The Lesson of the Thistle

I caught the creeping crud that’s been making the rounds this winter season.  It grabbed me, shook me around a bit, knocked me into bed, then departed, leaving presents behind for me to deal with for the last several weeks.  Who knew a human could hack up hairballs on a daily basis?  Sorry, too visual? J  Anyway, I have not been able to go on my morning walk during my 15 minute break at work because I didn’t want to cough up a lung (or, possibly both).  After 3 weeks, I finally felt good enough to give speed walking the old college try.

Last year, I wrote a post discussing a lesson the star jasmine plants growing along my walking route taught me.  The flowers on these plants are roughly a month or so away from blooming, but as I walked past the second clump of bushes yesterday, I came across a sight that actually made me slow down to take a good long look.  In the middle of the star jasmine bushes, was a huge thistle!  It was nasty looking, with angry looking thorns and a thick base stalk.  A plant that big doesn’t grow overnight; it’s probably been there for a couple of weeks while I wasn’t walking.  With the frequency of city groundskeepers who patrol this stretch of road, I was surprised the thistle had lasted as long as it had.  Not knowing if a verbal description could truly do this weed justice, I hoped it would still be there this morning in order for me to take a picture of it; luckily for me, it was.

So here I am, staring at this thistle (taking pictures of the thistle for crying out loud), and I realize that this thistle, marring a bed of plants that will soon blossom into wonderful, fragrant flowers, is a metaphor for me!  I try to keep my spiritual flower garden weed free, yet no matter how hard I work, angry, nasty looking thistles still pop up in the middle of my garden when I’m not looking (and sometimes when I am looking)!  As I returned to my walk, something Elder Douglas Higham, our Area Authority 70, said in his Saturday night Stake conference came to mind.  To paraphrase (I didn’t write down the exact quote), he reminded us that we have a loving Heavenly Father and we need to know this in order for the gospel to truly make sense.  As I have pondered this statement, I am reminded of the fact that Father in Heaven loves us, His spirit children, collectively with a perfect love that we can’t even begin to achieve at this time.  Yet, while He loves us all collectively, He also loves us individually.

As our Father, He knows us and He wants us to become the best individual people we can become.  He put together the perfect plan for us to achieve happiness and joy.  To Moses He proclaimed: "For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man" (Moses 1:39).  "Man" in this context (despite political correctness) covers both genders.  When I think about the specific word choice, however, I realize He doesn't say "men”—the plural form encompassing His entire family; He uses "man"—the singular form which focuses on the individual.  Everything He does is designed to bless the life of the one and to bring the one back to Him.  This returns me to quote from President Dieter F. Uchtdorf that I’ve probably used before: "Our Heavenly Father created the universe that we might reach our potential as His sons and daughters.  This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to God" (Ensign, Nov. 2011, 20, emphasis added).

Why did His plan require a Savior?  Why was it important that an Atonement be made?  Why sacrifice His son?  “For God so loved the world,” Jesus explained to Nicodemus, “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16, emphasis added).  Again, Father loved us all collectively, but, even more so, He loved us individually so much, that He sent His Firstborn (only begotten) Son to save us from ourselves—our mistakes, our missteps, our omissions and commissions.  Usually, though, this is the only verse that is quoted.  We stop there, but the next verse is just (if not more so) poignant: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17).  He didn’t send Jesus to condemn us; He sent Jesus to save us.  In other words, He didn’t send our Elder Brother to earth to show us that no matter what we do, we’ll never measure up; He sent our Elder Brother to help us overcome those times when we don’t measure up and to lift us to a higher plane that we could not achieve on our own.  Elder Bruce C. Hafen, in talking about Adam and Eve (us when we apply what is said) testified that “because of the Atonement, they could learn from their experience without being condemned by it” (Ensign, May 2004, 97, emphasis in original).

That is the beauty of the Atonement!  We can make mistakes and learn from them without being condemned by them as long as we properly use the Atonement to overcome those mistakes.  Please don’t misunderstand.  In no way am I endorsing committing sin in order to learn some lesson—we are much better off not committing any sin at all—but what I am saying is that if we do make a mistake, Jesus has provided a way to overcome it.  President Boyd K. Packer declared that “save for the exception of the very few who defect to perdition, there is no habit, no addiction, no rebellion, no transgression, no apostasy, no crime exempted from the promise of complete forgiveness. That is the promise of the atonement of Christ” (Ensign, Nov. 1995, 20, emphasis added).  That is a powerful promise!

When Jesus offered His Jerusalem Apostles the sacrament for the first time, He explained to them that the bread was a symbol of His “body which is given for you” and the wine represented His “blood, which is shed for you.”  In both cases, the disciples were to partake of the emblems “in remembrance of [Him]” (Luke 22:19-20, emphasis added).  They were not told to consider the limitless reach of the Atonement, nor were they advised to think about how it would impact the other members of the group.  Jesus instructed them to reflect on how His pending sacrifice affected them individually.  In order for the infinite Atonement to work in us and for us, the Savior’s sacrifice must become profoundly personal to each of us.  Doing so will bring us back to the love our Heavenly Father has for us as He works “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of [every] man [and woman]" (Moses 1:39).

If mistakes, sins, missteps, offenses, trials, pain, sorrow, loneliness, anger, resentment, and every other negative feeling or experience pop up like thistles in our spiritual garden, we don’t have to allow them to grow and flourish!  We need to put on some protective gloves, grab a spade, secure the weed killer, and get out into the garden and get to work at pulling the thistles out by the roots.  We need to do “all that we can do” to remove those weeds from our garden—exert every effort, expend all our strength—yet “even when we utterly spend ourselves, we lack the power to create the perfection only God can complete. Our all by itself is still only almost enough—until it is finished by the all of Him who is the ‘finisher of our faith’ [Hebrews 12:2]. At that point, our imperfect but consecrated almost is enough” (Elder Hafen, Ensign, May 2004, 98-99, emphasis in original).  With Jesus’ enabling power, we will have those thistles “rooted out of [our] breast[s], and receive his Spirit, that [we] may be filled with joy” (Alma 22:15).

Wow.  Two years in a row that these star jasmine bushes have taught me a gospel lesson.  What will be in store next year? J