From Strong to Unstoppable

Back to Conference. As I was watching the General Women's Meeting, I heard two quotable sayings that seemed to contradict each other. The first quote came from President Rosemary M. Wixom's talk, Keeping Covenants Protects Us, Prepares Us, and Empowers Us, "As individuals, we are strong. Together with God, we are unstoppable."

The second quote came from President Henry B. Eyring's talk, Daughters in the Covenant:

Heavenly Father taught you before you were born about the experiences you would have as you left Him and came to earth. You were taught that the way back home to Him would not be easy. He knew that it would be too hard for you to make the journey without help.

It's that last sentence I wanted to focus on. Putting those two thoughts together, we need help, but with that help, we're unstoppable. Without God's help, we're strong, but apparently not strong enough. This bothers me because it leaves me with the question "How strong can we really be if we can't make it successfully through life without God's help?" Then I realized that my miscalculation might not be in my measurement of our strength, but in my estimate of the difficulty of our task. One could just as easily ask themselves, "How strong can I really be if I can't even pick up a cement truck?"

Strong is a relative term. If a person had enough strength to roll a sedan over, I'd call them strong, even if they didn't have the muscle to lift the car off the ground. Perhaps we are incredibly strong (extremely subtle reference to the Incredible Hulk, a superhuman known for his immeasurable strength, or perhaps to Mr Incredible, whose super-power is also strength), but the burden of life is phenomenally heavy (no reference; I just needed an adjective more extreme than "incredibly"). It is possible that we're very strong - just not quite strong enough, and we need God to help us make up the difference.

Or perhaps it isn't a question of strength at all. We may be strong enough to do anything we set our minds to, but that doesn't mean we'll know what to do. We may be strong enough to resist temptations and choose the right, but are we wise enough to recognize temptations and make the right choices? It may not be a question of will-power, but wisdom. If so, we have a problem.

Traditionally, wisdom comes from experience, and even the most experienced of us only have a few decades of experience behind them (as far as any of us can remember), whereas God has had an eternity of experience, and probably remembers just about all of it. That's why we have so little wisdom, whereas His wisdom is infinite.

So, it may be that our difficulties in passing the trials and tests of life isn't in having too little strength, but in having too little wisdom. It could be that we're incredibly strong, but even having all the strength in the world wouldn't really help us without sufficient wisdom. Perhaps that's the kind of help that President Eyring said we'd need.

But here's the good news - When we combine God's infinite wisdom with our incredible strength (plus some additional strength from God, if we need it), we will have the wisdom to know what to do AND the power to do it. In other words, "as individuals, we are [merely incredibly] strong, [but] together with God, we are unstoppable."