A Child's Prayer

Ok ok, I don't want to sound super cheezy...but I recently had a spiritual experience and figured I would blog about it.

I was thinking about a recent conversation I had about returning home from a mission and how life isn't quite so meaningful, and how personal progress seems an insurmountable task. I was thinking about the high goals I had set for my personal progression and good desires. I was also thinking tonight about a new little nephew I have, and what that little boy has lying ahead of him in his life. I was thinking about these things as I went running tonight.

I felt very overwhelmed--like all the goals I had set and every good intention I'd had, were just poorly laid bricks in a poorly-constructed "road of life." I paused from my run, laid down on a parcel of grass, and waited as these kinds of thoughts settled down next to me.

It may not seem like a huge revelation (but honestly, the good revelations are the ones that open our eyes when they're too tightly shut to see at midday) but after uttering a prayer, I had the calming reassurance that it wasn't all dependent upon me. I learned a little something about the Atonement tonight. I relearned the exclamation of the Savior to "take [His] yoke upon" me. Regardless of the burdens and doubts (and inadequacies), the Atonement of Christ exists as the end of all suffering.

With General Conference coming up, I'll end with a quote from Elder J. Reuben Clark and others:

"So as I conceive it, we must stand adamant for the doctrine of the atonement of Jesus the Christ, for the divinity of his conception, for his sinless life, and for, shall I say, the divinity of his death, his voluntary surrender of life. He was not killed, he gave up his life. It is our mission, perhaps the most fundamental purpose of our work, to bear constant testimony of Jesus the Christ. We must never permit to enter into our thoughts and certainly not into our teachings, the idea that he was merely a great teacher, a great philosopher, the builder of a great system of ethics. It is our duty, day after day, year in and year out, always to declare that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ who brought redemption to the world and to all the inhabitants thereof."

"Man unquestionably has impressive powers... But after all our obedience and good works, we cannot be saved from the effects of our sins without the grace extended by the atonement of Jesus Christ... Man cannot earn his own salvation."
--Dallin H. Oaks

"This life is not so much a time for getting and accumulating as it is a time for giving and becoming. Mortality is the battlefield upon which justice and mercy meet. But they need not meet as adversaries, for they are reconciled in the Atonement of Jesus Christ for all who wisely use Today."
--Lance B. Wickman

"Each of us will taste the bitter ashes of life, from sin and neglect to sorrow and disappointment. But the atonement of Christ can lift us up in beauty from our ashes on the wings of a sure promise of immortality and eternal life. He will thus lift us up, not only at the end of life, but in each day of our lives."
--Bruce C. Hafen

Sometimes laying alone in the dark on a patch of grass can be the perfect place to be taught that we are never alone, and that God provides us that little bit of knowledge we need when overwhelming thoughts threaten to settle down next to us and stay awhile.