Sunday, June 15, 2014 Thoughts on the Gospel

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.