Christmas Gifts: Knowledge

I thought I would do one post on how grateful I am for the Spirit. That is a big one, not only for the things I know through the Spirit, but also for the comfort.

I could probably spend a whole post on that, but then I started thinking about other things that I do know or feel because of the Spirit. I might sense some of them without having been raised in the church, but others I would not.

So I am grateful to have a Father in Heaven and a Heavenly Mother as well. I know sometimes having difficult parents on Earth makes it hard for people to build relationships with their parents in Heaven.

I can't say there are no issues there, yet I do have that sense of parental love and being watched over. I can see many times when that love has been communicated; communicated often enough to compensate for my difficulty in accepting it. For that I am very grateful.

I am also grateful for the Atonement and the brother who not only loved us enough to do it, but was also able to do it. I don't know that I am am always weighed down with a sense of sin or death, but when those are felt, they can hit hard; I know that those burdens can be lifted.

Believing in the importance of ordinances would be awful without knowing about temples, but we do.

I am also very grateful for being raised believing the Word of Wisdom. 

It is too easy to look around at some of my own issues (and some of the issues with family members) and be very pessimistic that if I had started drinking or using drugs that I could ever stop. Truthfully, other people do amazing jobs of not making those things look tempting, but if you start young enough you may not notice that.

I am better off this way.

No matter how much frustration I have with the way we view chastity through a patriarchal lens, I nonetheless can see that with my sensual nature and my difficulty in feeling loved by people or feeling at all attractive, it would have been easy to make a lot of choices that would be regretted (and would not have fixed the deficit in feeling loved or attractive).

I am grateful for being raised with that belief.

I am grateful for prayer and scriptures. 

I am grateful for the growth I have experienced through church callings.

Finally, I have known many wonderful people through church and had good experiences. 

If that part is a little shaky now, it is only that too many of us have allowed divisiveness and judgment to dull our sense of love, despite multiple scriptures telling us that is the most important thing.

I know it is not too late.

Merry Christmas.