Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Moroni 10:21 -- On Hope and Faith and Love

"And except ye have charity ye can in nowise be saved in the kingdom of God; neither can ye be saved in the kingdom of God if ye have not faith; neither can ye if ye have no hope."
Moroni 10:21


This is interesting.  I think sometimes we feel like these requirements are unfair.  Who needs God more than the hopeless?  And sometimes it seems like the world can drum faith, hope, and charity/love right out of us.  So, why would God refuse his saving grace from us just because of what the world has done to us?  Definitely easy to feel that way.  I think the reason is because we still have a choice.

The world can beat us down, yes. But with God we always have a choice, to retain hope, to not let the world dictate who we are... to be more than the sum of our experiences.  As it says in 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; / Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed."  Bad things can happen to us, but that doesn't have to make us hopeless.  We don't have to lose our love or our faith when the worst happens.  We can, instead, retain that spark of good that is in every one of us, and fan it back to life, no matter what the world does to us.

I'm not saying it is easy, and definitely not that we can always do it alone.  Sometimes we need counseling, psychological and/or spiritual.  We *always* need God.  It's not bad to ask for help... this is our soul that we are concerned with.  In order to be saved, we have to be able to have that spark of hope, to have faith that the Lord can help us, and still be able to love other people.  It's often difficult in the best of circumstances, and seems impossible in others... but with God, it never is.  He can show us the way in the darkness... the way to hope, and he can teach us how to trust and have faith again, and to love.  Even better, he can teach us how to help and support each other, finding love and friendship in the midst of the turmoil of the world.  Today, let's reach out to God for help, and let's reach out to each other to offer support, as we all work to keep the hope and love and faith alive in our lives.

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