"Rise up, O men of God!
Have done with lesser things.
Give heart and soul and mind and strength
To serve the King of Kings."
I really enjoyed the topic I was assigned this month. It is based on Elder Uchtdorf's talk called "You can do it!". I have pasted the video of his presentation below for those reading this talk online. The talk was given for the Priesthood Session of General Conference in October 2013.
When I was a kid, I had a physics teacher that was teaching us Newtonian mechanics, including the concept of Gravity. One thing he mentioned that I remember is that the process of walking is the process of continuously falling, and correcting our position. I am going to talk a little about falling today.
Part of the process of life is falling, for we all have fallen, we all fall and we all will fall. We often times fall short of what is expected of us. The question is how do we react when we fail. At times, when we fail, we feel guilt and sorrow when we have made a mistake. We feel bad for what we have done. But we have to distinguish between sorrow that leads to repentance and sorrow that leads to despair.
In 2 Corinthians 7:10 it says:
10 For
Let us contrast these two types of sorrow.
Sorrow of the world
What do we feel? Despair. We continue to feel bad for a long time, because our behavior is not changing. Sometimes, a desire to "throw the towel".
Outcome: No improvement in behavior. Sometimes it may do the opposite, the individual may consider himself/herself hopeless, and just stop trying to follow God's commandments.
In this case, we think we are by ourselves.
The sorrow of the world, is comparable to putting a rock on our backpack whenever we do something wrong. These burdens become heavy to bear over time.
Godly sorrow
What do we feel? A desire to repent, a desire to be better, to change our behavior.Outcome: the individual improves over time, and becomes happier.
In this case we remember the Savior has taken our guilt upon His shoulders. We realize we are going through this process by the Hand of the Lord, we are doing our part to correct our behavior, but we are actually leaning on Christ in this transformation.Godly sorrow is part of the repentance process. When we repent, we let Christ bear our burdens.
The Savior said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
It is like instead of putting a rock on our backpacks, learning our lesson, and giving it to Christ instead. He will take care of it.
As Elder Uchtdorf says in his talk, however: "our destiny is not determined by the number of times we stumble, but by the number of times we rise up, dust ourselves off and move forward".
There were a few pieces of advise I really enjoyed in Elder Uchtdorf's talk:
1. Keep our focus on the goal.
When I was a young man, I did a bit of kayaking. One thing I learned is that you are much more efficient when you paddle if you set your focus on a landmark far away that you want to reach. The same applies to our life.
There have been many men and women who have not reached their full potential because they are focused on their daily failures and sometimes successes, instead of setting their sight on the larger goal of seeing where they want to be on the eternities, and the kind of person we need to become to get there.
When I was a missionary, I remember teaching a very charismatic young man with a lot of potential, a leader. I could see that this young man had the determination to do whatever he set his mind to. At a young age, he had his own business, and he was really talented. He got baptized. I thought, this is a great man. He could become a bishop one day, or a stake president. The years passed, and his activity in the church diminished because of his other goals. He accomplished a few things in his life, but nothing compared to what he would have accomplished, had he set his sight on higher goals.
It is hard to find our way when we don't have a clear goal in sight. I remember another incident when I went on a week long hiking trip with two friend. On one occasion I remember going for a hike not too far away from the cabin where we were staying that night (it was about a 30 minute walk). I remember at one point I was trying to get back to the cabin, but I got lost. I could not see any landmarks around me that could tell me the way to the cabin. Just trees everywhere. Eventually I found the cabin, but I struggled quite a bit -- and was a bit worried.
Just like it was hard to get back to the cabin without proper landmarks, It is really hard to get back to the straight and narrow if we don't have a set of divine goals to keep our sight on. If we keep our sight on divine goals, it will be easier to get there. Even then, we may fail, but we will know the steps to get up on our feet again.
In the process of becoming more Christlike, we will also gain peace in this world.
23 But learn that he who doeth the works of
Related to this, we should:
2. Live our life based on who we want to become, and not because we have been told to
Sometimes we may think we do things "because we have to".
We may not eat something because the doctor told us to, or we may do our home-teaching because we need to report on our visits at the end of the month. But we will not gain much from doing things this way.
What if instead, we change our ways, and rise up to become the type of people that we need to be. What if we do things because we are convinced of their good for others and for ourselves. We will serve with power and determination then. We will not just be home-teachers, we will be friends. We will not just suffer a diet, instead we will become enjoy living a healthy life style.
3. You can do it!
The most important thing I got from Elder Uchtdorf's talk was in the title of the talk: "You can do it!"
Brothers and sisters, no matter how tough things seem sometimes, or how weak we think we are, let us remember that we are not on this alone. Let us remember that Heavenly Father actually wants us to be happy, to have joy. We are in this together, and we are in this together with Christ. We are much more capable than we can imagine, and much stronger than we realize. Heavenly Father knows our potential, and will not give us any trials that we cannot overcome with His Help.
Brothers and sisters, let us understand the difference between these two sorrows. There may be some of us who have been carrying heavy rocks on our backs for too long. It is time for us to learn to forgive ourselves, and to let Christ take care of those burdens. As I mentioned before, God wants us to have true joy in this life, and that requires us to trust Him. It does not mean that we should not feel sorrow for our failures, but it does mean that the sorrow we feel should be focused on improving us, on making good use of Christ's atonement and to get us closer to our goal of eternal life instead of further away from it. I know that our Savior, who loved us so much to atone for our sins, wants us to make good use of that atonement, and I say this in His name, Amen.
