I added this quote from President Uchtdorf to a post from a couple weeks ago after the fact, because I felt it fit well with what I wrote. I’m deciding to share it again, because it’s been on my mind quite a bit recently.
Faith means that we trust not only in God’s wisdom but that we trust also in His love. It means trusting that God loves us perfectly, that everything He does—every blessing He gives and every blessing He, for a time, withholds—is for our eternal happiness.
With this kind of faith, though we may not understand why certain things happen or why certain prayers go unanswered, we can know that in the end everything will make sense. “All things [will] work together for good to them that love God.”
All will be made right. All will be well.
We can be certain that answers will come, and we may be confident that we will not only be content with the answers but we will also be overwhelmed by the grace, mercy, generosity, and love of our Heavenly Father for us, His children. (Fourth Floor Last Door)
Having faith and trust in Heavenly Father means that I believe his plan will bring me the most possible happiness :) And it means choosing to look forward to and expect that :) This theme came up in a couple other places for me this week. One was in my scripture study, reading about Alma’s trust in the Lord. He taught his son Helaman:
“…I have been supported under trials and troubles of every kind, yea, and in all manner of afflictions; yea, God has delivered me from prison, and from bonds, and from death; yea, and I do put my trust in him, and he will still deliver me.” (Alma 36:27)
Alma could have chosen to focus on having been afflicted and in prison, but he chose to focus on being delivered, and he trusted in being delivered in the future :) I also read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho this week, and this quote struck me in this same regard:
If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve upon the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children.
Trusting in God means being confident that he loves us, and that he’ll make things work together for out good! HWN for me this week has in part come from developing more of this kind of trust.
And here are some highlights since my last post. We celebrated Emily’s birthday with bowling on Thursday, and surprise dinner at Thai Village on Friday :) You can see all the pictures here.
And Danny, Sarah, and I drove down to Temecula for Christmas, and we went to the temple yesterday with my mom.
The weather has been beautiful! Who needs a white Christmas when you can have this!
I’ve also gotten to go caroling with my family a couple times, and last night we visited the famous Bainbridge Court
