It is easy to get swallowed up in bad news. There are abundant opportunities to be gloomy. Ingrown toenails. Lack of rain. National contention. Family challenges. Inflation. Egg shortages. There is plenty to worry and fret about. We can start living in a cloud of anxiety.
I don’t want to dismiss legitimate concerns. In this world, we are all besieged by aches, pains, disappointments, and tragedies. Yet I would like to put our lives in perspective.
Imagine that you are walking the dusty trails of Palestine with Jesus as your companion. As you walk along with aching feet and gnawing hunger, you know that life is good because you are with Him. He can answer the treacherous questions of the local Pharisees, heal the pleading leper, calm the troubled seas, and even raise the dead. He can even feed the 5,000. Life is truly good with Him.
He still can. He still does.
Another way to put our lives in perspective: Almost everyone who reads this article enjoys better shelter than kings of past centuries as well as more abundant and better food than almost anyone in the history of the world. While food prices have recently risen painfully, we now spend about 11% of our disposable income on food compared to 40% in 1900. For large parts of human history, the bulk of every day was spent finding enough food to survive. And many people were still hungry and malnourished.
Compare our transportation in cars and airplanes with travel of previous eras.
We complain about the cost or availability of medical care, yet many of us are alive today because of modern medicine.
Of course, a focus on comfort and convenience misses the point. While we arguably have better lives than 90-something percent of the people who have lived on this planet, we have something far more important. We live with purpose. We have a deep assurance that God loves us and has prepared an eternal life for us that is beyond imagination! He is our Father and fully intends to bless us with all the blessings we are willing to receive.
Maybe we are like lottery winners who complain that we must drive all the way to the bank to deposit our winnings.
Why aren’t we rejoicing every minute of every day? It is easy to be so absorbed with mortal irritations that we forget to rejoice.
Neal Maxwell quoted Malcolm Muggeridge.
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstance that is not a part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about except that we should rebel against His purpose and that we should fail to detect His purpose in things and fail to establish a relationship with Him. On that basis there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand.
You know it’s a funny thing but when you are old as I am there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, 3 a.m. and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. It seems quite a toss up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the city of God. In this limbo between life and death you know beyond any shadow of doubt that as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation you are a participant in God’s purpose and that His purpose is loving not hating, is creative not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy. Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling. All the happenings in this world including the most terrible disasters and suffering will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are a part of that love and only insofar as we belong to that scene does our existence have any meaning at all. The necessity of life is to know God. Otherwise our mortal existence is no more than a night in a second class hotel.
“The necessity of life is to know God.” Yes! When we are friends with our beloved Father and His faithful Son, we feel profound reassurance. We feel a peace that passes understanding. We feel a confidence that waxes strong.
President Howard W. Hunter challenged us.
Doom, and Discouragement are not an acceptable view of life for a Latter-day Saint. However high on the charts they are on the hit parade of contemporary news, we must not walk on our lower lip every time a few difficult moments happen to confront us.
John 3:16–17
I want to say to all within the sound of my voice tonight that you have every reason in this world to be happy and to be optimistic and to be confident. Every generation since time began has had some things to overcome and some problems to work out. Furthermore, every individual person has a particular set of challenges that sometimes seem to be earmarked for us individually. We understood that in our premortal existence. Prophets and apostles of the Church have faced some of those personal difficulties. I acknowledge that I have faced a few, and you will undoubtedly face some of your own now and later in your life. When these experiences humble us and refine us and teach us and bless us, they can be powerful instruments in the hands of God to make us better people, to make us more grateful and more loving, to make us more considerate of other people in their own times of difficulty. Yes, we all have difficult moments individually and collectively, but even in the most severe of times, anciently or modern, those problems and prophecies were never intended to do anything but bless the righteous and help those who are less righteous move toward repentance. God loves us and the scriptures tell us he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
When our friendship with Jesus is such that we feel we are walking the dusty trails of life with Him at our side, we feel peace.
Henry Ward Beecher observed that “the test of Christian character should be that a man is a joy-bearing agent to the world.” May we be so filled with Jesus and His good news that we radiate joy to all the world!
Invitation: Nancy and I continue to serve a Syrian refugee family here in Cache County. Mom and Dad are working hard to support their four children. But they are burdened by dental and medical needs from the poor care they received for ten years while in Jordan after fleeing the war in Syria. If you would like to make a difference for an amazing family with big challenges, we welcome your donations. Every penny you donate will be used to help this dear family. Venmo: @HWallace-Goddard
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