Grace and Mercy

So yesterday I was talking to a friend about the way people live their religion, important points that stick out to different people and how those points are expressed. He will remain unnamed because that’s what he would want but when he reads this I hope he sees how much his view changed mine. 

I’ll get a little personal here- after coming back from an 18 month mission for my church I felt a little lost… for quite a while. Not in what I believed or felt or thought, I knew those things but I didn’t know what to do about the fact that one moment my life was happening for others and their progress and the next moment it was happening for me and my own. 

For anyone who has ever served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you may be nodding your head saying “Yeah, not a great feeling”.

To keep my thoughts short I’ll just say that for some reason not having the medium of another person between me and God was hard. Instead of saying 

“I'm here to help this other person who wants to learn about God”

it became 

“I am here to learn about God” 

and as a human being, doing something for myself was less rewarding, less enticing and maybe even frightening. This past year consisted of a lot of strange decisions because of this and admittedly some mistakes and heartache. So yesterday, as I’m talking to this friend, he starts telling me about his favorite gospel topic- 

Mercy.

And I’m like “I already know about mercy.”

And he’s like “Let’s talk about it a little.”

And then my mind was blown.

He started to explain to me what Brad Wilcox explains in the video I attached at the bottom. The fact that things like mercy and grace are not earned. At first when my friend said this I thought 
"That can't be right. We're here to work our way back to God" 

and as it turns out Brother Wilcox spends 30 minutes pleading with me to see that that's wrong.

I've done some pretty dumb things in my life. And I think it's safe to say that I'm not alone in that. Deep down I always believed that if I work hard, someday I can be free of those unwise choices I've made and I can become the person I want to be and therefore become the kind of person that can comfortably live with God. 
I'm partially right. 

I can become the person I want to be and therefore become the kind of person that can comfortably live with God. 

Now, the part that I had wrong was the first part- if I work hard I can be free from my unwise choices. As my friend explained to me- I am free from those unwise choices. Jesus Christ made it possible for me to progress freely, without owing a debt for what I've done.

I thought that that was pretty beautiful and freeing but the next part is just as incredible and just as beautiful. You still must progress in order to be joined with God again after this life but you do it without the residual guilt of your past. If you make a mistake: recognize it, make it right and let it go. Then go on and become the kind of person that you want to be simply because you can and want to- not because you owe it to anyone. 

I think that before yesterday I didn't see the difference. I thought that repaying My Savior for my sins was a perfectly valiant way to go about life not realizing that Christ does not see me as a debtor, 

He sees me as His sister. 

At one point in our conversation my friend emphasized that someday when I stand before God to be judged there will once again be someone between me and God and it will be Christ proclaiming that He has paid the price for me, willingly and without hesitation and that His grace is sufficient.

Yesterday the verse in the Book of Mormon about how 

"Adam fell that men might be and men are that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2: 27)

came alive for me. We are here to have fun, explore, challenge ourselves and those around us freely, doing our best to stay aligned with God so that our joy can continue from this life to the next!

I immediately came home and listened to this talk and was really touched by the Spirit, logic, comparisons and pleadings for us to understand what 'grace' and 'mercy' really mean.

So Watch It and Enjoy!