“Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God. My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.” (Mosiah 27:28-29). The word sin originally meant to miss the mark, as one might do by firing an arrow at a target. The path to peace in this world and eternal life in the world to come is strait and narrow. If we are off in our aim by even a very small margin, we will miss the mark. I know we sometimes visualize sins as burdens we carry, or cords and chains that bind us, or stains that mark us, and there is definitely some utility in conceptualizing sin in each of these ways. But if we imagine ourselves as an arrow that we have fired towards what we desire most, what we are aiming at, then to be saved by Jesus Christ from our sins would be most like the way that Alma describes it. We missed the strait and narrow way to the best possible version of our life and we are currently on a trajectory that will land us in the gall of bitterness and the darkest abyss. But somehow, miraculously, we are snatched out of the air and brought back into the proper trajectory through the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. In a supreme act of courage and love and self-sacrifice, Jesus throws Himself into the path of our sins, of our arrows that have missed the mark, and He snatches or catches those arrows with His own body. No wonder He bled from every pore. We like to assume that we have a certain amount of control over the repentance process and our recovery from sin and ultimate forgiveness and redemption. It is certainly true that we must always do everything in our power to aim for the strait and narrow path, but once we have taken aim and fired, we can't change directions mid flight and if we have missed the mark, all we can do is pray and trust that the Savior will snatch us out of our wrong trajectory and get us back on track.
