Keep on Believing in the Atonement

One more post from Elder Randall K. Bennett's talk, Your Next Step, before I move on. On the subject of believing in dreams, Elder Bennett had an experience where he met a group of people who had stopped.

My heart sank during a recent meeting with wonderful Latter-day Saints. The question was asked, “Who desires to live with Heavenly Father again?” Every hand went up. The next question was “Who has confidence you’ll succeed?” Sadly and surprisingly, most hands went down.

Going back to live with our Heavenly Father again is one of the great goals of mortality. To achieve this goal , one has to be worthy of it, which typically involves being very righteous. That's where we mess up, I think. We think that the entire plan hinges on whether or not we can behave perfectly, and we can't, so even though we wish with all our hearts that we could live without Heavenly Father again, we don't think we can do it.

And we're right, almost. We can't be perfect; it's too late for that. We have all sinned and become imperfect. Even when we consider that God cares much more about the future than about the past, we're in trouble. Many of us struggle to be as righteous as we think we need to be, and we don't see ourselves making any progress in the future. We're not perfect now, and we don't think we'll ever be perfect, so the dream must be impossible.

Miraculously, the dream of becoming perfect and living with Heavenly Father again is not impossible. It'll take diligent effort on our part and repeated forgiveness on God's part, but both of those things are achievable. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can be forgiven for all our sins, as long as we try not to repeat them. As long as we never stop striving for perfection in our behavior, we never have to fear that we'll never achieve it.

The dream is possible. We just have to keep working at it. And to do that, we need to keep on believing in the infinite power of the Atonement.