Some
of my favorite verses of scripture that help me feel the immense love, majesty, and power of God are scattered around in Isaiah 40:9-10 and 21-31. I also love
the Youth theme scripture of Mosiah 5:15 because it helps
encourage me and testifies of the importance of keeping your values and
standards and how great your joy will be when you do.
I
know that Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are real beings
that are fully aware of us. I know that I am a daughter of God. I know that my
family loves me so much and that my parents are proud of me and that I am an
example to my siblings, and that I have to work and choose everyday to be the
best person for them to look up to and be proud of.
I recognize that the Atonement
is such a great blessing for us. Even though I don't fully understand it right now, I want to be able
to, and I am grateful for it
and for the fact that Christ could have chosen to not totally fulfill His
mission and complete the plan, but He did; He was the only one who ever could,
and He made it possible to save worlds of God's children should they choose to
accept and follow His teachings, have their wills aligned with the Father's,
and make and keep the covenants necessary to achieve the greatest happiness and
progression we can.
I know that the prophet is God's
anointed to lead His church today. I believe in personal revelation and am
grateful for the gift of the Holy Ghost, to comfort and guide us. I believe in
the power of the priesthood. I know that in the past I have been blessed by my
father and other worthy priesthood holders for healing, safety, peace,
guidance, counsel and comfort; and I know with absolute certainty that I will
continue to need those blessings in the future and will be able to ask those
who have the authority and pure hearts and hands needed to administer those
blessings to me and my loved ones.
Lastly, I know that there is a
Plan. Heavenly Father is a God of order and truth. We of this time watched our
brothers and sisters go through their mortal experiences over millennia so that
we might gain greater knowledge than they had and know what Heavenly Father
expects of us. One of the girls in my last ward shared the thought that our
children are watching us, their future parents, and learning from our
experiences so that they may hopefully become a stronger generation than we
were. I find that very humbling. That means that I knew my dear mother before I
came to be her child, and so my children shall know me before I will be able to
bring them into the world. That thought has increased my love for them so much
more, and with a different, deeper love and appreciation than I am used to
feeling. I can try to begin to understand the vastness of godly love that we
have access to.
We
really are such a connected group of people that our salvation is fairly
dependent of the choices, forgiveness, and sealing powers of love and
commitment within our families that we truly cannot be saved without our dead,
nor our dead without us. And they are not just dead people we go find on Family
Search. They are real people who we looked upon and watched before we
came here, and they continue to look out for and help us in our lives now.
There must be a perfect god with a perfect understanding and knowledge that
would allow such an intricate and perfect process to proceed in the correct
way.
On
earth, we have vague inklings of what this whole Plan entails. We are taught
that it is good. That we can have eternal families and happiness. That we must
be obedient and follow the Lord's commands. But we know so little here! The
veil has taken any former knowledge we had all throughout learning at God's
side, which was so great that the only way we could learn and progress any
further was to come here to earth. To have a body, have a family, have agency;
in order to follow the path that will lead us to godhood, like our heavenly
parents.
I know that God lives and loves us and that He has prepared a way for us to
be happy, and that through our continued obedience and faith, enduring to the
end, we can receive blessings from on high and enjoy the fullness of His glory.
