With the recent events in my life, I've had that section go through my mind a lot about Joseph in Liberty Jail. I'm well aware of the importance of keeping my head up. It's so different when you're actually going through things though, you know? It is so easy when things are going alright for people to say...well just be positive, or don't worry about it, or...God is watching out for you, you're gonna be okay. Sometimes you just have to kind of let things settle in. I've been praying so much for clarity in my judgment. I'm even praying that I don't hate this man that did this to my mom, I'm praying that I don't become embittered or let this jade me completely. I pray for deliverance and just to know how to deal with everything. But sometimes you just need to mourn and kind of just deal with things as they are. I really appreciate that scripture in Mosiah 18. Sometimes we just need to mourn with those who mourn, and bear one another's burdens.
I have a friend who is amazing at practicing this virtue. He is actually one of the best people ever at it. We had a friend and she basically burned down her apartment. Like destroyed it. This was up at school and so many people came by and were like...it's going to be okay, you're going to get through this, and some people even said, okay...what can we learn from this? They said all of these things before they said anything else to her. A lot of times we just don't realize that people need to let things settle in a little bit, and sometimes it's better to just be sad or upset with someone rather than thinking the answer is saying something like, just don't worry about it, things are okay...or God has a plan for you. His reaction was atypical of what she was getting. Rather than just responding like everybody else did, he empathized and said, "I'm so sorry. That just really sucks." Sometimes we need to hear that more than, "you're going to be fine, things will turn out for the best." Sometimes we really do need to just take time to mourn with those who mourn. I think this is perfectly illustrated when Mary and Martha are mourning the death of Lazarus and then there follows that famous short verse, "Jesus wept."
Why was Jesus crying? Did he not know what we was about to do? Did he not really believe that he could raise Lazarus from the dead? Reading the chapter, it's obvious that he went with the intention of bringing Lazarus back. I think one of the coolest parts that verse is that he was so intimately acquianted with Lazarus, and with Mary and Martha. Of course he knew what miracle he was about to perform. He was fully aware of his power and that he could bring Lazarus back from the dead. Not only that, but he knew that it was God's will for it to happen so then there was absolutely nothing that would prevent him from performing the miracle. So the question of why...
Because those were his friends. They were his best friends. He knew that they didn't fully understand what he was capable of, and he knew that the only thing they were experiencing was the pain of losing a loved one, one whom they thought they would never see again in this life. Never again. There is a tremendous amount of pain and sense of loss that one feels when mourning the dead. In spite of his knowledge of what was going to occur, he wept with them because he too was experiencing that pain that they were feeling. Even though his faith is perfect and he knows better than anybody else that things are going to turn out alright in the end, he perfectly understood the importance of letting someone grieve and how important it is to just experience that emotion with another person. There is so much to gain sometimes from just the experience of feeling for the sake of feeling.
What's been hard about this situation is that for a couple of months, I actually thanked Heavenly Father in my prayers because I felt like, finally, my mom has someone that can be there for her and take care of her. I said a lot of those prayers. Is this really what God intended to happen? I honestly don't know. A lot of me wants to say yes, and a lot of me wants to say that God would never want this to happen to anybody. I feel like it's not something that he wanted, but happened through the natural course of people exercising their agency. The miracle of it all is that regardless of whether or not this was in his original blueprint for our lives, we will still learn and gain the perfectly customized experience that he intends us to have. In that talk I keep linking to Elder Maxwell, he says that God customizes the curriculum for our benefit. Isn't that amazing?
I think it would be really easy to ask, or even to question my faith and say to myself...how could God let me thank him for this person who was actually ruining my mom's life? I think that would be really easy to do. And I don't think that I'm doing that, but I could see how some people would look at the circumstances and react in that way. You know what I mean? There are so many nuances to life and experience, I think sometimes we don't give the plan of salvation enough credit because sometimes things happen that we just can't understand right away and we try to compartmentalize it. While just trying to right ourselves and get reoriented, we try and just write it off quickly for the sake of moving on without REALLY learning what it is that we need to be learning.
All of the sudden something happens that we just flat out cannot explain or comprehend with our finite minds, and at first glance it looks like it can damage our faith, and so we close ourselves off to what the real answer may be. We're afraid that examination will cause more hurt rather than help. I think sometimes we do that when we try and just give short answers or just pretend like this is just how things are and we just need to deal with it. I don't know if I'm explaining myself that well, but I feel like I'm really learning a lot about God and how His plans really works. Maybe that sounds crazy. I don't know, but I think there is a lot about this situation that will take me a whole life time to really understand, and then to really fine-tune that understanding that I get.
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