A bishopric message written on Wednesday, January 28, 1998, and published the following Sunday in the February 1998 issue of the Bountiful Twentieth Ward Newsette.
The passing of loved ones—as has happened in recent weeks to a couple of people in our neighborhood—is a fresh reminder to each of us of the transitory nature of this mortal life. We are here for such a brief moment.
A loving Heavenly Father has sent us here to this earthly boarding school to obtain our physical bodies, to gain experience, to learn to use our agency to see if we will “choose . . . this day, to serve the Lord God who made you” (Moses 6:33). As the Book of Mormon reminds us, “this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God” (Alma 12:24).
Our Father designed an excellent test for us here in this mortal curriculum. The nature of that test is to see how we will use our agency to make it through life. Every day we are confronted with choices. We make decisions. We determine how we will use our time, our talents, our opportunities. Since there is never quite enough time to do or have or be everything we want, the nature of our choices reflects what we really desire out of life. Day by day we are selecting what we really deep down inside want to become.
“There is only one day that you and I have to live for,” said Harold B. Lee, “and that’s today. There is nothing we can do about yesterday except repent, and there may be no tomorrow. The thing for us to do when we arise from our beds, as God gives us a new day, is to take whatever comes to our hands and do it to the best of our ability.”
That sounds like good advice to me, as does this bit of counsel from the Old Testament: “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalms 118:24).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment