Come Follow Me: Doctrine and Covenants 125-128
Thanksgiving is almost here! I’ve always seen it as being all about being grateful for your blessings and the good things we have, but as I was reading D&C 125-128, I found something that disproves this at the end of section 127 verse 2. The part I’m referring to says, “Glory in tribulation; for to this day has the God of my fathers delivered me out of them all, and will deliver me from henceforth; for behold, and lo, I shall triumph over all my enemies, for the Lord God hath spoken it.” At first, a few of the things said in that verse didn’t make much sense to me. So I broke it apart into pieces and searched for what each bit means. For instance, I found that “glory in tribulation” means to rejoice and be thankful even in hard times. So after I was done, I made my own version of it to help me understand it better. Here’s what my interpretation of it is: “Be grateful for hard times and trust that God will be with you to guide you out of them. Hard times won’t last forever. They will help you grow and enjoy the good times more. We will receive rewards for the good things we do, and your effort will be noticed.”
So I realized that maybe we should not only be thankful for the good things in life, but also the challenges we face every day. Except that is so much easier said than done! Recently, I had a difficult project to do for science, and it led me to stay up super late trying to figure out what to do and how to finish it when all I wanted to do was cry about it. (Which I most definitely did for a bit.) Finally, I had finished my project and it was looking pretty good. if I do say so myself. I was relieved to be done, but I was also annoyed at the assignment, and also my teacher. I kept saying, “If I don’t get an A on this, someone’s getting sued!” I was so frustrated with having to do it that it took away from my feeling of accomplishment. But now that it’s not 1:30 am in the morning and that project is already done, I can feel relieved for my hard work, and grateful to my project and teacher for giving me a challenge to work on, and teaching me not to procrastinate.
So I guess everything we go through helps us learn and grow. We take so many things for granted until we don’t have them, and then we start to realize how much we want those things back. But when we do finally get them back, we go back to taking them for granted until they’re taken away again, and the cycle continues. I think the first step is to find a way to keep ourselves from taking things for granted. We could do this by thinking about 10 things every night that we’re thankful for. Even just mentioning something once can help to get us thinking about it. Then that’s when the second comes in. As we’re noting what we’re thankful for, we might forget to appreciate our challenges, too. Like I said before, challenges help us grow, and feel extra good and accomplished when we get over them. So we need to take those into account as well. As I was writing this, “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammer was stuck in my head, and there’s one part in the song lyrics that says, “Only rainbows after rain, the sun will always come again. And it’s a circle, circling, around again, it comes around”. And yeah, that’s the perfect way to put it! There is no good without bad, happiness without sadness, or peace without contention. As soon as we go through hard times, we can experience good times. It all has to be balanced, so we should always be equally grateful for both the easy and hard parts of life.
