We had an Easter egg hunt yesterday at Grandma and Grandpa Epps' house. Katie was more like herself again. Lively, determined, energized, smiling, laughing. It was a nice day. It is good to see Katie feeling stronger again. Today should be just as good. I am glad she is able to enjoy Easter and the joys of being a child.
I am grateful for this Easter season. I am grateful for the atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ and the gifts and blessings that affords us. I know my Savior lives. I believe in His grace. I am grateful for the gift of the resurection. I am grateful for the knowledge that I will be able to be with loved ones again. I am grateful for the blessing of repentance, which is also made possible through the power of the atonement. I know our brother Jesus did for us what no mere mortal man could do. "With His stripes we are healed." I know that Jesus not only atoned for our sins, but that he also took upon himself our pains and our sorrows too. Christ will heal our wounds and dry our tears. How grateful I am to Him for all he has done for me - for all of us.
Here is some excerpts of one of my all time favorite talks about what Christ has done for us. It is called, Beauty for Ashes, by Bruce Hafen.
"Life is a school, a place for us to learn and grow. We, like Adam and Eve, experience “growing pains” through the sorrow and contamination of a lone and dreary world. These experiences may include sin, but they also include mistakes, disappointments, and the undeserved pain of adversity. The blessed news of the gospel is that the Atonement of Jesus Christ can purify all the uncleanness and sweeten all the bitterness we taste.
We might think of the degree of our personal fault for the bad things that happen in our lives as a continuum ranging from sin to adversity, with the degree of our fault dropping from high at one end of the spectrum to zero at the other. At the “sin” end of the continuum, we bear grave responsibility, for we bring the bitter fruits of sin fully upon ourselves. But at the other end of the spectrum, marked by “adversity,” we may bear no responsibility at all. The bitterness of adversity may come to us, as it did to Job in the Old Testament, regardless of our actual, conscious fault.
Along this fault-level continuum, between the poles of sin and adversity, lie such intermediate points as unwise choices and hasty judgments. In these cases, it may be unclear just how much personal fault we bear for the bitter fruits we may taste or cause others to taste. Bitterness may taste the same, whatever its source, and it can destroy our peace, break our hearts, and separate us from God. Could it be that the great “at-one-ment” of Christ could put back together the broken parts and give beauty to the ashes of experience such as this?
I believe that it does, because tasting the bitter in all its forms is a deliberate part of the great plan of life. This consequence of the Fall was not just a terrible mistake; rather, it gives mortality its profound meaning: “They taste the bitter, that they may know to prize the good.” (Moses 6:55)
In their admirable and sometimes blindly dogged sense of personal responsibility, some believe that in the quest for eternal life, the Atonement is only for big-time sinners. As everyday (people) who just have to try harder, they feel that they must make it on their own.
The truth is not that we must make it on our own, but that he will make us His own.
After Adam and Eve had partaken of the tree of knowledge, the Lord barred the way to the tree of life. They needed the time and space and shaping purpose of mortality. They needed to taste the bitter in order to “prize”—to grasp the meaning of—“the good” represented by the second tree. The Lord never intended that we should partake of the tree of life and thereby gain full access to perfecting grace before we have stumbled and groped to learn all we can from the disappointments and surprises of this vale of tears. We, like Adam and Eve, must make the best of our circumstances. We need not apologize for the typical untidiness of those circumstances. It is their very lone and dreary nature that allows them to shape us as they do. Perhaps we can only appreciate and comprehend the gift of eternal life after we do all we can do. Until we are prepared in what may look like very imperfect ways to receive them, we are not ready for the gifts that perfect our nature.
In his dream of the tree of life, Lehi found himself in a dark and dreary wasteland and saw others surrounded by a great mist of darkness. The pathway home from this darkness was the way to the tree of life—the same tree, I suppose, as the one from which Adam and Eve were barred until they, too, had walked the trail Lehi took. The path was marked by the iron rod, the word of God.
Holding fast to this rod in the mists of darkness, we, as did Lehi, grope and move our way homeward. As we do, we are likely to find that the cold rod of iron will begin to feel in our hands as the warm, firm, loving hand of him who literally pulls us along the way. We find that hand strong enough to rescue us, warm enough to tell us that home is not far away; and we summon our deepest resources to reciprocate, until we are again “at one” in the arms of the Lord.
It is so important for us to be on the Lord’s side. But we should never forget that the Lord is also on our side.
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.
“Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God … giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might, he increaseth strength. … They that wait upon the Lord shall … mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” (Isa. 40:28–31.) (Ensign, April, 1990).
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