Life is an interesting thing. We are faced with so many decisions daily. Some are not really important but others make a huge impact in our lives. I've been reading several church books lately and all of them have talked about feeling the spirit and learning to listen to promptings given to us by the spirit. I think as a Christian and as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints that is the key to life. We are all just doing our best to make it back to our Heavenly Father. In the past two days I have had two conversations about this. One with my Mom and one while I was on a date. I love talking about the gospel and about Heavenly Father with others so I can get others perspective. That doesn't mean I can just go off what they said I still need to study and pray and learn on my own. I am so glad that God has placed us in families and given us friends so we can help each other in this long hard journey on Earth.
I am so grateful my Mom made the very important and hard choice to homeschool me and my siblings. I know that is one of the reasons I have such a love of learning. I've spent my whole life watching my mom learn and she instilled that in most of her children. I've made a lot of choices in my life some for the good and some not so good. But that is how we learn. So long as we take a lesson learned from our mistakes and move forward that is the important thing.
I know this story is random but I feel I need to share it. While I was on my mission someone very close to me chose to leave the church and start drinking and smoking. It broke my heart. I was serving the lord trying to help complete strangers come to Christ and my own loved one wasn't even there. It was a very hard few months. My mission President knew about all that was going on at home and helped me as much as he could but he could always be there because he had over 200 missionaries to look after. So he called my Zone leader to look after me and told him what was going on. One day at a zone lunch I was sitting next to my zone leader and as the conversation at the table drifted on some gospel principle (I don't remember what but what I said pertained) I said under my breath that I was frustrated with free agency and sometimes I wished we didn't have it because it hurt when people chose the wrong. I said this out of anger and hurt that's not really how I or feel. But my zone leader turned to me and shared this scripture: Moses 7:29-37 I'm going to paraphrase but in 29 Enoch sees the lord weeping and Enoch asks the Lord how he can weep because He is holy and he has created the Earth and so much beauty why is he crying and in the end of verse 32 God says "gave I unto man his agency" and then he goes on to say all the horrible things man has done. The end of verse 37 it says "and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?" God is sad when we do wrong. It makes him sad. It makes our loved ones sad. However we have to have agency and we have to allow others there agency. Even though it breaks Heavenly Fathers heart he allows us to make our choices. So in other words we need to not only think about the choices we make daily and think of the impact it will have on our lives we also need to love one another and allow others to make their own choices.
