Good morning all. Happy Easter to everyone too.
It’s kind of crazy but I woke up this morning thinking about the Lord, about Easter Sunday, about why we really “celebrate” this “holiday.” When you grow older, Easter is no longer all about easter egg hunts and spending Sunday afternoon dying the easter eggs. This sort of thing is perfectly fine for kids, though.
You get older, though, and you realize what Easter is all about. Easter is such a special time to remember the Lord, what He did for all of us when He died for us, and the miracle that He performed when He resurrected himself to complete the Atonement.
I’m so grateful for the Gospel, for the things that I know to be true about life, the Lord, and the reason we’re all here on Earth. I know that there is a reason for all of it. I know that it’s not by chance that we are here. This life is more than just about how much money we can make, how much “fun” we can have with the vain things of this world, or how popular we get with our friends around us. There is so much more.
So I woke up thinking about a young single adults fireside that I went to back on August 26, 2007. I went with my buddies Corey and Nate, and Nate’s girl Stephanie. It was a packed house, but we were lucky enough to find some seats, while a lot of the people in the back were standing the whole time. The message that Elder Richard G. Scott delivered that night was one of love and peace. It was about the single adults of the Church and dating. It dealt with some real pertinent issues that apply to situation that many of the young single people of the Church find themselves in.
A lot of his message was talking about dating and how, as young people with our futures ahead of us, we need to start getting out there in the world. We need to start settling down and making a home. We need to move, however slowly and steadily, towards that goal of marriage and a family. (Of course, this isn’t word for word, but this is the impression that I got of what he was telling us.)
At that time in my life, last summer, I was really struggling with some things in my life. There were two statements that Elder Scott made that I wrote down, almost word-for-word. And they seemed very personal to me at that time. The Spirit was obviously telling me to listen. I wrote them down.
The first statement is a statement that Elder Scott wrote down in his journal, early on in his life. The statement was this: If I lost everything and everyone that was dear to me…if I lost everything and everyone that I appreciate and love in my life, would I still know that God lives and is real, and that Jesus Christ is my Savior?
The second thing that Elder Scott said that I was urged to write down, was regarding prayer and receiving answers to our prayers. He said that the Lord will always answer us. That is not in question at all. We just don’t know when those answers will come. Sometimes we will have to go and search out the answer from the Lord. We may have to work for the answer.
Those are two pretty heavy statements, and statements that had a profound effect on me then as well as they do now. I would truly hope that if I did somehow lose everybody and everything that mattered to me in my life right now, that I would still have faith in the Lord, and know that God lives. I have faith that I would still know these things in my heart. It’s hard to say what would happen if somehow it actually happened that I lost all that was dear to me, but I don’t think that was the overall point to what Elder Scott was saying. At least for me.
I think he was saying that we need to work on having faith that is so strong, that if something horrible ever happened in our lives, and we lost some of the people we love, that we would endure and still have faith strong enough to know that God is God, and that Jesus’ Atonement is real.
So Happy Easter Sunday folks.
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