Today’s Reading: 2 Nephi 4:16-23
17 Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great and marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth: O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities.
Many years ago I met someone who just drove me crazy. As irrational as I knew it was, I felt deeply wronged by them. I had to interact with them, I couldn’t avoid them, yet I couldn’t seem to control the feelings of absolute frustration and insanity I felt with everything they did. It seemed I turned into a monster every time they made a mistake. I had a problem though. As much as I knew how technically “wretched” I was, I couldn’t bring myself to really feel sorrow over how I was treating this person. I would lose my temper, feel bad, apologize, and then go ahead and do it again the next day. That bothered me—for a very long time, six years in fact.
In my journey, I realized several elements that worked together to bring about my change of heart that might help others.
- Don’t Accept It, Fight It! Remind yourself that Nephi said: “O wretched man that I am”…not “this is just the way I am”[i].
- Pray…A Lot! I often repeated Moroni 7:45-48 to myself and tried to explore what it meant to pray “with all the energy of heart that ye may be filled with this love”.
- Take time to be alone and work on your problem. Accessing the atonement and overcoming mortality takes work. The only way to get to where you need to be mentally and spiritually is if you deliberately put yourself in a quiet place physically. If I would have just numbed myself with TV, food, or other distractions I would have been spinning my wheels for an indefinite amount of time!
- Follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost. One of my dear friends felt prompted to stop eating sugar when she prayed about overcoming a personal trial. For me, I found that I had Celiac’s Disease and could trace a strong correlation between my emotional outbursts just minutes after ingesting gluten. These are not excuses, just expanded information that the Spirit can help us seek.
One Saturday afternoon I was alone for several hours pondering what had become my “pet problem.” There, alone in that empty church building, the pieces fell into place. For the first time I felt real sorrow for my actions “and my soul grieved for my iniquities”. I finally saw this person as a child of my Heavenly Father. [ii] My heart actually, permanently, changed that day because “His atonement gives every one of us–no matter our weaknesses, our frailties, our addictions–the ability to change.” [iii]
What has helped you have a change of heart?
This week in Howard W. Hunter Chapter 3: Adversity—Part of God’s Plan for Our Eternal Progress
I was born and raised in Alberta, Canada and California and promised every childhood friend I would never raise my family in Utah…until I fell in love with the most amazing fourth generation Orem boy. Now we are raising our kids in the house he grew up in and we love it. I am an estate planning attorney and marriage educator but I really want to be better at those half-baked talents like speaking Spanish, playing the piano, and making dinner every night! Read more about me at mormon.org