The Atonement Does Not Mean Erasure

I watched a video of this artist who would go to places that had graffiti, especially hateful or ugly graffiti, and he would paint these beautiful murals over them. And sometimes people would come and deface them with more ugly graffiti and he would just paint a new, even bigger and more beautiful mural over the top of the graffiti and the old mural. This is a good illustration of how the Savior's Atonement works. Christ doesn't erase our sins, much as we might like Him to. Rather, He creates something even more beautiful and wonderful than we can imagine out of the ugly mess we made. If our relationship with someone else has ended in violence, manipulation, betrayal, or mutual destruction, the solution is not to take things back to the way they were before the fight or the infidelity or the lies took things beyond the point of no return. That's because the relationship was already broken in some way long before the final straw. So erasing the final sin isn't the best long term solution. Christ doesn't want to take us back to square one, He wants to give us a whole new square to work with. There is no repairing the damage done when we have wronged someone or someone has wronged us. But Christ can replace a broken heart, a broken relationship, a broken life with a new and more beautiful one. And if the new life gets wrecked, He’ll replace that with a newer, even more beautiful one. When Christ was resurrected, He did not erase the marks of the nails in His hands and feet, but showed us that even our scars can be a part of the beauty that is our new life. Christ’s Atonement is not meant to erase our mistakes or make them like they never happened. The power of the Atonement is contextualizing our mistakes and making us realize that our life couldn’t possibly be as good as it is without the mistakes that have led us to this point. Christ will never dishonor or minimize our pain and suffering and struggle by trying to take away our mistakes and our traumas, but rather, through His grace, He will embellish and ennoble and exalt our struggles and our mistakes and make something beautiful out of them.