Month: April 2021

When we hear the word “trial”, the emotion that accompanies it is usually negative.  Trials are difficult and unwelcomed.  We don’t willingly invite them into our lives. Whatever the trial may be, trials often bring grief, sadness and hopelessness into our heart and soul.  We are never the same after a trial.  We are not meant to be the same after a trial. 

Whether our trials are short lived, last a long time or even continue for a life time, I believe they are meant to help us and teach us.  When you are going through a trial, it certainly doesn’t feel that way, but a trial will either teach us or destroy us.  I did not want my trial destroy me, my children or my family.  So I chose to be taught.

As this trial began, I was in shock, despondent and unable to function.  It was not just my trial.  It had hurt many others in so many ways – my children, the children of people I loved and the adults that loved them.  The things that happened to these children were so terrible.  I will always weep for the evil that they experienced.  Yet in the devastation I felt from all that had happened, I looked for ways to heal.  I longed to heal, and I yearned for all the children to be healed that Phil had hurt.  I began reading books that would help me find answers and understand what I could learn from my trial, and the valuable lessons resulting from my trials that could make a difference in my life. 

Trials have a tendency to make you feel worthless.  They can make you feel unloved and of no value.  We may feel abandoned by God because we have a trial, but I think we misinterpret our trials and the reasons for them.  In the many inspirational books that I read during this time, a message kept recurring that lifted my spirits and helped me feel like I was valued by the Lord.  The message was this:  God tutors those whom He loves.  We are being blessed by being tested, because He trusts us enough to make the choices that will turn our hearts and minds to Him, and in the painful processes we become His dedicated sons and daughters.  His love for us cannot be matched, not anywhere on this earth and He will never stop loving us.  These statements may be hard for us to process, but I feel that they are true.  This understanding helped me so much, because I knew that He loved me enough to teach me. 

In my counseling sessions, Mark would use his wealth of earthly knowledge to teach me about the psychological effects of abuse.  But his teaching became much more as he added gospel principles to his counsel.  I came to understand the impact of what had happened to my children, and what had happened to me.  I understood things better from a professional point of view, but he also taught me how to make sense of all of it by using the gospel.  He shared gospel insights and personal spiritual experiences that helped me to understand and process my trial.  Both Mark and the inspirational books I read were pivotal in helping me begin my path to healing.  I would like to share their insights that became my understanding. 

I understand that my trial was not meant as a punishment, but an experience I was allowed to have  to teach me and to help turn me towards my Heavenly Father.  It gave me the desire to know what God would have me do in my life.  As mortal beings, I don’t think we can learn the great lessons in life without experiencing some tough things.  We can go along in life and be happy or sad, but to progress and learn we must go through trials.  We must actually go through the pain – mentally, emotionally and spiritually to understand the deep and abiding importance of things in both life and eternity.  How can we learn if we’re not faced with having to learn?  We can certainly learn many things without experiencing everything, but in order for the learning to sink deep into our hearts and souls, we must experience trials firsthand.  We can’t have a deep understanding of the purposes of life unless we have to go through something hard.  Physical and emotional pain teaches us things that go deep into our hearts.  It can make us into something better than we are.

Our individual trials can teach us what we individually need to know.  It will be different for everyone, and no two trials may be the same, but the Lord desires that we learn from our trials.  We came to earth to learn, to progress and grow.  We came to learn wisdom, which is most often learned by going through a trial.  In the scriptures we are taught that our trials refine us.  In Webster’s Dictionary, the word “refine” means:  “1. To bring, to come to a pure state; purify.”  A Bible Dictionary describes a “Refiner” as, “A man who separates the precious metals from the dross with which in nature they are usually found mixed.  Part of the process consists in the application of great heat, in order to bring the mass into a fluid state, hence the term ‘refiner’s fire’”.  Isn’t it interesting that precious metals and dross are mixed in nature?  We need a “refiner” to help us separate those two things in ourselves, someone that can bring us to a precious and pure state that we are meant to be, and pull the dross away.  In that refining process, our trials feel like “heat”, making us uncomfortable and seeking for refuge in the cool of the day.  The end of the Bible Dictionary description states, “Christ is the great Refiner.”   Christ is the only one that can bring us out of the heat and into the calm and cool of his presence. 

