I am so blessed.
Not only because I have everything I ever had before that sickness snaked its way through my body like a quiet poison, taking all movement from my limbs and strength from my muscles but also sneaking its way into my hopes and dreams and, for a moment, destroying those too.
I am blessed because my soul is deeper now.
According to Preach My Gospel, "While we are on the earth, we have experiences that bring us happiness; we also have experiences that bring us pain and suffering... These experiences give us the opportunity to learn and to progress, to learn right from wrong, and to make decisions."
I didn't understand what it meant to have experiences that truly brought pain and suffering, not before last year. And some of you may not understand why the experience I had in that hospital and the time before and after it still, sometimes, bring me to my knees in prayer, pleading for comfort.
That doesn't matter.
The point is, is that God knew that this experience would rip my heart open.
And I am grateful He allowed it to happen to me.
My heart was ripped, right at the points of all of my pride; my athelticism, my hard working nature, my ability to always be energetic and lively, my intelligence and how easy it was for me to study hard in school and understand difficult concepts. These weren't taken from me temporarily; some of them, who seemed to define who I was to my very core, seemed to be taken from me forever. I would never be strong enough to have a large family, I could not count on ever being able to go back to school. Instead of a brilliant game, with me as an instrumental player, life, my future, was going to be a chore, an uphill climb, with me as a player who could barely take a couple of steps a day.
My message to the grievers, as I have learned over the course of the past year and a half, is to accept the pain. Do not shrink. Drink the cup which God has placed before you, for He himself has partaken of this cup, and has become glorified because He did so.
"For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all... which suffering caused myself, even God, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit-- and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink--"
For those grievers, my advice as you enter this storm, or come to end of the storm, or have found yourself in a Hell even you could never have imagined, is to drink the cup with one hand, and grasp onto the Savior with the other arm, with everything that you have. When you can do nothing more, talk to God. Just talk. Yell at Him if you must; for He will understand that you are dealing with this the only way that you know how. He knows you have never done something this absolutely soul-destroying before, and that you don't know how to do it.
My promise is that He will hold you. Sometimes you will feel so far abandoned, you will not be able to sense Him there. I plead with you in that moment to be stubborn enough to believe that He is.
I promise He will protect you from the storm. I promise that when you are coming to deal without sobbing every moment of every day with a pain that pulls your heartstrings so tightly that tears are drawn down your face in the very essence of the meaning of the word 'suffering,' I promise that when you kneel down to tell Him how it is, to tell Him that this, this is what Hell means, I promise that He will show you the privileged path He has chosen for you to come to Heaven.
It hurts so badly, to get to God.
I am sorry it hurts you.
But please, remember this promise from a young girl who has little experience in life, but has had the opportunity to prove to God that she will be loyal to Him even in the darkest of moments, remember that this is not a lonely path. This is your opportunity to open up a conversation with God that never ends; no trial is done alone.
I am not afraid anymore. I sob with people when they are in pain. I cannot listen to songs about people who are experiencing death. My soul has been deepened, and it is still a bit broken.
But I would drink the cup again, if it meant I could come nearer to my Savior.
So, to the grievers. I love you. But that doesn't mean anything; I am crying with you. That doesn't mean anything either. What really matters is that the fact that those things are part of my nature now are only possible because they were first part of God's nature.
He loves you. He is sobbing with you.
Grasp Him with everything you have, and I promise that this will make your soul deeper. If we must suffer, why would we not take the opportunity to suffer with the one whom it pains most to see us suffer that way? Why would we not suffer with God?
Invite Him into your deepest pain, your darkest place, and you will find He is the light that saves your soul from the ravaging waves and rocks of pain no other man can understand.
Use this as an opportunity to know God.
And He will become more real to you than you have ever imagined.
This talk is sound advice from men who have suffered, Elder Neal A Maxwell and Elder Bednar. Please read it:
That We Might Not Shrink
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