Pt3
I
believe that when we have this personal honesty we should not keep it secret.
After all, we have felt the tremendous burden of perfection lifted from our
shoulders so wouldn’t we try to alleviate someone else pain? If I’m not
pretending to myself that I’m perfect, why pretend to others? We can all tell
when some is solidly grounded and just seems to get it. We naturally gravitate
to those types of people. As we’re honest about being imperfect, we liberate
others to do the same. The insecure don’t need their pride inflated, they need
to realize that its totally natural to be imperfect and that everyone else is
to. My hope would be to put their mind at ease and let them feel better about
themselves because there is no reason to cry about spilled milk in the middle
of the earthquake of mortality.
So I’ve
talked about this personal honesty and all the great things about it and only
alluded to the ‘how’. As I look back I
can see what the first domino was that fell to cause this paradigm shift in
perspective; God pushed over the Confidence in Christ domino. Jesus came and
did what he did because He and God foresaw and realized that not a single one
of us would make it through the Mortal experience unscathed. We would all
succumb to sin and shatter our chances to return on our own efforts. Their
unfailing charity for us imperfect things is what moved them to act for us.
Unlike us, Jesus could go through the Mortal experience and leave unscathed and
would do this vicariously for the rest of us. He cleared the path. No matter
how dirty we got in mortality, he made it so we could choose to come back.
And
that’s the heart of it-I choose to have Confidence in Christ. I choose to
believe that he really can make my scarlet sins into white snow drifts. My
returning back to heaven is not dependent on my abilities to run through a mud pit
without getting muddy, but my willingness to choose Christ and believe that he
can continually clean me up. He did what He did to allow imperfect people into
Heaven to become truly perfect there.
Perfection
will come to those who want it. But does this mean that I can, as I said, roll
around in the mud of my imperfection and revel in it? H no! That is not what a
god would do. If we did live life like this we would be terribly uncomfortable
in the presence of God. As Moroni says in Mormon 9:4, ‘Behold, I say unto you
that ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God, under a
consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the
damned souls in hell.’
We are to develop the attitude of a god by
striving for perfection all our lives even when it’s unobtainable. However
paradoxical that is doesn’t matter, it’s true. Jesus and the Atonement mean
that we don’t have to be discouraged when we fail; we simply have to pick
ourselves back up and try again. We have to try to keep the commandments to the
best of our abilities but not for the sake of getting yourself to heaven or
trying to measure up to the Celestial ‘you must be this righteous to be here’
sign. Keeping commandments is for the sake of demonstrating Confidence in the
One who asks us to follow him and he’ll clean us up and get us there. So its
all on his shoulders not mine. If I choose Christ and give him my good efforts
at perfection, then I’m assured salvation. Sweet!
Thus we can be fully honest with
ourselves and accept that we just aren’t perfect. Oh well- it’s just not in the
game plan right now. I don’t even have to pretend to be perfect to have divine
acceptance either. Man that feels good. I don’t have to hate others for how I
perceive that they’re better than me either because we’re all in the same boat.
Hot dang! I love a quote by Elder Nelson, ‘Be patient with yourself. Perfection comes not in this life but in the
next life. Don’t demand things that are unreasonable, but demand of yourself
improvement. As you let the Lord help you through that, he will make the
difference.’
Remember our duty to alleviate the
burden on others. When Jesus said to ‘let you light shine’ he did not mean to
let us shine but our Hope and
Confidence in Christ shine bright. So along with being honest about our
imperfections to relieve the burden on others we should be displaying our
utmost Confidence in Christ to show them the way and source of our ‘at-easness’.
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