FAIR's Rising Generation

Posts Tagged ‘atonement’

A couple of weeks ago I met a vendor at the mall, named Nathaniel. He was a black man dressed in business casual and his composure suggested he had all of the secrets of life stored up in his forehead. When he looked at me it was an instant transference of confidence; confidence in him, confidence in myself, and confidence in the message he had to share with me. Now I’ll continue with my story where I left off last week, and in case you missed it here’s the link that will take you to it: Missionary Moment @ Eastern Oils.

“Woohoo! Darth Vader has found religion!” I cheered to Nathaniel, fully understanding the metaphore he had presented to me. He was comparing himself to Star Wars’ youngest protagonist Anakin Skywalker. Anakin grew up as a slave, won a race for his freedom and started training in the supernatural religion of the “Jedi.” However, before Anakin could complete his training, he was decieved by a wicked Dark Lord. Anakin followed the Dark Lord and became caught up in the snares of power–before he knew it he had become “Darth Vader,” the right hand of evil. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone reading this should know by now, if you’re outside and a mosquito bites you, do your best not to scratch the bite. Give it about three days, and you should be fine.

But if you scratch that bite, it will most assuredly grow. It will begin to bleed, and pus will start to ooze out the center. The infected wound will get bigger and bigger and scab up. Keep picking at the scab, and the wound will never have a chance to heal properly. What would’ve healed in days, will now take weeks. What never would’ve left a mark, will now leave an unsightly scar.

A younger friend asked me recently why God made his children forget everything they had once learned in the pre-mortal existence. “Wouldn’t this life be easier if we got to keep all that knowledge from before?”

But we haven’t done anything quite like this before! We didn’t know in the pre-mortal realm what it was like to have a physical body that could act and be acted upon. “It’s all about the experience,” I answered. Every action has a consequence, and now the stakes have been raised; we have more to gain but equally more to lose.

That should be straight-forward enough for most Latter-day Saints. Almost as easy for us is the whole, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Critics say ‘religion is a means of social control’ like it’s a bad thing, but if we all acknowledged and lived God’s law, we wouldn’t have things like war and poverty, and innocents would no longer suffer at the hands of others.

As you can plainly see, the Plan of Salvation has a few things to teach us that aren’t all sunshine and lollipops, and there are parts that I and many others continue to struggle with, such as the randomness of life and, furthermore, the randomness of its unexpected loss.

For example, sometimes things happen that are so beyond our control that there’s nobody to blame, not even ourselves. We struggle to find comfort through meaning, but no meaning can be found. Our only conclusion is that life is cruel because God is cruel.

The loss of a loved one can cut deep, and we subsequently pass through life with spiritual wounds that never heal. This is no confession, but an accusation: Love is a lie, we declare. God is a fantasy, and happiness is a luxury for the ignorant.

But wait! Does God not also experience loss? Imagine one of God’s wounded children. Rather than let the wound heal, the child stubbornly picks and scratches at it. “Here, let me show you what to do,” God offers, but it’s useless. The child keeps it up until the wound utterly consumes him; he dies from infection and blood loss. Whether the wound was manifested as anger, doubt, sadness, or despair, there was nothing God could do but watch.

For people who have loved and lost someone dear to them, this is my best answer to the question they are undoubtedly asking: We endure loss because God endures loss, and he wants us to be like him in every way. Although godhood may epitomize happiness, it’s also the most difficult job in the universe. I testify that God has earned our allegiance one hundred-fold for what has done and continues to do on our behalf.

The best we can do is allow ourselves to heal when we are wounded. We may feel so alone that nobody can possibly comfort us. However, the Atonement is not just an antidote for sin; it heals us when we experience a loss so overwhelming that part of us dies as a result.

