Patience and Trials

Waiting for the rest of the family to gather for early morning scripture study.

"My default assumption is that good sense and patience will triumph in our many challenges in life.  If we live wisely, our lives will go smoothly.  LDS folks may especially be vulnerable to the rosy world view.  We expect to be blessed for doing what is right.  Then the sky falls...We ask, What did I do wrong?  Didn't I have enough faith?  Is God mad at me?  It turns out doing good does not guarantee a life of contentment and fulfilled dreams.  We may be blessed for our efforts with the gift of serenity or new challenges.  God will provide precisely the experiences that can lead us to greater faith and a closer relationship with Him.  We can move resolutely and peacefully to our next rendezvous with God or shake our washing machine hoses at heaven....Maybe life is designed to deliver a solid and growing measure of failures for each of us--especially the valiant.  Look at Joseph Smith, Job, President Spencer W. Kimball, the Savior.  Maybe the Grand Designer wants us to be humble rather than self sufficient.  Maybe He wants us to learn firsthand our dependence on Him.  By systematically inserting failure into our experience, we are likely to become either discouraged and bitter, or relentlessly reliant on The One.  We can learn to trust Him.  Whatever we come to depend on--our minds, our talents, our money, our connections, our bodies, will be taken from us.  In the end, only one Thing is left -- there is only one Thing we can depend on: Him.  We expect everything to work out the way it should.  Yet the world is designed so that nothing works the way we expect it to.  But this is not random meanness.  This is a perfect design that invites us to depend on God.  Our challenges are blessings carefully designed to help us recognize our need for Him.  Everything in mortality will work against us.  Fail us.  Or disappoint us.  We must not trust anything but God.  He is the sure foundation upon Whom we must build.  If we want our talents to be refined and enlarged, we must be willing to surrender to Him.  Because of His great goodness, He will not simply strip us of everything.  Instead, with perfect discernment, He takes only as much as He must in order to reach us where we will find salvation.  His grace is sufficient for all men who humble themselves before Him," Wallace Goddard, Meridian Magazine. (Italics added)



I was send this quote last week from a dear friend.  I thought it was a nice quote but didn't think much of it.  Then on Sunday I bore my testimony and talked about my foot and how I have had to accept help from others and that this has been hard for me.  Then a friend of mine said she wanted to send me a quote.  This is the quote she sent.  This time when I read it I felt it.  It was what I needed to hear.  I am still trying to understand the need for trials and to be patient in them and am grateful for my Father's gentle reminders.