"Not Always"

I just saw this quote on Facebook: "He [God] will not always take your afflictions from you, but He will comfort and lead you with love through whatever storm you face." This quote is from President Thomas S. Monson's April 2008 General Conference talk, Looking Back and Moving Forward. While the quote as a whole is inspiring and blogworthy, I want to focus on two words from it: "not always."

To say that God will not always take our afflictions from us is to imply that He sometimes will. He did this for Nephi at what I consider to be a rather surprising time. Nephi's older brothers had tied him up and were planning on leaving him to die, but he prayed for the strength to burst his bonds, and his bonds fell off of him instead.

When I blogged about this three years ago (to the day), I expressed surprise that God didn't grant Nephi the blessing he had asked for. Nephi had prayed for the strength to overcome his affliction, which is the kind of help God usually grants people who pray for it (that, or the patience to endure the affliction). It's not often that He simply takes an affliction away.

On the other hand, God doesn't like to see His children suffering. He usually doesn't allow us to suffer afflictions without good reasons. Afflictions can have many reasons, mostly to teach us and/or to test us. But if an affliction has served its purpose, I suppose there's no reason for it to continue. Nephi had already learned a lot about the Lord's power, and he seems to have passed the test, so rather than leaving Nephi tied to that tree, God decided that his affliction should come to an end.

But I still don't understand why God loosed Nephi's bands rather than giving Nephi the strength to burst them. I speculated about the reasons three years ago, so I'm not going to rehash those same possible reasons, but I will add to them. Maybe God wanted to show us that, sometimes, He will take away our afflictions.

God can solve any problem. He can, and sometimes will, solve the problems that we no longer have to face. Why He wouldn't instead give us the strength or wisdom to solve our own problems in those situations, I'm not sure, but I am sure that our afflictions were never meant to be permanent. Whether God gives us what we need to overcome our afflictions or whether He simply ends them for us, they will all end. It will often require strength and wisdom on our part to overcome our afflictions, but, surprisingly, not always.