We cannot understand the Plan of Salvation unless we understand the Atonement, and knowing every reason why God came to Earth and gave his life for us makes a huge difference to how we perceive our situation. As we traverse this lone and dreary world, we endure the unendurable through Christ. We will not run; we will not hide; we will not lose faith; and we will not abandon hope. Instead, we will stand behind our Savior, steadfast in the promise and reality of Eternal Life.

Hello, everybody!

My name is Frank Robertson. I’m a seventeen year old who has probably read too much apologetics for his own good. I have to give a heartfelt thanks to Christi, who found me during a class at EFY, to our founder Erik, who has put up with my endless questions for the past few weeks, not to mention edited and refined this post into the late hours of the night. Last but certainly not least to the members of FRG who mercilessly exposed all my errors of judgment and clarity in writing this post!

As the newest member of FRG, I’ve spent quite a while pondering my purpose, and having the purpose of the organization explained to me (special thanks to Noah and David on that one!). I believe my purpose is to explain the joys and obstacles in my life, as a seventeen year old trying to live the gospel. With any luck the things I have to say will be doctrinally correct, and some other teen will benefit from my (lack of) experience.

For my first post I’d like to discuss one of Satan’s weapons which I have particular difficulty with. It’s an instrument which I believe to be in wide use among youth today, both in the church and out of it. It is a debilitating and subtle assault so typical of our adversary and one I think that needs to be dealt with as such.

I speak of despair, of the fear which binds tongues, and the melancholy which oppresses spirits. Please understand that I do not speak of depression in the medical sense, which is an actual affliction which should be brought to a medical professional and dealt with accordingly. The difference really is that clinical depression won’t go away without proper psychiatric attention, more information can be found here.

For the rest of us despair falls into a few distinct categories:

• worldly sorrow for sin,
• rationalized sadness we won’t let go of,
• and fear of sinning distorted to paralysis.

I’m not going to deal with the first one, except to say that you need to pray and maybe even go to your bishop about it. We’ve all heard about repentance since the day we were two feet tall. Enough said.

“…Despair” parts one and two will deal with rationalized sadness and fear as despair, respectively. Part three will discuss what you can do to help someone coping with despair. I might throw in a ‘part four’ if someone thinks of something I missed.

Now I’m just seventeen years old. That means I haven’t seen despair in all it’s colors, but I remember what I have seen. I pray that the words I write will touch someone’s heart somewhere. I pray that you’ll know others have been where you are today, and through the love of our Savior they survived. I pray that the lessons I have learned and the prices I have paid will help you in your life.

That’s all the space I’ve got for now! But don’t despair! The next segment of this series will be here before you know it!

Most critics are one trick ponies, meaning they have a very small arsenal of baseless accusations to draw from. Nevertheless, if you tell the same lie enough times, people start to believe it no matter how incredible. The criticism I find the most implausible is that Mormons believe in a “different Jesus”, who is either imaginary or fraudulent.

I always root for the underdog; I believe all human beings deserve respect regardless of status; and I’m quick to speak out against injustice towards others. One thing I’m not, however, is vengeful. It is said that hate begets hate, and violence begets violence, but when I recently considered the amount of pain, betrayal, and abuse I had been the recipient of throughout my life, I only had to wonder briefly why it now seemed so irrelevant. The reason came to mind almost instantly: “Because you have been saved.” Temporal loss means nothing when you know you’ve been promised everything.

While I don’t think my experience is unique among Mormons, I’ve often wondered why, if you ask a Sunday School class of Latter-Day Saints whether we are saved by grace or works, they’ll each give you a different answer. To be fair, when asked the same question, I always fail to offer a concise reply. How could I have been raised on the truth of the restored gospel and not know? Perhaps it’s because we’ve all been cornered into using the wrong terms–those of our critics. Thus, in my own words, I will explain how I believe we are saved.

