Going Back for the Bag

After Mom and I left the Roser's house, but before we left their town, We stopped to gas up the car for our return trip. Since we have a habit of recording our odometer readings on our gas receipts to track our gas milage, after gassing up, we looked for a pen. Mom knew she had a pen in her bag, but she realized now that she didn't have her bag. We quickly went back for it, then proceeded on our journey home as planned.

Having forgotten the bag and having needed to go back for it took a little bit of time out of our day and delayed our arrival at home by a few minutes, but in a way, we had been very lucky. What if we had chosen to get gas at a town a few miles away from the Rosers? We could have driven for several minutes and then had to drive back to get the bag. Even worse, what if we had had another pen handy and hadn't noticed that the bag was missing until we were already half-way home? At that point, getting the bag back would have become much more difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

This reminds me of repentance. The sooner we notice something about ourselves that we need to repent of, the easier that repentance is. The longer we go without noticing our faults, or the longer we go without acknowledging them, the harder our repentance becomes. That may be why Elder Allen F. Packer said "Frequent small corrections are less painful and disruptive than large course corrections."

Thankfully (or not), we cannot be ignorant of our faults forever. Just as the Rosers would have eventually found Mom's bag, our friends and relatives will eventually point out (hopefully gently) the faults we have and need to work on, but by that time, repenting of the fault that had grown so bad as to become noticeable will probably be much more difficult than quickly repenting of a fault so small that nobody noticed it but us.

In life, we will have many faults to repent of, and all repentance requires some sacrifice, but the sooner we notice our faults and repent of them, the smaller that sacrifice will be. So, "watch yourselves" (Mosiah 4:30), take notice of your faults and repent of them quickly. It'll be much easier that way than waiting to repent after you've gone farther down the road.