Greatly enlarged souls

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Afternoon Session of the April 2000 Conference.

Elder Maxwell talked in this session about "contentment," which seems like kind of an uncommon topic to choose—but I almost see it as another word for trust, which is definitely one of Elder Maxwell's themes! What struck me about it was how strongly he tied contentment (feeling at peace with the circumstances we can't change) to Jesus Christ's atonement. I think the link is that because Christ suffered and died for us, and because we know He will turn all things for our good as we repent, we can then have ultimate trust and acceptance of whatever things Christ "allots" to us.

Here are some of the things Elder Maxwell said about that:

• Being content means acceptance without self-pity. Meekly borne, however, deprivations such as these can end up being like excavations that make room for greatly enlarged souls.…

• We can draw upon [Christ's] glorious Atonement by repenting. We can learn to serve and to forgive within our sample of humanity, including settings no larger than the family or friendships.

The justice and mercy of God will have been so demonstrably perfect that at the Final Judgment there will be no complaints, including from those who once questioned what God had allotted in the mortal framework.

We can and “ought to be content with the things allotted to us,” being circumstantially content but without being self-satisfied and behaviorally content with ourselves.

Such contentment is more than shoulder-shrugging passivity. It reflects our participative assent rather than uncaring resignation.

• This spiritual contentment rests on our accepting the Atonement of Jesus, because we “have come to a knowledge of the goodness of God, and his matchless power, and his wisdom, and his patience, and his long-suffering towards the children of men; and also, the atonement which has been prepared from the foundation of the world”

I was just re-reading Elder Bednar's talk about having faith "not to be healed" and the message there is similar. In that talk, Elder Bednar quotes a young man he knew who had cancer. The man wrote in a letter to Elder Bednar about something he'd learned while praying to be healed: 

Up until this point, I had a hard time reconciling the need for my faith in Christ with the inevitability of His will. I saw them as two separate things, and sometimes I felt that one contradicted the other. ‘Why should I have faith if His will ultimately is what will prevail?’ I asked. After this experience, I knew that having faith—at least in my circumstance—was not necessarily knowing that he would heal me, but that He could heal me. I had to believe that He could, and then whether it happened was up to Him.

As I allowed those two ideas to coexist in my life, focused faith in Jesus Christ and complete submission to His will, I found greater comfort and peace.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately. It takes some courage to believe that God could have fixed any number of things in your life that you wish he would fix—and he didn't do it. But if you can keep that firmly affixed to its concurrent truth—if he didn't, there was a good and loving reason He didn't—it's actually very comforting. Peace doesn't come from everything being easy (we all know too well that that could change at any moment)—but peace comes from trusting God is there with us in all of it, working and planning and preparing all things for our good!

Other posts in this series:

Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven—by Rozy