Sister Michelle Christine North: There is GREAT POWER in a SIMPLE DESIRE

Once upon a time I learned a really cool lesson on my mission….

So we have been working a lot with an inactive family (mom and daughter), Anita and Tamera. Over the years of their inactivation they have both gone off the deep end with doing drugs and other things that bring, life, problems. Tamera has made mention to us that she wants to change and that she wants to come back to church; just that right now she doesn’t have ganas (the desire to). Its sad for me to hear this just because she knows that she is hurting her life, she can feel what is causing her unhappiness and she knows what she needs to do, yet because she is too lazy right now and she isn’t willing to take the necessary steps to repent. And as for Anita, she knows her mistakes and she knows that she CAN repent, but she says that she is too old and that she doesn’t feel like going through the repentance process. Hearing her excuse especially made me so sad to hear.

Growing up in the church, I remember learning about the Plan of Salvation and about how it was our own choice of what kingdom that we ended up in in eternal life. It was crazy to me that anyone would choose to live in the Terestial or Telestial kingdoms (the lower of the three where God doesn’t live) when they could chose to live in the highest and best kingdom- Celestial. I never knew that anyone would actually want that for themselves, but after talking with Anita, it opened my eyes and I realized that she is not the only one in the world that feels this way. It broke my heart. It was really hard for me to understand how to help these Hermanas. I just couldn’t find a way to relate to them (especially Anita) no matter how I tried. I said a million prayers in my heart asking Heavenly Father to give me some inspiration or a scripture to share that could touch their hearts and my answer came (like they always do). I was flipping through my scriptures and I opened up to Alma 22- the story of Aaron, the missionary, and the King’s conversions. After coming to and understanding of the gospel, the King had a desire to change and he was able to come to a forgiveness of all of his sins. He was able to pray to the lord with a broken heart and contrite spirit. It’s an amazing story of repentance in the Book of Mormon. It shows us of the great power that a simple desire has. Because the atonement is INFINITE there is no sin that can keep us away from reaching our highest potential as children of God- this is what we taught them.

In my life the way that I have only ever had a desire was through the love that I felt for someone or something. Love invokes desire. When I’ve been led to confessing and forsaking my sins repentance has come from the LOVE that I feel for my Heavenly Father and the love that I feel from him; not because it is a commandment or because someone told me that I need to do it. When I am closest to God I feel His love more strongly in my life. This closeness comes through doing the little things like reading my scriptures every day or praying, going to church, etc- any of those typical seminary answers. As we do those little things, we are fulfilling our promises with God, we can have His spirit with us and that sprit is what helps us to make good choices and to recognize when we have made bad choice. When we recognize those bad choices, the sprit that we feel (aka: the love of God) gives us that DESIRE that we need to repent and CHANGE, which in turn allows us to progress.

There is GREAT POWER in a SIMPLE DESIRE

After teaching this principle to them, I realized that I really could relate to them in this situation. I think that this is something that we can all really relate to. Even though we all sin differently, Christ’s atonement works the same. I know that Tamera and Anita have a lot of work cut out for them because when one has distanced themselves from God, after making covenants with Him, its harder to come back (Alma 24:30), but it is possible! I know that a simple habit of prayer in their lives will help them to gain this desire or “the ganas” to change, to use Christ’s atonement in their lives. He wants to help us but only if we let him.

This week also marked a very special event- Cecilia’s baptism! Its amazing to me of the HUGE changes, physically and spiritually, that the gospel has brought into her life within a 3 month period. I told this to Cecilia that I couldn’t believe that we were at her baptism and she just smiled and told me, “You better believe it! This is how God works.” She looked absolutely BEAUTIFUL and 100% happy. Even though life is full of trials we still have a million ways to be happy and feel at peace. As long as we follow Christ in our lives all things spiritually and temporal will be taken care of, we have that promise (Mosiah 2:41).

...and she lived Happily ever after.

love you guys! xox

pic 1: Lama pens that our ward mission leader brought us from their trip. SO CUTEE!