Gluttons For Forgiveness

Someone who seems to enjoy doing hard and unpleasant things is often called a glutton for punishment. The Savior does not want us to be gluttons for punishment. What He does want is for us to be gluttons for forgiveness. If we sin seven times, He wants us to come to Him and be forgiven seven times. If we sin seventy times seven times, then He wants us to come to Him and be forgiven seventy times seven times. It is no small thing trying to hold onto faith and repentance and hope for forgiveness when we try and we fail over and over and over again. We want so desperately to be good and stay on the strait and narrow path but we slip and we slide all over the place. We want so badly to get to a point where we won’t need to ask for Forgiveness anymore because we’ll be so full of the pure love of Christ, abounding in good works, doubting not, fearing not, strong and of a good courage, faithful in all things. But forgiveness isn’t some pill we swallow that can cure us of our mortal weakness. Forgiveness isn’t even the unappetizing vegetables we must pinch our nose and gulp down before we can get to our dessert. Forgiveness is the entire reason for our - and the universe’s - existence. When we ask for and receive forgiveness, we are proving that a thinking, reasoning being, possessed of its own free will, can choose to fight against every instinct to fear and mistrust and even disbelieve and look down upon in contempt a power greater than itself - a power that has every right to demand fully justified condemnation and punishment for the sins it has committed, but nevertheless choose with love and mercy to forgive and to believe that such a rebellious soul is and can be more than a catalog of its mistakes, that it can rise above its failures, that it can show the same kind of compassion and love and choose to forgive in turn for all of the evils and misfortunes and tragedies that have been perpetrated against it. Forgiveness is not the unpleasant salad course, politely put up with until something better arrives. Forgiveness is the main entree, the whole feast, the bounteous banquet, the all-you-can-eat buffet. And Christ wants us to be gluttons for Forgiveness, to come back for seconds, and thirds and four hundred and ninetieth helpings. I know that Christ will never turn us away from another serving of forgiveness, and I know that we should not be ashamed if it seems to us that we have to return to the banquet table a little more frequently than those around us. I’m certain that we would all be surprised just how many helpings of forgiveness we have all been given. It is far, far more than we deserve, and yet not nearly as many as the Savior would willingly give us, if we could but overcome our pride and our fear to ask for another serving.