By Wesley Thacker — 27 Sep 2021

Thoughts with Coronavirus

Hey there! It’s been a while, I know, but I was just going through some older drafts I had saved and thought I’d post one. This was written on March 20, 2020, just a few days before I came home from my mission.

Hello all. I'm here with another post, apart from my weekly emails you all were so used to. I have just been thinking about these effects of Coronavirus and missionaries and just the overall state of the world right now.

In my short time as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I learned, or had reiterated, a few different things.

It's been intersting and eye-opening as I've gone back through journal entries I kept throughout my mission. I definetely saw that times that God was there, and some of the times that He wasn't due to disobedience. I'd like to share some of these with you, especially in this time of great difficulty.

1. God knows us all personally and He loves us

Keeping all due respect, many religions on the earth today do not believe that God knows us or loves us. Their perception of an almighty being, referred to as God, is in a haven and is watching us, looking for reasons to strike us down and cast us away. That is not true. I know for a fact that God loves us more than we can ever imagine and He knows each and every one of us personally. He knows the struggles that we go through, the mistakes we are going to make, the shortcomings we have, our weakness. You name it, He knows it. And he knows that we are all imperfect; we're human and we're going to fall short. And He loves us because we are His spiritual children. He wants us to return to live with Him for eternity.

He also knows the path that we are all going to take during this life. Yet, it is ultimately up to us to decide if we continue on those paths or if we choose another. Some people don't want to make any decisions until they know their role in life. And at the same time, they may have drifted away from this knowledge and no longer know what their purpose here is. God knows this, and the amazing thing is that He has a plan for us. All of us, individually. With more than 8 million people on the earth, it is almost impossible to fathom that God knows each and every one of us, our situations, our needs, and He knows how to solve them.

This was the first thing that I realized while on my mission. In today's world, it is super easy to feel completely and utterly alone. That is Satan working on you there. Yes, we will have those times that we feel we are utterly alone. But it is in those times especially that we need to turn to Him and ask for help.

Keep in mind that help can come in many different ways. It can be through a friend, a positive post on social media, through our own experiences, along with a host of other different ways. God knows how we all learn and what the best way is for us to overcome these obstacles in our lives. Sometimes, we don't even realize that we have received help until we look back. It is there that we realize that we received the help we asked for and needed.

2. We are a chosen people, especially in these days

All of us alive on the earth today, and those that will join us, along with those that will leave us, are on this earth right now for a specific reason. All of us have our own purpose to fulfill while here on the earth.

Questions

If God loves me so much, why is my life so difficult?

Challenges in this life are a part of the plan that God has for us. We all experience trials in the life, some more difficult than others. But none of the trials we got through is impossible. By turning to the Atonement of Jesus Christ and understand that he "...descended below all things, in that he comprehended all things...".

Learn more about this here:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1997/04/enduring-well.p4#p4

I understand God loves me, but why is Satan so powerful? And why would God allow that?

Truth is, Satan is not very powerful. He's jealous. Why in the world would Satan be jealous of me? Well, the one thing you will always have that he can never have is a physical body. Why would he be jealous of that? Because one of the steps we needed to take in order to progress through eternity is to have a physical body so we could experience the trials and tribulations that come because of it. He's jealous of all of us for a lot of different reasons, and he is miserable because of it. And his philosophy is that if he's miserable, he's going to get as many people as he can to be miserable too.

Now, why would God allow that? Part of the human experience is to experience temptation, or the choice between right and wrong. In the premortal existence, a plan was presented to us known as the Plan of Salvation. As part of that plan, we were allowed agency, or the ability to choose for ourselves. When Satan stepped forward, he said that he would make sure not a soul was lost and all would return to live with Him again. Sounds pretty good, right? Not really. There is a few big flaws with this.

First off, agency is a gift from God, and is essential to our progression here on the earth and through eternity. When Satan's plan was rejected, he used his agency in heaven to persuade a third of the hosts of heaven to follow him in a rebellion, which ultimately ended with him and all of his follows being cast out of heaven.

Second, Satan wanted to be the one to receive all the glory associated with this plan; he was selfish in his intentions. This is recorded in the book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, chapter 4.

1 That Satan, ... came before [God], saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.

2 But, behold, my Beloved Son (Jesus), which was my Beloved and Chosen from the beginning, said unto me—Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever.

Notice how in verse 1, Satan wants everything to be his. But Jesus, in verse 2, wants the glory to be his Fathers.

This can be better explained in the following links:

Have more questions? Visit comeuntochrist.org to learn more or leave them down below!