God Has Faith in Us

Most of Elder J. Devn Cornish's talk is good enough to blog about (play on words intended). I'll probably end up blogging about it multiple times. The hard part is choosing which part of his talk to blog about first. I suppose I'll start at the beginning.

At the start of Elder Cornish's talk, he spoke of facing an intimidating challenge and expressing his apprehension to a respected colleague. In response, the colleague told Elder Cornish expressed confidence in Elder Cornish's abilities and potential. In Elder Cornish's words, "he believed in me at a time when I didn’t even believe in myself."

God often does that for all of us. In life, knowing that this life is a test and seeing first-hand how often we fall short of the ideal, we often get discouraged and lose faith in ourselves. But even when we don't think we have any value, not even any potential value, God sees us from an eternal perspective. He sees us as beginners. We are inexperienced and often weak, but we are not hopeless, and we are often far more capable than we believe.

If a man who can lift 10,000 lbs tries and fails to lift a weight that weighs 50,000 lbs, he may, in that moment, feel weak, but God will know that He is not. When facing life's challenges, we often feel incapable of overcoming them, but that may say more about the difficulty of life than it says about our strength or weakness.

Another tangential example before I get back on topic. At my school, there's a teacher who likes to challenge her students by assigning them homework assignments that would be very difficult to them to complete proficiently. While discussing this matter with another student, I theorized that that teacher may grade her students leniently, judging them on how close they come to achieving greatness rather than on how far they fall short of it.

God may be doing the same thing - giving us tough challenges to see how close we can come to overcoming them. Of course, at the end of the day, we're going to need God's help, no matter how strong we are, but I think that we earn the majority of our credit by proving that we're willing to try to overcome our challenges, even if we don't have a prayer of succeeding.

But the glorious thing is that we do have a prayer of succeeding, especially if we make it a matter of prayer. We may not be able to fully overcome all of life's challenges, especially if we try to do it alone, but God knows that we are far more capable than we sometimes think we are, and He sometimes gives us intimidating challenges so we can impress ourselves with how much we can actually do.

God knows our strengths and limits better than we do, and He has confidence that we can achieve every goal He has set before us, even the goal of eventually becoming like Him. Naturally, we will need His help for some parts of the journey, but we may need His help less than we think we do. We are not as weak as we sometimes feel. God knows how strong we are and what we're capable of. If He thinks we have the strength we need to face a certain challenge, than we can at least have the courage to try. God knows us far better than we know ourselves. When He demonstrates His faith in us, we should have faith in ourselves as well.