1-2-11 “Look Not Behind Thee”

You can’t go back so you may as well go forward.  We need to consider that our futures are going to be brighter than our pasts. I learned that today from one of the Mormon Messages.  I watched about 6 of them because I guess I was in the crying mood or something. Whoever makes those videos has an amazing ability to tug your heart out of your chest.

With it being a new year and today being a new day, there is room for improvement in my life. Greater devotion to and trust in Christ and His gospel, more patience, more charity, more gratitude, more willingness to live all of the principles that I’ve learned throughout my life.  Less worldliness, less busyness, less noise from outside influences that take my attention away from things that matter most. And this isn’t a resolution that I need to make on January 1st of each year, but one that I need to make every morning and each night as each and every new day is a chance to begin again. A chance to start over with greater resolve to be better than I was yesterday. 

I know that I need not look behind me or around me or anywhere but in front of me, just as they did in Lehi’s dream when they were “pressing forward . . . and caught hold of the rod of iron; and they did press forward through the mist of darkness, clinging to the rod of iron” until they went forth and partook of that fruit which is “the most joyous to the soul”. There were others who heeded the mockings of those in the spacious building, those who in a sense looked everywhere but forward and “fell away into forbidden paths and were lost.”

In my life these past years and months and especially days I have had an immense feeling of gratitude that I have been through all that I have and been given the gospel of Jesus Christ in my life while so many others live without peace, without a sense of who they are. Maybe the Lord knows that I couldn’t survive that way for even a moment so He has been merciful and blessed me with the knowledge of who I am, who my Father is, and what the Savior has done and is still doing for me.