Lord had some missionaries to send who had gone so far off the righteous path and who were familiar with the long, hard road to repentance and forgiveness. I believe that men like King Lamoni and his father would have found it easier to forsake and repent from such serious sins because they had living proof of men who had been among the vilest of sinners and yet had managed to find their way back to the gospel. We should never feel that because of decisions and choices from our past, we are somehow less valuable or have less to offer or contribute to the Lord's work. The sons of Mosiah had been not just a weakness but an active threat to the church, but the Lord was able to take those weak things and make them mighty in accomplishing His work. The Lord needs each of us, whether we've stayed true and faithful our whole lives or we've gone so far off the path that we can't even fathom how we could ever make good on our mistakes. The Lord has a plan for us not in spite of the errors we've made but a plan that incorporates and relies on the specific choices and decisions we've made.