God Can Be Found In The Gray Areas

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I am reading the book Silent Souls Weeping by Jane Clayson Johnson, and I recommend it.  Today I was reading about someone named Kara who struggles with perfectionism and depression.  She said:

"Perfectionists, we deal in the black and white.  There's no gray area.  It's all or nothing.  And that's Satan's plan.  Heavenly Father wants us to live in the gray areas where there's mercy and love, compassion, charity."

Those of us who struggle with perfectionism can feel like we should be able to be perfect right now, but Heavenly Father always knew that we would need a lot of practice.  Growth takes time.  Learning takes time.  I've often had the feeling that surely, if I just think hard enough, I will be able to figure out how to never mess up.  I want to be like the child prodigy who can play the piano perfectly without the hours and hours of practice usually required, except I want to be like that for all of life, and I sometimes have felt like a failure when I couldn't do it.  In these moments, I am forgetting that Heavenly Father did not mean for life to be that way.  It is through our imperfections that we learn and find that God provides help, strength, knowledge, capacity, forgiveness, mercy, and all good things.

The quote above reminded me of a discussion I had years ago with someone who was struggling with his faith.  He said he had always thought things were black and white but that he felt things were more like Billy Joel's song that says, "Shades of gray wherever I go, the more I find out the less that I know."

There are many, many people who struggle with questions, who feel stuck in this gray area where they can't quite see what is right, and what to do or think.  They feel alone, and might even feel ashamed for struggling and having questions.  But it is in that very struggle and working through all of those hard questions with faith that we gain strength, and can eventually find, and come to know God.  In all of life it is in those gray areas, in those daily struggles of life, and in the real challenges we have, that we can best find the God of mercy, love, compassion, and charity.

***Used by permission from churchofjesuschrist.org

Covenants and Grace

I was listening to the Christian radio station today, and thought I'd better be very clear about something.  God wants us to make covenants, but that does mean that we are earning our way to heaven!   We are saved by grace, and we should also be changed by grace.  Covenants help us on the road to being changed by grace -- they mark the path back to heaven, but no matter how hard we try, if we insist on working our way to heaven, we are going to fail.

Working on becoming more like Christ is not the same as earning heaven.  Following Him by making covenants with Him is following His example and is for our benefit.  I think we will be a lot more comfortable in heaven if we aren't just saved by grace, but changed by it.

Grace

We all are going to have trials that cause us to need consolation, and will make mistakes that leave us unclean.  We are all in need of transformation!  Where will that consolation and cleansing come from?  It will come through Christ's grace, through His power to save us through the atonement He made.  

We are not God, but we can extend grace to those around us in the best way we know how.  We can console people in their sadness, or hard times.  We can love them when they make mistakes.  Jesus does that for all of us when we turn to Him, and we get to practice doing that for each other.  When we receive Christ's grace ourselves it makes us want to extend that same grace to those around us.  To love, to be patient, to forgive, to help, to console.

It is by seeing us receiving grace and then extending grace to each other that people can be led to Christ, who is the one who saves.