Can they?

An interesting question was asked in Sunday School this week.

We were asked, Can people outside the Church and without the ordinances and covenants of baptism and confirmation receive forgiveness and the influence of the Atonement? As I thought about the question, I realized that all too often we as members of the Church think that people outside the Church can't be happy. We think sometimes that they have no access to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, that without baptism that they can't repent or change, that they are sinners. Regardless of the intention of the teacher, I felt like they were looking for a no with the question, that we were supposed to think that those who have not been baptized don't have access to the Atonement. Don't get me wrong, I understand completely the need for ordinances and authority. I just think that there's room to give people the benefit of the doubt even though (or because) they are in different circumstances than we may be. 

The question still stands: Can they receive forgiveness and access to the Atonement?

I say yes.

I say that if "they" don't have access to the Atonement then neither do I.
I say that the Lord is a God of mercy who is happy to forgive and if we reach out to Him, whether we are baptized or not, He will reach back to us.
I say that Saul was a man whose life was entrenched in sin, blasphemy, and he was an accomplice in the murder of Stephen. I dare say that the Atonement of Jesus Christ reached this man before he was baptized.
I say that if the Atonement cannot heal and save those who are currently outside of the covenant of baptism— I dare to say that if I let myself believe that, then I must also believe that the Atonement cannot heal and save me.

The benefit of the doubt is that it is blasted away by the truth. Smithereens. The truth will leave no remnants of doubt, provided we accept that truth.

And yes, whoever you are, Christ's Atonement, His suffering, and His death and resurrection were for you. Whoever you are.

Because you're supposed to.

So the other day I was eating a navajo taco for lunch and I was shooting the breeze with Sam, a 5th-grader.

I asked him what his favorite subject in school was, and he replied, "P.E....Physical Education...or math." I asked him why he liked math (because I sure don't), and he said, "Because you're supposed to!"

I had no reply. All I could do was laugh and accept his answer. I thought about it later and realized that sometimes there doesn't need to be more explanation than that. Sometimes we need to just accept the answers we get. Sometimes when the answer isn't what we expect, we need to just give the benefit of the doubt and trust whoever we're getting answers from.

The benefit of the doubt is that it gets easier and easier to pinpoint. Doubts force us to ask unnecessary questions, and over time that becomes painfully obvious (and annoying). Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly okay to ask questions and wonder and dream.
The benefit of the doubt is that the doubt will get stuck on the little details and get ripped off as we move forward.

"You're pretty hard on yourself"

I had just handled a situation with a neurological disorder, a roommate, and some paramedics as best I thought I could. But, I was reviewing the events in my head and drawing conclusions from what I had perceived: I was pretty impatient with her... I shouldn't have said that... Why did I get upset with her? I'm working on this whole "be humble" thing and it's definitely not working right now... Why can't I get it to work? Why can't I make these changes? Why can't I—

"You're pretty hard on yourself," I heard from the passenger seat. Great friends tend to know the best time to say things like that.


It's hard to forgive yourself. I find that I am my harshest critic. I perceive more of my mistakes than anyone else does. It's pretty easy to be hard on yourself and not give yourself the benefit of the doubt.

I've been studying grace since then, and I've been finding that it's perfectly okay to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. It's good to recognize your weaknesses and great to take them to the Lord (12:23-29). The Lord wants to work with us and walk with us, and that's exactly the point that helped me let go of my own faults and be more concerned with what the Lord thinks of me and what He wants and where He wants to go. Moses had this pretty figured out (Exodus 33):

 13 Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found ^agrace in thy sight,^bshew me now thy ^cway, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight: and consider that this nation is ^dthy ^epeople.

 14 And [God] said, My ^apresence shall go with thee, and I will give thee ^brest.

 15 And [Moses] said unto him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.

 16 For wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have found grace in thy sight? is it not in that thou ^agoest with us?

If God's not going to go there, then I shouldn't either. He teaches in Ezekiel that if I repent, that my sins should not be mentioned to me anymore. That includes me; I should not mention my sins to me once I repent. God forgets my sins and challenges me to do the same. He invites me to do the same. He wants me to do the same.

The benefit of the doubt is that we know where it comes from. God forgets my sins, I can forget them, Satan doesn't forget them. Satan will throw doubts at me because he cannot forget that I have sinned and that I have repented. I know that doubts don't come from God. Self-doubt doesn't come from God. If I can't forgive myself, those feelings don't come from God. God forgives me, and I can forgive me too.

New Beginnings

Sometimes good things come to an end. Actually, good things usually come to an end. Like a relationship, a friendship, the life of a friend or family member, a great college class, the Animorphs series, etc. But God won't take anything away from us without giving us something better.

That's where the new beginnings come in. When something ends and we start something new, it's easy for doubts to creep in: that didn't work out last time. Remember how they left? It won't work out this time, because it didn't work out last time.

The benefit of the doubt is that it can be left behind when you start something new. Doubt is heavy, and so is the past. If we've been distrusted or distrustful in a relationship, we can leave that distrust behind when we start over and be completely open, honest, and trusting. If we've lost a friend or family member to death, doubts may come. The next time we make a friend, however, we don't have to keep thoughts in the forefront of our mind like, well, he'll probably die too. All my friends die. See how it doesn't really make sense to apply the doubts of the past when we start over and begin something else?

