Will We Seek Jesus?

God expects us to hold happiness and sorrow at the same time. It’s a beautiful contrary that many of us struggle to understand, but it’s really key to understanding our purpose on earth.

We can easily find ourselves in a battle of emotions if we can’t accept that both can exist at the same time; we will falsely accuse ourselves or others as either ungrateful & weak, or overly strong & fake. Perhaps a lot of it is how we speak to the struggle. 

Our main purpose is to experience heartache & frustration (one side of the coin), but to overcome it through the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which provides everlasting joy (the other side of the coin). In order to really value the Atonement of Jesus Christ, many of us are humbled by the feeling of hopelessness. We will all experience some level of loss & acute awareness of our own weaknesses, usually when things start to feel out of our control. But what does holding both sorrow & joy look like? That is a question we should ask ourselves.

Perhaps we haven’t felt His redeeming love in awhile, but we have the faith to wait. Perhaps we are consigned to never feel it & want to give up. Perhaps the darkness feels so overpowering, that we cry out for God to save us from this gulf of misery, and feel abandoned & alone. But what if, what if we asked to be refined. What if we allowed Him to change us & asked Him what we should change today. What if we asked to see His hand in our lives today so that we would know we weren’t completely alone. What if we asked for new eyes & new hearts to clearly see the things of God.

We are all beggars, my friends. I have a few weaknesses I dare not mention & I’m afraid there are many days I am not strong in asking to perfect them through Jesus Christ. I just testify that He knows us perfectly, but we must seek Him if we want the ability to overcome the stings of death & sorrow in this life. We could have much material wealth in this world, yet be insanely unhappy. We could have but very little & be full of joy. It is not the things in our life, but where our focus rests at the end of the day. The prophet said so.

To experience sorrow is an opportunity to experience joy. We should not negate our sorrow, but speak to it in the wisdom that joy will be found. Something is always going right and something is always going wrong. And usually it’s like a circus of joys & sorrows, with all kinds of balls in the air. However, this life is a test of our wills - whether life feels overbearing or easy going - will we continue to seek Jesus or not. Feel the disappointment, hold the sorrow, but remember we are fully capable of letting it go, at least in time, because Jesus is Jesus. He already carried your pain so that you can overcome it through Him. Our only priority should be understanding what that looks and feels like. There is no greater joy in this life.