Rising Up Again

A verse in Proverbs reads, “For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again” (Proverbs 26:16).  This reminds me of what the Lord said about Oliver Granger in the Doctrine and Covenants: “Let him contend earnestly for the redemption of the First Presidency of my Church, saith the Lord; and when he falls he shall rise again, for his sacrifice shall be more sacred unto me than his increase, saith the Lord” (D&C 117:13).  One of the principles of the gospel is that no matter how many times we struggle and feel that we fail, we only truly fail if we don’t keep trying to live the life that our Savior wants us to live.  There is no limit to how much we can sincerely repent and have the Lord forgive us.  Alma was told by the Lord, “Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me” (Mosiah 26:30).  Moroni recorded something similar about the Church in his time, “But as oft as they repented and sought forgiveness, with real intent, they were forgiven” (Moroni 6:8).  The hope of the gospel is that the Lord will never give up on us as long as we keep trying.   Perfection may be the ultimate goal, but there is no due date for that requirement. 

               My sister-in-law likes to quote from the poem The Race attributed to Dee Groberg.  To “get up and win that race” is a call for all of us, and the “race” is, as Elder Holland put it, “not… a race against each other…. The race we are really in is the race against sin.”  Paul gave us these words of encouragement in that race: “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).  It certainly does take patience as we seek to overcome our own faults and weaknesses.  This week we posted a new version of our software, and I was a little frustrated to find a somewhat minor issue right after we posted the new version.  So I fixed the issue, but realized a day or two later that I had fixed the minor issue and introduced a different much bigger problem at the same time.  So I went in and fixed that, but I realized the next day that my fix still wasn’t correct.  So it took me several times just to get about ten lines of code working properly.  I guess life is like that sometimes where it seems like we just can’t get ahead.  Gratefully as Paul taught in the above verse, we can “look unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”  He ultimately is the only one who can help us to keep rising even if it is seven times that we have fallen.