Answers To Prayers Of Answers To Prayers.

"Sometimes we can be the answer to the prayers of someone who is the answer to ours."

Every week at the ward we attend, I am spiritually uplifted and fed. The talks are always so humble and filled with the Spirit that it is almost impossible to not walk away feeling better than when the meeting started. And yet in my year of attending this ward, nothing that has been said has hit my nearly as hard as this quote, said as almost a passing comment. I still don't quite fully understand why this hit me so hard but there is so much power behind that simple thought.

The story that preceded this short statement was one of the most powerful I have ever heard. The speaker talked about how the prayers of a wandering woman were answered as she helped answer the prayers of a girl who had slept in.

My Soul Did Long To Be There

Elder Neal A. Maxwell, one of the past leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, once said, "Repentance is a rescuing, not a dour doctrine. It is available to the gross sinner as well as to the already good individual striving for incremental improvement. Repentance requires both turning away from evil and turning to God."

I think repentance is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I will be the first to tell you that for much of my life I didn't understand this principle very well at all! I always saw repentance as a painful, scary thing not as the liberating process that it really is! I still don't really understand why I always saw it that way but I still held that view going into my freshman year of college. At the beginning of the first semester something happened that helped begin the shift in my view point towards understanding what Elder Maxwell way saying. Then, during my second semester at college, I took a class to help me prepare for my time as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.