Submit Cheerfully and With Patience

As I read from the Book of Mormon last night, I came across Alma 24, in which Alma and his people are persecuted, and basically enslaved, by Amulon and the Lamanites. Alma and his people pray for deliverance, which God promises to grant them, but in the meantime, "the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord."

In life, we will always have afflictions. Sometimes, we can overcome them on our own, sometimes we need God's help to overcome them, and sometimes, we just need to tough it out. Taken as a whole, life itself could be considered a kind of affliction. We are separated from our heavenly home, we experience a long series of trials and afflictions, and we have to work almost constantly on one thing or another about as long as we live. For some people especially, the opportunity to "rest in peace" would be a great blessing, but that's not the blessing we need right now. Deliverance from the afflictions of life is guaranteed, but it's not coming immediately. In the meantime, we need to endure.

As with the people of Alma, we can pray for, and receive, strength to help us get through our affliction. In fact, we can receive enough strength to "submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord." So, that's a goal I'm working on now. There are some aspects of life that I feel that I would rather live without, but they are a part of life nonetheless, and that isn't going to change just because I would like it to. Either I should actually do something about it, if anything can be done about it, or I should learn to endure it with cheerfulness and patience, according to the will of the Lord. The aspects of life I've had the most issues with lately aren't going away any time soon, and since I'm not likely to die soon, either, I guess I had better just get used to those afflictions for now. It's going to take a lot of God's help, especially considering how rebellious I am, but I someday hope to learn to submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord.