“It is my testimony that we are facing difficult times. We must be courageously obedient. My witness is that we will be called upon to prove our spiritual stamina, for the days ahead will be filled with affliction and difficulty. But with the assuring comfort of a personal relationship with the Savior, we will be given a calming courage.
From the Divine so near we will receive the quiet assurance: “My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment; “And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.” (D&C 121:7–8.)”
President James E. Faust, “A Personal Relationship with the Savior”, General Conference, October 1976
When I think of needed peace, I think of certain suffering in order to need peace in the first place. Opposition in all things.
Who’s to say that the suffering of one person is greater than the other. Who really knows, besides Christ? We may think we know because of what we see, what we perceive. What about suffering that isn’t visible on the outside? To truly know what someone else is going through, we have to be that someone. And that isn’t possible. Walk a mile in their shoes as they say.
It’s all a matter of perspective and mental/emotional/spiritual strength. We all have different levels of strength, what we can handle. And we all see the world differently. Nobody is the same. What we see as up, someone else may see as down. What we see as how we should proceed, someone else may see another way forward.
Point is, there is only one truth. Irregardless of how we or someone else perceive it, it is unchangeable. It cannot be changed to suit an agenda. It is eternal. It is infinite. It is divine.
And only Christ (and Heavenly Father) knows it all. Only He knows it perfectly. Only He has the perception, the perspective, to see it as eternal and infinite. He knows the only and correct way forward. And, He knows how we perceive reality and how we compare it against the truth. He molds us in a manner that aligns our perception, our reality, to that truth. If we let Him.
Until we have His perspective, His perception of the truth, we are only guessing, only speculating. The only way to truly know “the way, the truth, and the light” is to bear the suffering and affliction that comes to us and do so with an eye single to Christ and His glory. We have to constantly focus on Him. Until our perspective through our spiritual binoculars is the same as His, we are not seeing the whole picture. Right now, we can only see a piece of the overall picture, and that piece is unintelligible, obscure, ambiguous, perplexing, and confusing. Yet, sometimes we think we can tell what the whole picture is and we can only see less than 1% of it. Why is that?
Christ can see 100% of the picture. We need to strengthen our relationship with Him to see it, even through His eyes for now. That is the only way that we, too, can see the bigger picture for ourselves, little by little. As we see more, we have greater strength, more confidence, greater courage, and more peace.