About a month or so ago Elder Holland came to BYU to speak at devotional. I loved his talk. It was so powerful and full of the sincerest, deepest love for God's children.
The talk is called "Remember Lot's Wife" and I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes from it. It's a great talk and I would suggest anyone read it. You can get it off speeches.byu.edu.
"There is something in us, at least in too many of us, that particularly fails to forgive and forget earlier mistakes in life—either mistakes we ourselves have made or the mistakes of others. That is not good. It is not Christian. It stands in terrible opposition to the grandeur and majesty of the Atonement of Christ. To be tied to earlier mistakes—our own or other people’s—is the worst kind of wallowing in the past from which we are called to cease and desist."
"When something is over and done with, when it has been repented of as fully as it can be repented of, when life has moved on as it should and a lot of other wonderfully good things have happened since then, it is not right to go back and open up some ancient wound that the Son of God Himself died trying to heal."
"Dismiss the destructive and keep dismissing it until the beauty of the Atonement of Christ has revealed to you your bright future and the bright future of your family and your friends and your neighbors. God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go."
"Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ truly is the 'high priest of good things to come.'"
"Live to see the miracles of repentance and forgiveness, of trust and divine love that will transform your life today, tomorrow, and forever. That is a New Year’s resolution I ask you to keep..."
I know that the power of the Atonement is real. And I pray that I can keep the past in the past and move forward with an unshakable trust in God knowing that the best is yet come. He is in control and He is watching over us all.