It is not a question whether or not the refining process is needed for each one of us, it is imperative.  The Lord knows it’s essential and wants us to be refined, and desires that we are purified through the refining process.  This can only happen with the application of great heat, great trials in our lives that teach us, change us and expand our knowledge and understanding.  The refinement we experience is a cleansing of our souls.  We are cleansed through the fires of adversity so that we can enter into a higher realm of understanding and be acceptable to dwell in the presence of God.  It is a necessary step in our progression towards Him.

There are some very specific lessons that came for me as a result of my trial, my refiner’s fire.  I see these things as gifts that changed the way I understand life, and learning them made my refiners fire worth the heat.  My gifts were not physical gifts, but spiritually tangible gifts that changed my soul.

• I learned how to be kinder, how to be more sensitive to others feelings and needs.
• I learned that I shouldn’t judge others, because we never really know what someone else is feeling or fully understand the things they have gone through.  I thought my experiences would make me judgmental of people who make choices that damage their lives, but it actually had the opposite effect.  I learned compassion for others pain and for their unique situations in life. 
• I learned to stop and listen and care more about what other people are going through.  I learned to look beyond what they are saying and see what their hearts are trying to express. 
• I learned how to stand strong in the face of adversity.  I learned that it’s ok and necessary to stand up for what is right and true, and we should not allow ourselves be taken advantage of. 
• I learned that I didn’t need to be manipulated by someone in order to be kind to them.   We may think that “keeping the peace” is more important than dis-harmony, but allowing manipulation to remain ultimately causes more contention and heartache.
• I learned to be genuinely happy for others’ successes and good fortune, even when it appeared that my own didn’t measure up.
• I learned not to compare myself to others, because it was just a trap for self-doubt and depression, messages sent from the adversary. 
• I learned how to love others that may be difficult to love, and show forth more love. 
• I learned that I could have joy and happiness even when I was going through a trial, if I continued to turn to my Father in Heaven in prayer and concentrate on gratitude for what I did have. 
• I learned that the Lord knows me and knows all his children personally and perfectly.  I had always been taught that the Lord loves all His children, but now, when I was begging for His guidance and help, I KNEW of His love for me.  I understood that He heard me specifically and knew me well. I felt His concern and abiding love for me.  I know He still hears me and my present concerns.
• I learned that His love is the same for all. 
• I learned without a doubt in my mind that my Father in Heaven is real, that Jesus Christ is His Son and I am a part of them.  They are always with us.

Though I have gained understanding of all these things and many more, I am still not perfect in the application of my knowledge.  But I am trying to live up to all that I have learned through my trial.

I have often asked myself this question… would I have ever learned all these things so deeply, so personally without the trial?  My answer… I don’t think so.  And what if I had chosen not to learn from these trials?  What if I had just given up and given in to the darkness and Satan’s influence?   Where would I be, how would I be living, and what would have become of my children?  The answers to those questions seem rather ominous and dark.

In the midst of a trial it may be a natural desire to pray our trials away.  I think that the more important thing to pray about is how to get through our trials.  They are there for us to learn from.  None of us wants to struggle through life because the struggle makes us feel like we are not succeeding in life.  Struggling doesn’t have to be a negative thing if we are learning through it.  It teaches us to be strong.  We can struggle through something and still be succeeding. 

I can’t say that I am totally grateful for this trial, because it hurt so many people.  But I can say I’m so grateful for all that I have learned through this trial.  I don’t know what my life would be without the knowledge that I have gained from having to go through it.  I know I was given an opportunity, however difficult, to learn to know my Father in Heaven and my Savior in a whole new way.  My life will never be the same, and I praise the Lord for that.  Knowing what I know now about how sweet and how important the gospel and the Savior are in my life, I would have hated to miss the learning that my trial provided for me. 

