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On faith and love

So Nephi, after having heard his father's dream, decided he wants to hear and see and experience for himself. It occurs to me that faith is the desire to know things, the belief that those things CAN be known, and the action required to obtain that knowledge. Sometimes it's as simple as being still and pondering - this has often been the case for me. Some of the sweetest experiences I've had in my life have come when I was pondering scripture, the words of Church leaders, my parents, or life in general. The communication that takes place between me and my Father in Heaven will often transcend verbal communication and I send Him feelings, hopes, desires, and even images from my mind. He gets them and responds in kind.

The angel that is guiding Nephi through the visions he is having asks him if he knows the condescension of God. Condescension is almost always used as a negative term, as in - Oh, she is SO condescending... Where the implication is that someone is haughty and arrogant. For a long time I struggled with that word. Then I started to realize that the Lord Jesus Christ, the great Jehovah, truly did condescend to put on Him the form of a man, to become subject to the frailties and weaknesses we share, and to experience even death and alienation from His Father so that He might succor us better - so that He might know how we feel and what we are going through. He was (is!) perfect, yet it pleased Him to come to this sphere and take on imperfect physical, mortal characteristics in an effort to draw us closer to Him. We can trust Him. We can love Him perfectly because He has descended below all things. And God be praised for his infinite love and mercy.

Nephi's response is interesting - he says he knows God loves His children, but he (Nephi) does not understand the meaning of all things. It is not required or even necessarily desirable for us to understand all things. It may even be impossible. But if we believe that God loves us (and surely He does!) then that knowledge forms the foundation for everything else we want and need to know. If He loves us, and knows our names (as He called Nephi by his name), He will answer our prayers and give us what we need. If He loves us, we can seek Him and His will, bending ourselves to Him and abandoning everything we think we want to Him - finding then that we have what we really need. If He loves us, we must love each other if we would be like Him. If He loves us, He will teach us truth and peace and comfort. If He loves us, surely He has a plan for us to be like Him.

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