A Mother's Hope

I'm going to make this a short blog post today.





This video first appealed to me because of its title, A Mother's Hope. It seemed to match a recent theme. But, having posted about the war chapters yesterday, I figured I'd move on from the Mother's Day theme and maybe go back to General Conference talks pretty soon. But first, since it's a new Mormon Messages video, I had to check it out.

The two things I like most about the video are the artistic animation and the beautiful background music (the music is available for free download in the description of the video on youtube). This is a wonderful video for those two reasons alone, but the message is pretty good, too.

I wonder how frequently we find ourselves in a similar situation, a hopeless situation, with no other real option than to pray for help. I wonder how long it takes us to determine that we need to pray. According to the video, it took President Uchtdorf's mother less than a minute to kneel down and pray, but in the real event, it probably took her a bit longer to call on the Lord.

Unless... Unless calling on the Lord and asking for His help was her first impulse. Living in such a dangerous situation, that woman probably prayed fairly often, and she wouldn't always have the opportunity to kneel or even close her eyes while she was praying. If I were in her shoes, I'd probably develop the habit of keeping a prayer in my heart pretty close to always. So when she turned around and saw that the train was missing, her first thought may well have been "Oh God, please help me find them."

But you know, who knows? Maybe that was her first thought, but it was impossible to show that on the video. Maybe she did pray for help almost instantly, then went out and looked. And when she couldn't find them, she knelt down and prayed to be led to them.

But my thought is how quickly do we react that way? How long does it take us to realize our need to call on the Lord? How long do we have to feel hopeless before we decide to pray to/for the one sure source of hope? How much suffering do we put ourselves through before we seek true relief?

We can be as wise as the mother in this video by asking for Heavenly Father's help as soon as we realize we need it. And, imperfect as we are, we always need His help. The sooner we pray for the Father's help, the sooner we can get it.