Rejoice in Every Effort

My favorite sentence from Elder Bennett's talk is "Our loving Heavenly Father rejoices in each and every faithful step, and if we fall, He rejoices in each effort to get back up and try again."

Think of it: Any time we do something right, no matter how small, He rejoices. Any time we fall short, but decide to try again, He rejoices again. He rejoices every time we take a step in the right direction and every time we even just attempt to take a step in the right direction. As long as we are making any attempt at all to follow Him, He's happy.

So why aren't we? Maybe we focus on our shortcomings rather than on our victories. Maybe, with the limited perspective of mortality, we think that we only have a limited amount of time to reach the goal of total perfection, and we think we're not making progress fast enough. Maybe we think we're backsliding faster than we're moving forward. Whatever the reason we think we're not good enough is, we're wrong.

We don't have to be perfect right now. We don't even have to be "good" in the sense of doing what we might call the "bare minimum" of what we think a good person should do. We just have to keep trying to take steps in that direction.

For example, I'm willing to say that most of us don't have exceptionally meaningful scripture study every day. Do we at least think about the scriptures sometimes as we read them? Do we read the scriptures regularly, or even occasionally? Do we ever read, or even just think about, any scriptures at all? No matter how small our steps toward righteousness are, God rejoices in them. If we ever read or think about any scripture or other spiritual truth at all, that's a good thing and God will appreciate it. Maybe we should, too.

In life, it's easy to get discouraged. It's easy to think of something we did wrong or something we didn't do as well as we could have. If we focus on our failures, it would be easy to think that we're not doing very well at all.

Thankfully, God doesn't do that, and neither should we. God focusses on the positive, and we can, too. Instead of kicking ourselves over the things we do poorly, we could praise ourselves for what we do well. I don't mean that we should become complacent, be we don't have to feel discouraged, even if it doesn't feel like we're making any progress. God, who knows exactly where we are and where we're going and how long it'll take us to get there, rejoices whenever we take even the smallest step in the right direction. Even when we fall, spiritually, God rejoices whenever we try to get back up.

Life has a lot of ups and downs. We're always taking two steps forward for each step back or one step forward for every two steps back. However many steps forward or backward we take on a given day, God rejoices in every step forward, whether we're truly making progress or just trying to recover from a backslide. Every faithful step forward brings us one step closer to Him. And according to Him, even a small victory like that is enough of a reason to rejoice.