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Monday, December 22, 2008

Monday Musings: Christ the Savior is Born



This Christmas Season has been an interesting one for me. I took a new job 6 months ago and it has been catalytic. It has changed me and how I think and who I am. Every experience we go through can be like that, but this one certainly has been transforming. It reminds me of something I have believed for a time. This world is a fallen world. The Fall of Adam brought about changes to this whole world. We live in a telestial state. A state bound by limits of time and plagued by the vagaries of temptation, sickness, suffering and death. A friend recently found my family and I and the wife in the family has been in the hospital for around a month. She was diagnosed with an Auto-immune disease. Now, some people would experience something like this and curse God for afflicting them with this when she is such a young mother with children. Others would revile Satan for having afflicted them with such suffering. Myself, I lay the blame nowhere. It is simply the nature of the world we live in. Now, Satan will do all in his power to turn this experience into a stumbling block. God will exert his influence to try and make this a stepping stone. It is the faith or doubt of the individual which will determine the change. It is truly our choices that create who we are.

Gratefully, Our faith in Christ can become an anchor for our souls. We can choose to trust in him to turn to him and to allow his Atonement overcome the effects of the Fall. Now, the Atonement works personally, individually in our own lives. Eventually he will return to reign here on Earth and the effects of the Atonement will take effect on the whole Earth creating a paradise here. A world where the suffering and afflictions will be gone. Some probably think this is very saccharine view of the world, but it is my faith and my belief.

Am I fully at ease with this. No, I am a skeptic, in the best truest sense of the world. I am a scientist, technologist, humanist and optimist. I honestly believe we as people must do all we can to solve our own problems with the skill, knowledge and wisdom we have. I believe as you look over the history of mankind that you see a story of people that prevail. Time and time again we have solved our problems and improved the standard of living for most people. I think there is more of compassion and understanding in our world today than their was even 50 years ago. I look at the crises we face and I have hope.  I have great hope and that hope is centered in Christ.


Links:
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=6be803bb4c19d110VgnVCM100000176f620aRCRD&locale=0

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