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!