To reconnect here with the love we felt there

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Morning Session of the October 2004 Conference.

I've always loved hearing Elder John H. Groberg's mission stories, but his talk in this session had so many good doctrinal insights too! I have been thinking this week about how much I wish I could teach my children the concept of real love and how to feel it. Elder Groberg says:

Every person who comes to earth is a spirit son or daughter of God. Since all love emanates from God, we are born with the capacity and the desire to love and to be loved. One of the strongest connections we have with our premortal life is how much our Father and Jesus loved us and how much we loved Them. Even though a veil was drawn over our memory, whenever we sense true love, it awakens a longing that cannot be denied.

Responding to true love is part of our very being. We innately desire to reconnect here with the love we felt there. Only as we feel God’s love and fill our hearts with His love can we be truly happy.

I know my children feel this longing for love. The little ones just reach out for it and drink it in. It's so easy to help them feel loved! But the older kids seem to feel the longing as a deep loneliness and sadness that surfaces sometimes. They want connection. They think they'll find it with friends or by having people admire them. I want so much to help them understand this principle:

Trying to find lasting love without obeying God is like trying to quench thirst by drinking from an empty cup—you can go through the motions, but the thirst remains. Similarly, trying to find love without helping and sacrificing for others is like trying to live without eating—it is against the laws of nature and cannot succeed. We cannot fake love. It must become part of us.

Elder Groberg also talks about the cyclical nature of love I wrote about a few weeks ago:

The more we obey God, the more we desire to help others. The more we help others, the more we love God and on and on. Conversely, the more we disobey God and the more selfish we are, the less love we feel.

I guess maybe to really understand this (and I'm sure I don't even "really understand" it as much as I could myself) you just have to have repeated personal experience with it in your life. I don't think as a college student I could have grasped how much my own happiness would depend, not on what happened to me or what other people thought of me or if I was "successful" in my goals…but on how much I tried to align my will with God's, and how much I tried to serve others. At that time, I knew I "should" obey God (and I tried to!) but I didn't realize that doing so would give me all the other things I was craving…peace, acceptance, meaning, love! I didn't realize that focusing so intensely on myself (what I was feeling, if people liked me, if I was "happy enough,") was the very thing making me unhappy! 

That makes it sound as if I've mastered it now, but of course I haven't. I still have to tell myself "Forget yourself and go to work!" about five times a day! But I have at least seen glimpses of the way serving God and others fills my own heart with peace and comfort. And this is just so beautiful:

When filled with God’s love, we can do and see and understand things that we could not otherwise do or see or understand. Filled with His love, we can endure pain, quell fear, forgive freely, avoid contention, renew strength, and bless and help others in ways surprising even to us.

I loved this reminder that for all of my worries and troubles and times of confusion, God's love is the universal cure. "The answer is always Jesus Christ!"