a tool to add to my belt: giving God my will

Jeffrey R. Holland, in this BYU sppech, The Will of the Father in All Things, has really helped me to understand what it means to submit to the Lord’s will–to willingly say “thy will be done.” My will (also know as my thoughts, feelings and desires) is this pain I carry, this broken heart, this sadness, this broken-ness, this bitterness, this pride–these are my feelings and I have every right to carry them as long as I want. I have been wounded, I have been crushed, I am entitled to feel this way, it is part of who I am right now–it’s my will. But God will never force us to anything we simply don’t want to do. Well I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I really do want to give it all to God but I simply didn’t know what that looked like. Until I read this:

….Education, or public service, or social responsibility, or professional accomplishment of any kind is in vain if we cannot, in those crucial moments of pivotal personal history, submit ourselves to God even when all our hopes and fears may tempt us otherwise. We must be willing to place all that we have…..our ambition and pride and stubbornness and vanity—we must place it all on the altar’ of God, kneel there in silent submission, and willingly walk away.

I get it now. I know what I need to do. And for weeks I have been doing this very thing. I have been reading Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and he talks about visualizing (Habit #2–Begin With the End in Mind). So that’s what I have been doing every day for weeks. Here’s the visual:

I visualize myself walking into a room, nobody else is in the room, this isn’t about my husband, it’s about me only.  I walk over to an altar and on that altar I lay down all my negative feelings, my sadness, my crushed dreams, my pain, in other words, my will to hold onto those things. I kneel down, I say a prayer something like “I don’t know how you’re going to take this all away. I don’t know how you’re going to make this all better. It seems impossible to me, but I know you can.” And then I walk out of the room, quietly, without looking back. That’s it, that’s the exercise.

Then Elder Holland goes on to say:

I believe what I am describing here is the scriptural definition of a saint, one who will “yield to the enticings of the Holy Spirit,” and “through the atonement of Christ . . . becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father” (Mosiah 3:19).

Now I don’t believe for a second the Lord is inflicting any of this upon me, sin is never a good idea in his book, I am innocent, but I do believe the principle is the same.  I need to submit to Him to be healed. And let me tell you, this realization, this exercise has meant everything to me. By far it is the best tool so far in my healing. I think about it everyday, I visualize myself unloading my will on that altar everyday. And that’s how I’m finally able to apply the atonement. God’s ways are always better than my way. So I’m doing it his way.