Mark Willis, Stake Mental / Emotional Support Specialist

Every year the Christmas season comes and the Christmas season goes. Over the years, it has brought us rich anticipation of remembering good times, opportunities to create fresh memories, and also a remembrance of times past which are painful.   We may be fraught with confusing messages that to keep a tradition or give a specific present is more important than offering the eternal gift of an open heart to change through Christ.

This might be a season of gathering with individuals who offer up messages that if we change this one thing about our look, personality or attitude, then we will be more loved and accepted by others.

Oftentimes we might find ourselves voicing that we “should” or “should not” do things, i.e. “I should talk to that person,” or “I shouldn’t be thinking that about my life.” For me, I’m learning that those messages come from a place of expectations from other people, more than a true inner commitment to do something.

This holiday, we might have found ourselves with just the right number of people we wanted to be with, or maybe desiring to be with fewer or more people at our party than we were with.

Within the Emotional Self Reliance Manual it teaches:

Some feel that they deserve what others already have, which can cause resentment. Others feel entitled to things they have not earned. These two traps blind people from seeing an essential truth: all things belong to God. Resentment and entitlement can be overcome by focusing on the needs of others.

Brothers and sisters, we each have a covenant responsibility to be sensitive to the needs of others and serve as the Savior did—to reach out, bless, and uplift those around us. Often, the answer to our prayer does not come while we’re on our knees but while we’re on our feet serving the Lord and serving those around us. Selfless acts of service and consecration refine our spirits, remove the scales from our spiritual eyes, and open the windows of heaven. By becoming the answer to someone’s prayer, we often find the answer to our own. (“Waiting on the Road to Damascus,” Ensign or Liahona, May 2011, 76)

The Spirit is seeking to give each of us a next area of what to work on, what to change, or where we can draw closer to the powers of heaven over the powers of man.  I have felt in my life the gentle nudging and unwelcomed elbowings to see life with greater honesty. Not only feeling those moments but starting to act on them brings an increase of faith.

Asking for qualified help from others (be it professional, traditional or non-traditional means), is a sign of acceptance that we seek an accelerated path to change.  It is also a sign of humility that we are giving our end of the tug-a-war as we surrender our will to God’s will for us. If all we can do is “desire/hope” for that change, start there.

Elder Oaks taught: “Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions. The desires we act on determine our changing, our achieving, and our becoming.”

A new day, new week, new year in our lives may be all the same if our desires remain the same as the past. Having and desire to see or create change would be less lasting without a plan of happiness to understand and learn from.

Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of his Son. The year-long and life-long invitations of the Atonement of Jesus Christ are available to renew us for our physical, emotional, and mental battles we face.