A Little Dose of Hope

I don't usually talk about serious things on here, but today a lady in my ward started a blog for people (especially women) who have lost hope and are drifting. There are a lot of pressures in this world and then we tend to add to that by expecting ourselves to be perfect in every area. I believe that we try to become perfect by ourselves forgetting our human-ness and our God-given weaknesses. Just last night someone called me to the mat about our church's policy on repentance. It says that one of the important steps is to forsake your sins and never do them again. For some sins, for some people, this can be easy. It's easy for me to forsake the sin of not paying tithing. For me, that's an easy one. But there are other places where I go to again and again, namely my temper, especially in the car and especially, especially with my kids. And last night I realized that because I believe in the steps for repentance, and because I know my own weakness in that area, I haven't been asking for forgiveness as regularly as I should. I've been asking for help to stop my temper and remember my love for them, but I feel silly asking for repentance when I know that I will probably do it again the next day. How's that for a big lack of faith! I've been doing only half of the steps and asking for help. Girls, can we just sit back and remember our Savior? We have so many blessings in this life, all of us, and the biggest one is that we have an older Brother who is perfect, but still knows how we feel when we let that favorite sin our ours back into our lives. He knows our weaknesses because our Father has given them to us, and gave us Christ to pay for them. AND to help us forsake them. My friend thinks that she can't be perfect. We can't, only with help from our Savior. And probably not all the way in this life, either. We can't just try, we need to strive, we need to work, and the biggest is that we need to pray. We can follow the steps to repentance over and over again. It's slow, it's painful but with Christ it's possible. I have been struggling so much with this temper, and I have a feeling it will take years, years, years to control it. But like we learned in YW/YM yesterday, Onward and Upward. And don't forget to pack your Faith, your Charity, and your Hope.

Here's the address to the blog that started all this (you'll enjoy the story about her daughter and the Evil Hairbrush): EnjoyingTheJourneyLLL.blogspot.com
I'm also going to put this on the side of this blog, and I'm sure she'll be glad to share this if you want to put a link from your own blog.