Yet Will I Trust Him

As my children get older, my wife and I frequently find ourselves the subject of criticism about our choices as it relates to them. For example, my ten-year-old said something like this to me the other day, “So and so who is my age has an iPhone 13 that her parents gave her. She is a member of our church. You are not making very good choices.” He was referring to the fact that we won’t give him a smart phone at this age, despite his protests and arguments about how some of his peers have one. But we understand a lot more about where having a smartphone at his age can lead, and we can clearly see that such a device in his hands would not a blessing for his future happiness. We have more experience than he does and, though still imperfect, our understanding of what he needs to be successful in life exceeds his own. I thought about this as I contemplated Elder Christofferson’s talk from the most recent general conference. He commented, “Because we know that God has power to prevent or remove any affliction, we may be tempted to complain if He does not do it, perhaps questioning, ‘If God does not grant the help I pray for, how can I have faith in Him?’… It truly is folly for us with our mortal myopia to presume to judge God, to think, for example, ‘I’m not happy, so God must be doing something wrong.’ To us, His mortal children in a fallen world, who know so little of past, present, and future, He declares, ‘All things are present with me, for I know them all.’” Like my children who often think they know better about how to be raised than we as their parents do, so too do we sometimes fall into the folly to think that we know better than God how precisely our lives should work out.

               Elder Christofferson further taught in this talk, “If life doesn’t fall out precisely this way or according to an expected timetable, they may feel betrayed by God. But things are not so mechanical in the divine economy. We ought not to think of God’s plan as a cosmic vending machine where we (1) select a desired blessing, (2) insert the required sum of good works, and (3) the order is promptly delivered.” Of course that is ridiculous, and yet we can all fall into that line of thinking, telling Him, “I have kept this commandment; why am I not getting that blessing?” But faith requires us to trust that He always knows better than we do, and ultimately we must learn to say like Job, “Thou he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). When our lives do not go as we planned, we must learn to say as the Savior, “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). I love the words of the hymn that we often sing as we partake of the Sacrament: 

We take the bread and cup this day

In mem’ry of the sinless One,

And pray for strength, that we may say,

As he, “Thy will, O Lord, be done.”

That is I believe the key to facing all the unexpected and undesired challenges in our lives: we must pray for strength that we can accept the Lord’s will and move forward in faith. Sometimes the answer from the Lord is like that given to Alma and Amulek when they were forced to watch the faithful suffer and be killed: “The Spirit constraineth me that I must not stretch forth mine hand; for behold the Lord receiveth them up unto himself, in glory; and he doth suffer that they may do this thing” (Alma 14:11). At times He suffereth things to happen that we do not want to happen, and we must remember as Lehi taught that “all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things” (2 Nephi 2:24).

Here is Elder Christofferson’s suggestion for how we deal with the undesirable events and situations in our lives: “So, in the midst of this refiner’s fire, rather than get angry with God, get close to God. Call upon the Father in the name of the Son. Walk with Them in the Spirit, day by day. Allow Them over time to manifest Their fidelity to you. Come truly to know Them and truly to know yourself. Let God prevail.” Just as I want my son to trust that I truly have his best interest in mind and to love me and stay close to me even when I do not give him everything he asks for, so too must we learn to trust and love our Father in Heaven and Savior no matter what our circumstances of life are. As Elder Christofferson summarized, “In the end, it is the blessing of a close and abiding relationship with the Father and the Son that we seek. It makes all the difference and is everlastingly worth the cost. We will testify with Paul ‘that the sufferings of this present [mortal] time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.’ I bear witness that no matter what our mortal experience may entail, we can trust God and find joy in Him.”