Doubting Our Doubts

Family Photo

This week my lovely daughter in law was awarded the Workplace Hero Award for her excellent work ethic, great attitude and significant contributions to her department. Co-workers and the division head said THE nicest things about her! They obviously loved her and appreciated the very things we do about her!

I could not have been more proud of her and couldn't keep the tears from flowing! Her beauty and strength shown through in every frame and her words filled me with encouragement and hope.

I'm so grateful for her determination and diligence, two wonderful qualities I wish I had more abundantly. As wonderful as it was to see that, her next words gave me even more admiration for her. I told her that she should post it to Facebook and I would "like" it. She said that Facebook has become very difficult for her lately as some of her closest friends are angrily expressing views that are directly contrary to hers and it makes her sad and uncomfortable to see it. She then expressed her testimony about marriage being between one man and one woman, making me even more proud of her and reconfirming my testimony as well.

I hadn't been on Facebook for a few days and logged on to see what she was talking about. One of the very first posts in my newsfeed was of a dear friend announcing that she was so disappointed in the latest announcement from the church insulting children of gay couples not being allowed to be blessed or baptized until they were 18, that even though she knew it would hurt people close to her who loved the Mormon church, she was publicly announcing that she was an apostate. Insulting children? The church? I doubted that could be true. It didn't make sense that a church so thoroughly Christian that it has the name of Jesus Christ in it's title, would insult children? I doubted my doubts and read further...

In a clarification from the First Presidency it very clearly states that it does NOT AFFECT those who are already baptized and active, NOR WILL IT AFFECT those who have one gay parent but don't live with them, AND each situation will be examined on the basis of what is the most beneficial for each child. 
"Our concern with respect to children is their current and future well-being and the harmony of their home environment....[this change will] apply only to those children whose primary residence is with a couple living in a same-gender marriage or similar relationship. When a child living with such a same-gender couple has already been baptized and is actively participating in the Church, provisions of Section 16.13 do not require that his or her membership activities or priesthood privileges be curtailed or that further ordinances be withheld."

read full text here

I can only imagine what had influenced my dear friend to reach this point, I don't know and I certainly can't judge. If you read the New Testament you can see how Jesus loved all people.... truly loved them and didn't condemn them. As he told the woman taken in adultery, "Go thy way and sin no more." He acknowledged she had sinned. SHE HAD SINNED! Well, so have I sinned! I am no better than anyone else on this planet and have no reason to judge or condemn either. I thought of all my sins and how beyond grateful I am for the Atonement, and that I KNOW because of it our family can be together forever if we keep our covenants, a thought I CLING to... especially lately. I also KNOW without a doubt that the Book of Mormon is true, I have read it many times and each time become more convinced of its truth... and how SO MANY truths follow THAT knowledge.

A friend sent me a link to a blog and I loved what she so beautifully said a few weeks ago about being true to what we KNOW before we are true to our doubts and to always keep our covenants. Here is a quote from her blog I totally love:

Oh, how Satan would love to cause us to stumble over things like seer stones, marriage, gender identity, polygamy, etc. And sadly, he’s having encouraging success with some closest to us.

Another question things of late cause me to ask: Is faith an endurance exercise? After all, we are encouraged to “endure to the end.” What does that mean? I think it means that under all circumstances we keep our covenants. I think it means that the Lord expects us to remain faithful even when we have doubts and questions. But faithful to what? ... faithful to what we do know, and have developed our testimony upon...

The marvelous thing about gaining a testimony of Jesus Christ and that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is His Church here upon the earth today is in how we obtain that testimony – it can be stellar because properly obtained it comes not of man but from God Himself. 

http://wellbehavedmormonwoman.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-seer-stone-faithful-membership-not.html

Courage... Good News and Gratitude

The good news is that the treatments are working. I can tell because I feel so much better than I did in the summer. I actually feel like exercising and doing yard work. It's wonderful!

The gratitude I feel is intense. I'm grateful for every single experience I've had this month, and there have been a plethora of positive ones! I'm grateful for every single human I've interacted with this month, and there have been the best of the best in my life!

I'm grateful for the strength my Heavenly Father gives me to keep going in this journey called life. People have commented on the courage I must have and it reminds me of a saying I have had taped to my bathroom mirror for many years.

"Courage is only the second virtue in a soldier, 

the first is endurance of fatigue."

 --Napoleon Bonaparte

We are blessed with the agency to respond to the daily emotional and physical challenges in our lives. We are also blessed with the opportunity to learn whatever Heavenly Father wants us to learn from those challenges. We make a choice every day, sometimes many times a day, as to what the legacy of our lives will be. 

“To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. 

It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. 

We make ourselves into one or the other.”

--Carlos Castaneda”

 

I'm so very very grateful for my team of warriors!