A Freebie!

 

Technically, I should not be doing anything that stresses my brain. However, I am afraid not to write about this in case it disappears.

I have reached a sad point in the Book of Mormon. Mormon has realized that the society he knows is over. He had tried for years—maybe decades—to save his people from self-inflicted destruction. But it was now everlastingly too late.

You can hear the desperation in his words: 

16 And my soul was rent with anguish, because of the slain of my people, and I cried:

17 O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!

18 Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss.

19 O ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen!

20 But behold, ye are gone, and my sorrows cannot bring your return.

21 And the day soon cometh that your mortal must put on immortality, and these bodies which are now moldering in corruption must soon become incorruptible bodies; and then ye must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, to be judged according to your works; and if it so be that ye are righteous, then are ye blessed with your fathers who have gone before you.

22 O that ye had repented before this great destruction had come upon you. But behold, ye are gone, and the Father, yea, the Eternal Father of heaven, knoweth your state; and he doeth with you according to his justice and mercy.

How do those two elements work together—justice and mercy? Hopefully, I will make a full recovery of my mental faculties which are now flagging. It took me several minutes to remember how to indent those verses of scripture—something I should have remembered almost automatically before my injury. Will there be mercy to cover those lapses? 

There is a Protestant hymn that has come back from years long past when I was teaching myself to play it on the organ. “Trust and Obey”–there is something profound in that combination of words. We do what we can to obey, and we trust that the deficits will be made up somehow in a miraculous balance of justice and mercy, where neither side is robbed and love receives its full measure. 

I don’t know how it works, but I trust that it does. Thanks be to God!