I Will Go...

There seems to be a theme this week. First, my friend Jessie posted a sacrament meeting talk she gave about submitting our will to the will of God and then the concept kept popping up all week.

The sacrament meeting topic for today was about honoring and sustaining our local and general priesthood leaders, but what stood out about the last talk was submitting our will to God.

The speaker told a story about young Joseph F. Smith and how he was in the process of earning a large homestead for his family and needed to work the land for just one more year. The prophet Brigham Young met with young Bro. Smith and told him that the Lord needed him to leave the country to serve as a full-time missionary. Bro. Smith didn't even tell Pres. Young about his circumstances. There was no plea to wait for just one year.  Bro. Smith just prepared for the mission and left.

And he lost the homestead.

Now, we know the end from the beginning. I don't think that we can even keep track of the number of converts who joined the church (and their descendants) as a result of this man's MANY missions and service in the churhc. Bro. Smith eventually became Pres. Joseph F. Smith, prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I suppose we could say, "Those were just the times! People made unbelievable sacrifices in the early days of the church. It was just what they did. It was necessary in those early days."

But I sat there in church thinking, "What would I have done?" In truth, I'm pretty sure I would have MENTIONED the year left on the homestead. Maybe a, "Are you SURE I'm supposed to go NOW, President?" would have slipped into the conversation too.

Is this I-will-go attitude what makes someone worthy to be a prophet? That willingness to do whatever the Lord asks without worrying about the consequences, because your faith is so strong that you just know everything will eventually work out in the end EVEN if it doesn't work out the way you had hoped or planned.

I worry that I'm more like Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, (who we also talked about at church today.) The older Zacharias was told that he and his wife would have a son,  and his thought was, "Well, I don't see how is THAT going to work?" And he was struck dumb until the Lord's will came to pass.

I would like to be more like Mary, mother of Christ, who said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy words." Though she did ask "how SHALL this be," but I guess the SHALL shows her faith in the question. SHALL seems to say, "I believe what you've said, will you please explain it to me a bit."

These words seemed to jump from the scripture pages to me today,
"For with God nothing shall be impossible."

It reminded me of a song my father often sang when I was younger.
"For with God, nothing is impossible,
but you must reach and take his hand...
With Him, nothing is impossible,
those who have ears to hear will understand...
The blind could see....
The lame man could walk away...
And lives were changed from night today
When they know that someone cares."

I think that's were my faith is rooted. I do believe that God cares about me. I KNOW He loves us. We ARE his children, and as such He wants our joy. The scriptures even say that's His goal.

So if he asks us to do something, it must be calculated for our ULTIMATE JOY (eternal and not necessarily temporal.) I think it's the faith and trust and even experience I've had of His love that gives me the strength to say, "Thy will be done."

I don't know if the theme this week means that hard things are around the corner for us, and I will need to exercise more faith, or if I just need to work toward a more humble and faith-filled attitude in general. I just kept thinking, "Who am I? And who am I working to become? A Joseph? A Zacharias? Or a Mary?"