Lessons Learned

I presented my lesson on adversity and suffering this morning. I always approach my lessons with a reminder to listen intently to the comments made. Often I learn more from the class participants than they learn from me. Here are some of the partial answers to questions in my last blog, that I learned from the class.

Adversity and suffering do bring us closer to our Heavenly Father. Overall, their purpose is to teach us humility, faith, hope and charity and in those lessons we become willing to be more obedient.

Its not always our own adversity and suffering that brings us closer to God. It may be another's, if we are willing to leave our own complacency and try to succor, to help, to lift, to share in another's suffering. In this sense, the "test" created by suffering may be more for the observer of another's suffering, than the person who is suffering.

To the point of how we become perfected as much as those who suffer more than we do, we can look to Christ. He descended below all things and suffered all things, to feel the pain that we felt from our suffering. This doesn't mean He actually experienced these things. We know He did not sin. He did not experience cancer or other diseases. He did not live through years of incarceration or imprisonment. Yet, somehow, by some unknown method He did experience the intense pain and suffering those experiences can cause. Its possible, that we too, not to the level of Christ, but by a similar method will come to have a sort of empathy for those who have suffered what we have not and experience a similar "growth in spirit."

I experienced this a little as a Bishop. With the mantle of the Bishop I became very sensitive to all of the suffering of those members of my Ward. This sensitivity went will beyond an awareness of members' trials. I felt as if I was suffering right along with them. This feeling was almost overwhelming and I found myself pleading to God, as Joseph did in D&C 121, to relieve their suffering and mine.

We can have all that Christ has with regard to His glory, but He will always be our Savior. Without Christ our paths would be blocked and we would take upon ourselves the full intensity of the suffering caused by our imperfections, mistakes, and sins. We do not have the physical, emotional or spiritual capacity to bear this amount of suffering. To think that Christ was able to bear not only our individual pain and suffering but every person's who has come into this world's pain and suffering is incomprehensible. The degree to which He loves us, must inspire us to love others - to succor them, to listen to them, to love them, to serve them, to lift them as much as our capacity to do so allows - as Christ did for us.

Finally, our capacity to do these things is only limited by our obedience and righteousness. The more righteous we become the more our capacity to serve increases. Righteousness has an innate power that can heal, without touch, without direct action, without direct purpose. We can help the World heal by "simply" trying to be more obedient and become more righteous.

Christ will always and forever be our Saviour. We should look to him to understand the entire nature and purpose of adversity and suffering.