It's taken me all week to get around to writing about this. Last Sunday, Sister Swanberg gave a talk in our ward about the atonement of Jesus Christ. She started off by asking us to imagine two identical sets of linen, one with a large sign that said "$20 BRAND NEW" and the other with a large sign that said "$20 USED - BUT PERFECTLY CLEAN." She said her hope was that by the end of her talk, we would value the used linen just as much as the brand new linen. (I pictured two sets of towels, that is why I used them as my graphic.) She talked about forgiveness, and how we are more apt to forgive others than we are ourselves.
I really liked one of the quotes she shared from an article called
Forgiving Oneself, by Elder Chad D. Richardson. Elder Richardson states, "Satan tempts others to judge themselves harshly and to believe they don’t deserve to be forgiven, even when the Lord is willing to forgive them. Such individuals continue to dwell on their transgressions and mistakes, remembering the details and thus increasing the danger of repeating them. According to President Boyd K. Packer, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, 'Preoccupation with unworthy behavior can lead to unworthy behavior.'”
Sister Swanberg asked us to imagine that we have a pile of dirty, stained laundry. We can take this laundry to the Savior and He will wash it absolutely clean with His secret ingredient. However, right before we give it to him, we take a picture of it with all its stains. Later, we whip out the picture to remind ourselves or others how dirty our laundry or their laundry was before being cleaned. Why do we do this? She told of a story about a woman who met with her bishop and felt anguished because it seemed she couldn't forgive herself of her mistakes, even though she felt she had gone through all the steps of forgiveness and was forgiven by Jesus Christ. He counseled with her and together they read through several scriptures.
Finally they read the account of Alma the younger and his repentance process in
Alma 26:12-19. When they got to verse 19, the bishop had the woman read the verse. At first, she read it wrong and said "I could remember my sins no more." He had her re-read it, and this time she saw that Alma "could remember [his]
pains no more" (italics added). At last, she was able to understand that though we don't necessarily forget our sins, the anguish associated with them diminishes and can be erased through the atonement of Jesus Christ. I thought this was awesome, b/c this was something that I've wondered about, as well. Now, I understand! I found this quote in the same Ensign article referenced above:
"Forgetting is part of forgiving. But forgiving oneself involves a special kind of forgetting. We don’t forget the sin and its effects; rather, the memory ceases to be part of how we see ourselves. For example, when Alma had been forgiven of his sins, he said, 'I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more' (Alma 36:19). The fact that he could describe his repentance to his son Helaman showed that a memory was still there. But through Christ’s Atonement and forgiveness, that memory lost its edge of guilt and self-recrimination.
"We must keep sin in its proper perspective. Satan would convince us that we are defined by our sins. He would have had the repentant W. W. Phelps see himself always as a traitor. He would convince someone who has stolen that he is and always will be a thief.
"The Savior, in contrast, would have us understand that we have sins that need to be cleansed, but we are much more than those stains. If I spill ketchup on my shirt, I have a stain. Perhaps it is right in front where everyone can see it. But while I have a stain, I am not the stain. I need to recognize that there is a good deal of my shirt that is clean and white. I believe that God sees the white shirt—the goodness in His children—and offers, through Christ, to remove the stains. If we obsess about the stain, however, it will become who we are in our minds and then in our actions. "
Another thing Sister Swanberg said that I liked was, "to deny the atonement is to say it isn't good enough." Wow. To say the atonement doesn't apply to us, that we can't be forgiven, is essentially saying that Christ didn't do a good enough job suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, paying for our sins. She asked us to turn to
Moroni 10:31-33. She commented that these were the last things that Moroni wrote, and that he probably wrote what he thought was most important as the closing words for this book. First she read the first part of Moroni 10:31, "And awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, put on thy beautiful garments..." and then she said that in verses 32-33, she had circled the word "grace" each time it appeared and wrote in the margin of her scriptures to replace it with the word "atonement" as per Russell M. Nelson's suggestion at a stake conference.
When you read it that way, it says: "Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his atonement sufficient for you, that by his atonement ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the atonement of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.
"And again, if ye by the atonement of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the atonement of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot." Those are now some of my absolutely favorite scriptures. They testify of the immense love that Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father have for us. I just thought this talk was so inspiring and wanted to share it with you. At the beginning of her talk, I didn't think I'd be able to see the second set of towels as valuable as the first, but now I do see that they are of the same worth.
However, the next morning, new snow superceded her excitement about her hair, and we didn't get many pictures of it. By the time I realized we still needed "after" shots, the curls had fallen out from playing in the falling snow.
Hmmm... maybe she's not quite ready for sledding.
Thomas and Mason building a snowman...
Thomas' favorite part was throwing snowballs...
...at me!
Megan, informing me that it is nap time.
After putting Mason and Megan down for naps, I came outside to this scene:
And then we finished the snowman!