For me, I see the experiences of life as waves coming to shore, one experience after another.  Sometimes the waves come in with such strength and crash fiercely, knocking us down.  Sometimes they come in with medium strength and are felt, but we remain standing.  Other times they come gently and leave a calming effect upon us.  Whichever way, as the water recedes, the waves leave ripples in the sand that are stunning.   There is form and beauty as the ripples leave their mark on the sand, just as our experiences leave their mark upon us.  These marks can bring even more splendor to the overall beauty of our lives, and looking back we can see their remarkable influence in us.

I began writing these experiences down several years ago and since then I have had to deal with new trials in my life.  New trials bring new healing that needs to take place.  The same primary answers apply to my current trials as they did to my previous trials, and the pattern of turning to the Lord for my healing remains the same.  The gospel contains all the necessary elements that we need in order to heal from whatever trial comes in our path.  Each time a new trial presents itself, I have to reach upward to my Savior as I find myself sinking once again.  And the ultimate lesson about experiencing trials is this… great and marvelous gifts result from great and terrible trials.   Instead of becoming less because of my trials, I believe I have actually become more.

When we experience trials, our first inclination may be that we feel abandoned by Deity.  We may question, “if they love me, why do I have to go through such difficult experiences?”  Learning about the atonement will help us to understand the answer to this question.  We are not forgotten or forsaken by our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, but saved by Christ through His atoning sacrifice.  The Atonement is a gift from a loving Father to all His children.

In the dictionary, the word Atonement is described this way,  “1) amends for a wrong or injury.  2) the reconciliation of God and humankind through Christ’s death.”  That’s an interesting though incomplete meaning of the atonement, but it’s nice that even the world acknowledges that the word “atonement” has to do with Jesus Christ. 

As a child I learned about the atonement.  I understood what the atonement meant…that if I committed any wrong or sin, that Christ had paid the price for that wrong doing, and I could repent and be forgiven of my sins.  I logically accepted that.  I knew Christ had “covered” for me and had made it possible that I could say that I was sorry for any wrong doing, repent of my indiscretion and then be forgiven.  I could be forgiven of all my wrong behavior if my repentance was sincere, and ultimately return to live with Christ and my Father in Heaven someday.  During my sufferings as an adult, I found there were things about the atonement that I hadn’t learned as a child, and I was learning them now. 

My experiences have taught me more about the atonement than I had ever understood before.  I think you can’t fully appreciate the majesty of the Atonement unless you’ve personally had to use it and needed to use it – we all need this perfect gift!  As he prayed in Gethsemane, Christ not only felt the sorrow we feel when making our own personal mistakes, He felt every sorrow we would ever know.  He felt the anguish that we would feel when bad things happened to us, even when it wasn’t because of our own wrong doing.  He felt all of our pains – physical as well as emotional, and our sicknesses, all that we suffer in this human experience.  The atonement wasn’t just for our sins, which may have been enough, but He suffered for and felt all our sorrows of any kind.  I know of no other person who would do this for all people who would ever live on this earth.  Though His atonement was for all mankind, it is the most personal sacrifice and gift we can receive.  Can you imagine receiving a gift like this from anyone else you know?  A gift so intimately personal that Christ knows exactly how to succor and help you because he felt YOUR pains?  He is our brother, He is our mediator with the Father and our Savior.  Christ is the one who saves us from an eternal death and offers us eternal life.  The thought that He took upon Him all our sufferings and felt every single one of our pains is staggering and I am unable to comprehend the magnitude of that! 

I know that Christ suffered as He felt my pain – not pain I brought on myself, but He suffered the pain and sadness I felt that were brought on by someone else.  He knows my sadness, my disappointments, my sorrow over personal mistakes.  As I wept during my trial, prayed and asked for His help, I felt a spiritual warmth wash over me.  I felt His love and His understanding of what I was going through.  I felt His compassion and His desire to comfort me.  I felt Him console my soul and His encouragement that I didn’t have to carry this burden with me every day, and I didn’t have to carry it alone!  He was carrying it for me.  I could give it away to Him.  He filled the emotional “holes” created in me by my trials and made me whole again through His love and his comforting spirit.   I came to understand that He is REAL – He doesn’t just exist in the stories of the scriptures, but He is a real and resurrected being that still lives to love us and succor us.  I felt His support and love every day.  Some say that “feeling” isn’t enough, that feelings aren’t tangible.  And I say “why not?”   Why isn’t feeling something as real as touching something?  The feelings of receiving His peace were more real to me than my physical surroundings because the peace I felt brought a remembrance of my eternal self.  We are eternal beings separated from our real, heavenly home.  Feeling is the gift we have that reminds us of who we really are, sons and daughters of God.  