The benefit of the doubt is that we can leave it behind. We shouldn't carry old problems into new beginnings. The heavy nature of doubt makes it so that if we are willing to put it down completely, we can leave it there. It feels good to start over and leave the past behind us.

Forgiveness

"...a man who during childhood was frequently threatened with abandonment can easily attribute such intentions to his wife. He will then misinterpret things she says and does in terms of such intent, and then take whatever action he thinks would best meet the situation he believes to exist. Misunderstanding and conflict must follow. In all this he is as unaware he is being biased by his past experience as he is that his present beliefs and expectations are mistaken." (Feeney and Monin 2008)

Science says that if something troubling has happened to us in the past—something like divorce, traumatic events, death of a loved one, abuse, addiction, and a plethora of other possible things— we are inescapably affected by it (whether or not we are aware). The research above says that if a boy is abused, he will be forever suspicious of his wife and her behaviors. If she goes out to be with friends and says, "I'm going out with friends while you watch football," that man (according to science) will tend to think She says she's going out with friends, but which friends? Will other men be there? Is she being unfaithful to me? And thus begins the downward spiral of misunderstanding and mistrust.

 So how does that man learn to trust his wife? After all, it's outside of his control, right? Something happened to him that he couldn't avoid, right? It's not that he doesn't trust her, but rather that he was hurt in the past, and he's "being biased by his past experience," right? It's not his fault, right?

Not right.

Judgement, bias, pride, distrust—those are all weakness that we have. Christ teaches that if we come to him, He can show us our weaknesses (Ether 12:27). He can show us where we are being judgmental. He can show us the prideful root of our flawed behavior. He can get to the root of the seed of distrust that we may have planted in ourselves.
He helps us to make the root-changes that we need to make by commanding us to forgive one another. Even if we've been "threatened with abandonment," abused, forgotten, He commands us to forgive. Forgiveness is the ultimate exercise of trust. It's changing the nature of the way you see that person who has offended you. Trading out mistrust for full trust.

The benefit of there even being doubt in the first place is that the Atonement, that sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ, can rip those doubts out of us if we come to Him. The benefit of that opening where doubt used to be is that it can be filled with whatever we choose. If we are truly forgiving, we can fill it with trust, we can fill it with hope, and we can fill it with love.


Christ lives. He is my Savior. He died to make us free. He suffered the pain of sin so that we can forgive and be forgiven without robbing justice.

Orange Flags

It's been an interesting week. Lots of good and bad, and many opportunities to be more trusting and giving (especially when giving the benefit of the doubt).

I was almost run over by a truck on Thursday. No seriously.
Here in Utah, at crosswalks they have NEON orange flags to make it safer for pedestrians to cross the road and be seen. I was walking home from school and grabbed a flag to cross the street. Traffic stopped and many kind drivers let me start crossing. One truck, however, was in a bigger hurry than everyone else. I wish I were exaggerating what happened: He pulled out of his lane, into the oncoming traffic lane, to get around the car in front of him, and he drove straight at me. Thinking he didn't see me, I waved my flag frantically, hoping to be seen. We made eye contact. He didn't stop. I had to hurry myself out of his way to avoid serious injury.
Did the man want to kill me? Are all Utah drivers like this? Was he more concerned with getting somewhere fast than he was with another human life?
I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he has an astigmatism. Maybe his depth perception was off. Maybe he was rushing to help with some emergency and shouldn't have been stopped on his way.

Maybe I needed to learn to cross the street a little faster.

Thursday night/Friday morning, I was startled by a bad dream where the person next to me had an acceptance letter to the Spanish Teaching Major program at BYU and I had a letter telling me that I hadn't gotten into the program and that I would never be good enough to do so, so I should give up.

Prophecy? I sure hoped not. God telling me that Spanish Teaching is not the career I should pursue? Again, I sure hoped not.

I got an email later that day advising me that I had in deed been accepted to the program!
Do they really want me there, or is this some cruel joke? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe I really am good enough for the program. Maybe it's a blessing from God and He's opening doors for me that I didn't believe could be opened (and then I did believe, and then they opened).


Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. See them for the person they can become. Assume the best. It's a little hard at first, but when I start to assume the best and just trust people based on their word, good and wonderful things start happening.

Repentance

repent |riˈpent|
verb [ no obj. ]feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one's wrongdoing or sin: the priest urged his listeners to repent | he repented of his action.• [ with obj. ] view or think of (an action or omission) with deep regret or remorse: Marian came to repent her hasty judgment.


God commands us to repent of our sins and leave them behind. Why is that so hard? Do we like having sins? Do we just not understand the seriousness of sin and its effects? Do we ever think we don't have anything to repent of?God promises us that if we repent, we can be cleansed of all our sins. That's what the Atonement of Jesus Christ did for us. It's hard to repent, though. We're human, we're prideful, we don't like to be wrong, and worst of all, it hurts to change.
This is where that whole benefit of the doubt thing comes in. We spend far too much time thinking that we can fix things on our own without the help of an omnipotent and omniscient God, our Father. We think that it's okay to hide things and just try and get the little pieces back together after we've broken something. We doubt the Lord of all creation who has promised us, "Yea, and as often as my people repent will I forgive them their trespasses against me" (Book of Mormon, Mosiah: 26:30). If He makes a promise, He will keep it. We have to give Him the benefit of the doubt. The benefit this time is that if we are willing to give our doubt to Him, then He will do away with it. If we trust Him and repent, He will forgive us and fill those dark corners with light.