God has a gift for us. It’s more than just a happy place; it’s an endowment of power, obtained by means of covenant–not payment. We don’t earn it, nor do we even deserve it, but we still must ultimately prove that we’re ready to receive it. When we become Latter-day Saints, we commit through faith to be Sons and Daughters of God. Thus, we covenant to be his children, and he covenants to be our Father. This is a parent-child relationship and easy enough to understand. If you’re weak but committed, God will be long-suffering towards you. If you’re able but stubborn, then he may ultimately give up on you.

The Book of Mormon itself says that Salvation is free. Once you have obtained the promise, you only want to live worthily of it and grow. Your works become acts of gratitude. Is the gift of Salvation conditional? Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that God will never lose faith in you if you never lose faith in Him.

My Savior has been long-suffering, generous, and merciful towards me. Because he has given and taught me so much already, I have no reason to doubt the promise of Eternal Life and proclaim it to others. So I ask, what ‘other Jesus’–being so silent and inconsequential–is more deserving of my devotion?

I’ve been trying to find things to write about that would concern people my age more. Although I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to get the whole “Great and Abominable Church” thing straightened out, or recognizing the brilliance of a child (both previous posts of mine) I realize that I’m not relating very well to other fifteen year old, Mormon girls. I hope to slowly become better at this, and at the moment, the following is the best I can come up with.

Something I’ve been working on lately is making things more meaningful to me. You know, like the scriptures, prayer or the Young Women Theme. I listened more closely in church and I would occasionally ask a leader or another youth, but I found that only certain things worked for me. What might make prayer mean more to one person might just frustrate me. So I’m not guaranteeing that what I did is going to fix everything for you, but it might help you a bit.

Probably the most drastic of my improvements lately has been to better understand the sacrifice my Savior went through for me to partake of the atonement.

I always knew that I wasn’t getting it all, and even now I’m sure I’m nowhere near truly understanding the pain he went through. I knew that if I really understood the agony he suffered I’d be beyond tears and at that point the most the topic ever got out of me was a clenched fist and a thought running through my head chastising me for whatever sin I’d committed most recently.

I felt bad because although I knew that he bled from every pore and I knew that he must have loved us (me) a whole lot more than I’ll ever be capable of loving anybody, I just didn’t feel it. If you know what I mean. I knew that I should have been feeling more whenever I thought of His great sacrifice, but like I said before, my reactions were minimal.

So I did what I always do when I’m struggling with something, I knelt on my bed (I kneel on my bed, to be honest with you I’m still terrified that one day there’s going to be something under it) and prayed. I realized that what I wanted was to feel sorrow for His pain. It might be kind of weird, but the way I know how much I love somebody is by how much it hurts me to see them upset or in pain..

About a month later I went to the second and last Seminary Morningside of the year and I got my wish during the testimony portion of the meeting. A girl who I knew only through her friendship with my friends and the fact that she yells whenever she wins a game during seminary (her class is right above mine) got up to bear her testimony. She said that she had been having trouble understanding the magnitude of the atonement and that recently, she’d had a thought. Jesus was her brother, her brother. That is to say, that Him bleeding from every pore so that she may return to their Heavenly Father was not that far from the brother she had grown up with doing the same thing.

Now I don’t have any real brothers. But my sisters all got married when I was around 8-9 years old, so I’ve known all of my brother-in-laws for a while, one of them since I was six. As weird as it might be, I do consider them my brothers, especially the one who’s been pushing me into lakes and making fun of my hair on windy days since I was in Kindergarten.

So when she said that, I immediately pictured one of my brothers sitting in Christ’s stead in the Garden of Gethsemane and tears started streaming down my face. I was tempted to scream in fact, the thought hurt me so much. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, that was the moment I realized that Christ is my Heavenly Brother and that he walked seemingly alone into Gethsemane, willingly and in a mortal body, just as if one of my brothers would if they had to. That’s when it really hit me. From that moment on, I’ve known that my Savior loves me, that I love him and that the sacrifice He made for me and everybody else was beyond that which I could ever bear. I finally realized that it hurts me to hurt him and in addition, the other way around.