A never-ending need

During Sunday School this week our teacher shared small bit of a talk given by Elder Russell M. Nelson (I think). The talk was about repentance and the fact that it is not needed just once or just for large transgressions, but we should be repenting each day of all our sins, large or small, sins of commission and sins of omission. I must admit, I kind of stopped listening to the teacher because my own mind was flooded with thoughts. I thought about the Psalm of Nephi and I thought about how so many Prophets have warned us not to procrastinate the day of our repentance. And I think I came to a new personal understanding of why repentance is so important and what I am doing wrong.

My ultimate goal is to be something more than I am; eventually, with a lot of help, I hope to be like Christ and like God. I am nowhere near meeting that goal. I know it is possible, in fact I have been given exact directions on how to do it, but like with most things that come with directions, I tend to try to figure it out myself instead of keeping the directions close by and following them closely. But I understand a little more today why I need to laminate those directions then put them on a string around my neck and refer to them several times each hour.

I have always loved what I call the Psalm of Nephi (2 Nephi 4:15-35). At one point he says “Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great and marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth: O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities. I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me. And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins; nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.” (17-19)

This man was a prophet of God, and yet his soul was grieved because of his iniquities. I remember the first time I really thought about what he was saying, I was stunned, I knew that a prophet had to be worthy to receive revelation from God and yet there were times that even a prophet felt unworthy, when even a prophet felt that he had sinned. If someone as good as a prophet felt that he fell short, then what was going to happen to me, I make big mistakes. Even though it was more than a decade ago I also still remember the thought that entered my mind while I was pondering this prophets words. I understood for the first time that I and Nephi, and everyone else were all in similar situations; we all have a never-ending need, we all need to rely upon the power of our Saviors atonement.

At first we recognize the huge sins we have committed, they are the elephant in the room that cannot be ignored. By our actions we have separated ourselves from our God and we must repent of those sins to return to our Fathers presence. It was at this point that I also recognized what it truly means to have the Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, to be with me. If I am worthy and repentant the Spirit of the Lord, the Holy Ghost, will be my companion, and if I am in the presence of the Holy Ghost I am in the presence of a member of the Godhead, so in a way if I am practicing for the day that I can be, literally, in the presence of my Savior and my God. It is easy to recognize the Big Sins, usually we knew they were wrong long before we ever did them, but we made our choice and we chose wrong. All is not lost; we know we can repent.

So what happens next? Hopefully we don’t run out and commit more huge sins, but we also know that we are not perfect we are still making mistakes, we still sin, smaller mistakes, smaller sins, but we are still separating ourselves from our God and as such we find that we once again need to repent. And so the never-ending cycle continues. Basically, what I learned from this pondering upon Nephi’s words was this, the more we repent the more we see what we could change and what we could do better. When you are dealing with an Elephant in your living room you are probably not too bothered by the fly on the wall of that room, but once you get rid of the elephant suddenly the fly is very, very annoying. As we repent and become more in tune with the Spirit, we notice the smaller things we didn’t see before. That is what Nephi taught me, to repent so that I can become spiritually sensitive and able to more clearly see what I still need to change and fix and repent of.

Today that teaching mingled itself with the words of many other prophets who warn not to procrastinate the day of our repentance. I knew it was important- after all it takes a while to truly get rid of an Elephant, but it is not just the Elephant sized sins we need to worry about, it is all of the sins, even the little itsy bitsy ones that we can barely see. That is why we cannot afford to procrastinate, because if we do we may not have enough time to become spiritually sensitive enough to even see the bunny sized sins let alone the speck sized ones.

In the end, after all we have done, we are still going to be imperfect, we are still going to have made mistakes but if we have done all that we can our Savior will fill in our gaps and build us the bridge back to our God. I don’t want to get to that day and realize that I have not done all I could have done; I think that would truly be Hell.