Pain in service

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Priesthood Session of the October 2007 Conference.

I loved Elder Eyring's talk, "God Helps the Faithful Priesthood Holder", so much! I don't think I'd ever read it before but it seemed so applicable to anyone feeling inadequate to the great task ahead, which is the state I've been in as a parent for the past ten years or so (and seeming to get less confident as time goes on)!

Elder Eyring starts out by talking about how much confidence we can gain from remembering God's goodness in the past. He describes the assurance he has felt from God while he is praying:

“Haven’t I always looked after you? Think of the times I have led you beside the still waters. Remember the times I have set a table before you in the presence of your enemies. Remember, and fear no evil.”

Then, beautifully, Elder Eyring says this:

So to the new deacons: remember. He has always taken care of you from your childhood. To the new quorum presidents: remember. To you fathers with children who are a challenge to you: remember, and have no fear. What is impossible for you is possible with God’s help in His service. And even when you were very small and in the years since, He has with His power and His Spirit gone before your face and been on your left hand and on your right hand when you went in His service.

Ah! I love that so much! It reminds me of Elder Andersen's luminous stones talk. Just reading this calms my troubled soul because I have to admit, yes! God has always taken care of me! And I see Him taking care of each of my children too. How can I doubt he will keep doing it?

My other favorite part of the talk seems a little contradictory, honestly, in context of this first part. These are words you don't hear very often:

But it is never going to be easy for you or for those you serve. There will always be pain in service.

I understand what he's saying here, actually. It goes along with "what a fulness means" and it's something I'm struggling, little by little, to comprehend. That "pain in service" is real, and feeling it can hurt enough to drop you into exhaustion and discouragement. It can even trick you into thinking that love and service might not be worth it, after all. But that's why Elder Eyring brings it up in the first place—to reassure us that the pain is planned for and doesn't mean we're doing it wrong. He continues:

That is in the nature of what you are called to do. Think of the Savior, whose service you are in. At what point in His mortal life can you see an instance when it was easy for Him? Did He ask easy things of His disciples then? Then why should it ever be easy in His service or for His disciples?

The reason for that is suggested by the phrase “a broken heart,”…The scriptures sometimes speak of people’s hearts being softened, but more often the words describing the state we seek for ourselves and for those we serve are a “broken heart.” This may help us accept that our call to serve and the need for the repentance we need and seek will not be easy. And it helps us understand better why testimony needs to go down into the hearts of our people. Faith that Jesus Christ atoned for their sins has to go down into the heart—a broken heart.

This, too, is "what a fulness means." And Elder Eyring suggests so reasonably and practically what we can do to combat that "pain in service," those feelings of being overwhelmed and inadequate and discouraged:

Now, tonight let us decide together what we are going to do. All of us, whatever our callings may be, face tasks that are beyond our own powers. I do and you do. That’s true from the simple fact that success is to get testimony down into the hearts of people. We can’t make that happen. Even God won’t force that on anyone.

So success requires people we serve to choose to accept the testimony of the Spirit into their hearts. The Spirit is ready. But many people aren’t ready to invite the Spirit. Our task, which is in our power, is to invite the Spirit into our lives so that people we serve will want to have the fruits of the Spirit in their lives—the fruits that they can see in ours.

So this talk helped me learn two things I can do when I feel inadequacy or pain as I try to serve:

1. Remember that God has always helped me and will always help me, and

2. All I really have to do is invite the Spirit into my life, and God will do the rest.

Such beautiful truths to hold onto!

Other posts in this series:

Procrastination—by Rozy