Joy guaranteed for the faithful

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Sunday Morning Session of the October 2013 Conference.

Elder Eyring seems to have such a deep understanding of what people worry about. Or at least of what I worry about. Although it's called "To My Grandchildren," I thought his talk in this session had such wise and comforting words for parents and grandparents who wonder and worry how their loved ones will ever make it safely through the challenges of this modern world.

First of all, I thought this was a surprising "great key to family happiness":

That great blessing [of feeling love for the Savior] has come by encouraging people I care for to go to the Savior for relief from pain, a relief only He can give. That is why I urge those I love to accept and to magnify every calling offered them in the Church. That choice is one of the great keys to family happiness.

Accept and magnify every calling offered them! I have heard that advice before and always tried to follow it (of course knowing there may be appropriate exceptions)—but I have never tied it to "family happiness," let alone to being one of the "keys" to family happiness! Very interesting.

Then he gives this great quote by George Q. Cannon:

Life in families will test us. That is one of God’s purposes in giving us the gift of mortality—to strengthen us by passing through tests. That will be especially true in family life, where we will find great joy and great sorrow and challenges which may at times seem beyond our power to endure them.

President George Q. Cannon said this about how God has prepared you and me and our children for the tests we will face: “There is not one of us but what God’s love has been expended upon. There is not one of us that He has not cared for and caressed. There is not one of us that He has not desired to save, and that He has not devised means to save. There is not one of us that He has not given His angels charge concerning. We may be insignificant and contemptible in our own eyes, and in the eyes of others, but the truth remains that we are the children of God, and that He has actually given His angels—invisible beings of power and might—charge concerning us, and they watch over us and have us in their keeping.”

I just love that statement "there is not one of us that He has not desired to save, and that He has not devised means to save"! If God Himself devised means to save one of His children, surely He, knowing each of us so well, provided for every stumble that child might make, and figured out a way back to Him from each individual point on the path that child make take! I think about this all the time—the fact that God knows how to get from anywhere back to Him. I so often can't see the through-line. I see no possible way some people might get from where they are to where they should be. (Even myself, at times). But God has "devised means to save" each of us, which means He always knows a way! That is amazing to me.

I also liked this:

God has devised means to save each of His children. For many, that involves being placed with a brother or a sister or a grandparent who loves them no matter what they do.

Years ago a friend of mine spoke of his grandmother. She had lived a full life, always faithful to the Lord and to His Church. Yet one of her grandsons chose a life of crime. He was finally sentenced to prison. My friend recalled that his grandmother, as she drove along a highway to visit her grandson in prison, had tears in her eyes as she prayed with anguish, “I’ve tried to live a good life. Why, why do I have this tragedy of a grandson who seems to have destroyed his life?”

The answer came to her mind in these words: “I gave him to you because I knew you could and would love him no matter what he did.”

It's sobering to think about that, because…can I be the kind of person who loves others no matter what? I'm not totally sure. But then I think about my children, and the underlying love I always feel for them (even when I'm mad or hurt), and I think I can be that kind of person at least for them. Or I can learn to be. And Elder Eyring gives us exactly the hopeful words we might need to do it:

My message then to my grandchildren, and to all of us trying to forge eternal families, is that there is joy guaranteed for the faithful. From before the world was, a loving Father in Heaven and His Beloved Son loved and worked with those who They knew would wander. God will love them forever.

You have the advantage of knowing that they learned the plan of salvation from the teachings they received in the spirit world. They and you were faithful enough to be allowed to come into the world when many others were not.

With the help of the Holy Ghost, all truths will be brought to our remembrance. We cannot force that on others, but we can let them see it in our lives. We can always take courage from the assurance that we all once felt the joy of being together as a member of the beloved family of our Heavenly Father. With God’s help we can all feel that hope and that joy again.

So much hope and goodness in those paragraphs! ("Joy guaranteed"??? That is such a bold statement!) I love it and I love Elder Eyring for helping me believe it.