Sometimes the atonement is a hard concept for people to understand.  They cannot understand why a sacrifice had to be made, an intercession for our sins.  In our earthly state, maybe we can’t fully understand the depth of the atonement, or the depth of love that Christ and our Father have for us.  But we can appreciate that it has a place in our lives on a daily basis if we seek Him.  Understanding the Atonement is an individual journey for each of us, but we can and we must come to know that the atonement is integrally a part of who we are, and through it, what we can become. What I’ve come to realize is that the idea of the atonement cannot be processed with your mind and intellect alone.  To fully grasp the concepts of the atonement, we must seek to understand it in our mind and heart by using the spirit.  What may not make sense to our mortal minds will only be comprehended with our spiritual senses.  Our spirits will know – it will be familiar to us.  The root word in the name “Savior” is the word “saved”.  That’s what Christ did – He saved all of our lives from eternal extinction.   No matter what we achieve in this life, we cannot make it back to live with our Heavenly Father without making use of the atonement of Jesus Christ.  We are not holy enough to be in Father’s presence without it.  We need Christ and we need His sacrifice, because we cannot do it on our own.    

In my sorrow, I was learning to have hope in Christ.  I was learning to trust Him.  I watched other people going through trials that made them angry at God, and I thought, “How could I be mad at God?  It was Phil who made the wrong choices, not God.  He is waiting to help save me from trauma, how could I be mad at the one who could save me from this?”  People sometimes imagine God as unreachable and untouchable.  They feel that He is distant because they can’t actually see Him in person.  In my heart I know that He is not some all-powerful God that sits in heaven, waiting to push His way around and make people do His bidding.  He is all powerful and all knowing, but He’s far from unreachable.  He is OUR Heavenly Father, our eternal progenitor and we are His eternal posterity.  In that relationship, there is love and concern for us, more love than we can possibly understand.  It’s a love a parent has for their child, and He is a caring parent.  I believe that one of the reasons we are meant to become parents is so that we can know what it is to love a child, thus knowing how He loves us.  Through parenthood we come to understand how our own Father (who happens to dwell in heaven at the time), feels about us.  He loves us, without conditions.  He understands the eternal nature of us and our relationship to Him.  He knows us in an eternal way that we do not know ourselves.  If we use only our earthly perceptions of God, we cannot grasp this eternal relationship between the Father and us, my spirit tells me that.  There is so much more to understand than our earthly knowledge will allow.

By gaining a greater understanding of the atonement, I have learned that I do not look to others for confirmation or validation of who I am.  Christ atoned for me because He loves me.  I understand that I am truly a child of God, and my brother Jesus Christ loves me.  He went through His sufferings so that I could return to be with Him, healed from my infirmities and whole again.  It no longer mattered to me what other people’s opinions were of me, because God’s love was the most important love of all.  If I could connect with God and feel my eternal relationship with Him, then no one else mattered.  By understanding this concept, I received a bonus lesson – it gave me the knowledge that our earthly relationships fall into place when our hearts are set on God.

The Lord is consistent, He does not change.  Just as the waves on the beach constantly and consistently roll towards the shore, He will consistently be there for us.  He is our “constant” and if we can put our “spiritual feet” in the water and feel the heavenly waves wash over our feet where we stand, we can feel His warmth and love penetrate our souls.  I believe He waits eagerly and longingly for us to know Him.  He knows that our lives are very hard at times.  He knows us and has felt our pain.  He can ease our burdens and heal our hearts if we will accept His sacrifice in our behalf.  It seems like such a simple thing to just accept His sacrifice, but we struggle to understand what He offers to us.  He knows us intimately because of His sufferings.  No one else knows you so intimately as to know the heart of your sufferings.  Let His love wash over you!