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Claiming Our Blessings
By G.G. Vandagriff
As I read the conference talk
of Elder Spencer J. Condie, “Claim the Exceeding Great and
Precious Promises,” I realized how greatly the Lord has blessed
me over the past sixteen months. I used to read talks like that,
clinging to the scriptures and promises with faith that never seemed
to be met with answers or fulfillment.
I identified with all the Scriptural
heroes and heroines who were tried mightily, but I could never identify
with them when the promises the Lord made to them were fulfilled.
I kept waiting as my life grew darker and darker.
I had real miracles happen in my life
when I was younger, and I clung to those over the twenty-five year
“drought” in my life. I knew the Lord was capable of
blessing me, because I had had two giant miracles before. They were
both miracles that affected my eternal life.
The first was in meeting my husband
by chance at a wedding far distant from where I lived and watching
him over the next year and a half transform his life and embrace
the Gospel. When we were married, we expected our life to be much
different than it has been. He never knew that the woman he married
would disappear from sight nine years later, be plunged into a life-threatening
depression and not emerge for twenty-five years.
Today is our 35th wedding anniversary,
and as I contemplate the past, I cannot even imagine what life would
have been like married to any lesser man. He has the compassion
and patience of a man who truly endeavors to be Christ-like. The
ordeal was just as hard for him as it was for me.
And now, it’s over. We are reaping
the blessing of hanging on all those years “by the skin of
our teeth.” We are different people than we were 35 years
ago. We started out as two very separate individuals and have suffered
separately. Because we were both striving for the same goal, we
have come together at the “apex of our triangle,” both
journeying towards the Savior. He has healed me, healed our relationship,
and blessed us abundantly.
The other great miracle that I had
was the birth of my three children, particularly the last two who
were born after my doctor had told me I would not have any more.
Is there anything to compare with the wonderful blessing of seeing
your children grow up and cleave unto the gospel, claiming their
own lives, standing on your spiritual shoulders, becoming more than
you have ever been?
This is a great blessing indeed. It
is even greater, because in the twenty-five years I spent in my
personal wilderness, they grew towards the light and developed strong
testimonies of their own. Each has his or her own story, just as
I have mine, and by a miracle, we have ended at the same place.
The conclusion to draw from all of
this, I think, is that in those years when I was barely making it,
when each day was a struggle, the Lord was leading my family and
me ever closer to him. When my mental health was restored, I realized
that even though I thought the Lord had delayed in blessing me,
he was actually watching me and my family become who we needed to
be.
The Motives of the Lord
We cannot question the motives of the
Lord. We don’t know the whole, eternal picture. If Rachael
could have seen the posterity that she would have, the posterity
that would bless the whole earth with the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
she would have been shocked and amazed.
It has been my observation that the
blessings that are delayed are often the greatest. The Lord needs
us to become, needs us to place everything on the altar
before certain important blessings are granted. “Faith precedes
the miracle,” is a statement I can testify is absolutely true.
Through the grace of Jesus Christ,
we are blessed in this tiny slice of eternity with all the essentials
we need for eternal life. It is our job to keep our eye single to
the glory of God until we are filled with his light — to have
as Elder Porter said in his conference talk, “a broken heart
and a contrite spirit [that is] willing to do anything and everything
that God asks of [us].”
Those who have returned with honor
from their missions can bear testimony to the difficulty of their
missions, but also to how that difficulty in some miraculous way
gave them strengths and taught them to recognize a capacity within
themselves that they never knew they had. They claim the blessing,
after two years of consecration, of being holier men and women with
a close and intimate relationship with their Savior. Most of them
say any price would be worth that.
In this season of my life, I offer
hope to you that are struggling. The Lord does remember you. You
will, if you continue to have a broken and a contrite spirit, be
able to claim the “exceeding great and precious promises”
promised by Peter (2 Peter 1:4).
They may not come in the way you expect,
but the Lord did not send us here to fail. All that seek eternal
life shall find it. We are promised this repeatedly in the scriptures
and by our modern prophets.
So prepare! Tune your spirit so that
it can be ready to receive happiness and joy through the channel
of our Lord’s enabling Atonement.
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