"And I exceedingly fear and tremble because of you, lest he shall suffer again; for behold, ye have accused him that he sought power and authority over you; but I know that he hath not sought for power nor authority over you, but he hath sought the glory of God, and your own eternal welfare."
2 Nephi 1:25
This struck me today... I think because I at first was thinking... why even say it. Laman and Lemuel aren’t going to listen. And then I thought... but maybe they should have, but pride and a need to be in control stopped them. So many, many things happened in their lives that could have convinced them of God and his power, and his love for them and their families… but they wanted to be in charge, or to be the center of attention, or just not to let someone else tell them what to do… even if they were wrong. And then I stopped thinking about Laman and Lemuel and remembered that the Book of Mormon is written to us... to me. And, wow am I exactly like that sometimes. And maybe all of us are kind of like this sometimes. ...We’re so addicted to roles and authority sometimes that I think we tune out anyone that doesn’t have some sort of power over us... even if what they are saying is exactly right, and we know that we are wrong. We stop listening. We have things in our lives that are overwhelmingly, obviously from God, but we only listen to what we want to hear, and let those moments of clarity fade into the background while we focus relentlessly on ourselves, and our desires, and our perceived lacks. We blame our problems on whatever scapegoat we can find instead of accepting responsibility for our mistakes, or realizing that opposition is going to happen in everything to make us stronger, not because the universe is biased against us. And somehow we never realize that what we’re complaining about isn’t actually a problem... it is the blessing and opportunity and privilege that we have to actually be walking the path to the promised land rather than lying dead with our riches in the land God warned us to flee from. Today, let’s learn from Laman and Lemuel’s blindness, and try to see past our own.
Mark 9: 24
ReplyDeleteReminds me of this scripture, where the plea is to "Help thou mine unbelief" Aren't we always asking to see where we are blind, hear when we have had deaf ears, feel when we have shut out feeling? But the amazing part of all of it is that with the atonement those things are all possible.