Developing hope by coming to personally know God, our Father, through prayer

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Proverbs 3:5-6

It would appear that the only way to convince me to find time to make a post is to ask me to write a talk for church.  Haha!  Between caring for my seven kids, constantly remodeling, and running our veterinary business, it seems a bit tricky to make time for other things.  I was not excited to have to find time to write a talk, but I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to do so.  I was asked to speak on prayer in the Beacon Hill Ward Sacrament Meeting on 3/10/19.  I didn't reference the above scripture in my talk, but having come across it again since delivering my talk, I felt it fits in nicely.  My talk is as follows:

I would like to speak today about developing hope by coming to personally know God, our Father, through prayer.  I pray that this shortened, eight-minute time allotment does not limit my ability to adequately address this important subject which really deserves greater attention.  I have, in my gospel study, tried, over the years, to develop a deeper and more profound understanding of the fundamental principles of the gospel.  However, I have struggled for some time now to fully comprehend the concept of hope.  To me, hope began as an elusive concept and, with my continued difficulty to grasp it in times of need, maybe even became in my mind a discouraging one.  Thus, I have been seeking to understand how hope can in fact bring us consolation,¹ gladness², even rejoicing,³ as the scriptures say, and to understand what the scriptures mean when they invite us to hope in the Lord, our God.⁴  

In his 2009 Ensign article, “Hope: the misunderstood sister⁵,” Larry Hiller (of Church Magazines) identifies hope as “expectation based on experience.” Similarly, as my dad describes it, hope is not “wishful thinking,” but rather, it is “trust in the Lord.”  Experiential expectation! trust!—not just a desire nor a wish!  These concepts of hope are confirmed in the scriptures.  We are told in Romans that experience worketh hope⁶.  Further, Jeremiah tells us that “blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is”.⁷  There are a few things with which I feel I have some experience on which to develop expectation.  For example, a significant portion of my life, in fact more than 1/3 of my life, more than ¾ of my adult life, has been spent growing, delivering, and nursing my babies.  So, it is not surprising that when my sister, Melinda, mentioned while I was preparing for the birth of my last baby that hope helps women through labor, my mind immediately latched onto the idea of understanding hope in terms of child-birth.  Because, for me natural child-birth has been a profoundly spiritual experience, it seems in my mind an appropriate analogy for conceptualizing spiritual matters.  But, please know that while I hope my reference to natural child-birth can be understood and applied by all, I am sensitive to the tender reality that it is an experience personal only to a few.

As for myself, I contemplate about how personal experience with child-birth transforms with each labor and delivery.  With the first baby, a mother has no personal experience from which to form realistic expectations.  She likely has developed through research an intellectual knowledge base of what is supposed to happen during labor (kind of like building faith), but she has no personal experience of labor from which that knowledge can form a point of reference.  Consequently, the incredible amounts of physical pain she endures bring with them incredible amounts of mental and emotional suffering, as she doesn’t have the personal experience necessary to trust that what is happening is normal;  she has no expectations of the process that are founded in personal experience, regardless of her intellectual understanding of that process.  The pain is so great that it even overrides reason and knowledge, and without prior experience it is inevitably accompanied by fear.  But with each subsequent labor, personal experience is increased and suffering decreased even though the degree of pain remains extreme.  The mother still experiences intense physical pain, but after several experiences with labor, she learns to differentiate that pain from fearful suffering.  She develops the ability to work through the pain and to even experience joy in the pain rather that suffering through it; because, now she has the personal experience necessary to provide to her reliable expectations of the process, removing the fear and replacing it with hope.

The painful experience of child-birth beautifully illustrates and represents the many painful experiences that we inevitably endure due to living in a fallen world full of agents.  These afflictions are opportunities for growth and are critical parts of mortality.  While our loving Father in Heaven, in His wisdom, does not prevent painful experiences, He does, as Lehi promised Jacob, “consecrate [our] afflictions for [our] gain”⁸ –He eases our suffering in those painful times by providing hope.  But, how does He provide this hope?  How can we generalize this process of developing hope in child-birth—of replacing fear with trust by forming expectations based on experience—to all painful experiences we will endure in mortality?  For, we surely will pass through a vast variety of painful experiences in this life.  I believe the answer lies in coming to personally know the Lord through continual prayer.  It is coming to know Him that establishes our love for Him, and it is our love for Him that builds our trust, or hope, in Him.  President Eyering has said that “our hearts cannot be drawn out to a God we do not know . . . . Our hearts can only be drawn out to a God when they are filled with love for Him and trust in His goodness. . . .  As we know Him better, we love Him more.”⁹

Our loving Heavenly Father has provided a means by which we can come to know Him by interacting directly with Him.  Consider the magnitude of this gift.  The Lord entreats us to pray continually.  He has offered us the ability and opportunity to commune individually and continually with an Eternal Being, our Supreme Creator, our Literal God and our Literal Father; and, He, knowing us perfectly, communicates individually and continually with us!  He guides our focus.  He places questions in our minds so that He can provide answers we don’t even know we are prepared to receive.  He reassures us when we fearfully face mortal challenges.  He expands our mental and physical capacities when we have exhausted our own abilities.  He warns us of peril and protects us when hazards are inevitable.  He speaks to us words of comfort when we feel hurt or misjudged.  He confirms truth to us when we are in need of validation.  He rejoices with us in our accomplishments and our happiness.  He gently reminds us of His loving role in our lives.

We have only to listen and become attune to His voice in our lives to be blessed by this gift.  This prayerful contact with our constant, unchanging, loving Father is what allows us to come to know Him personally as we pass through mortal experiences with Him at our side, communing with Him continually by choosing to spend our time interacting with Him as an integral and involved part of our lives, just as we would a spouse or a best friend.  By including the Lord in our experiences in this way, He becomes our constant upon which we can build our real trust and founded expectations despite the fickle nature of living in a fallen world, thus allowing Him to play important roles in our mortal experience.  He gives us hope by giving us Himself.

By building this personal relationship with God the Father through prayer, we allow the Lord with His pure and unwavering love to ₁guide us as our teacher, ₂to change us as our creator, ₃and to comfort and sustain us as our Providing Father—One to which we have constant access!  As we learn to allow the Lord to play these three vital roles of love in our lives, we are given experience from which we can draw expectations of the true nature of the Father—we are given hope.  The more time we spend including the Lord in our experiences through prayer, the more attune we become to recognizing His influence in our lives and the better we come to know Him and His abiding love for us.  We begin to see that during times when we endure intense degrees of pain, as we turn to Him, He guides us through those trials as our Teacher, molds our character as our creator, and provides for and comforts us as our Father.  We learn the futility of pleading for Him to change our experiences and recognize the wisdom of instead pleading for Him change us;  we cease seeking for Him to remove our pain and instead seek for Him to provide for us in our pain;  we no longer long for Him to choose our paths, but now trust Him to guide us through the paths that we choose.  As we prayerfully pass through continued life experiences, allowing Him to play these divine roles, we come to expect Him to fill these roles and trust that He will do so.  Then, while we are enduring the pain of mortality, we can now cast out the fear that accompanies that pain and replace it with our now experientially founded expectations and trust in the Lord—replacing, by degrees relative to our pious experience with Him, our suffering with hope.

I testify that as we come to personally know our Heavenly Father through prayer, our experiences of suffering from our pain will be replaced with experiences of hope despite our pain.  While our Loving Father will not remove the afflictions of a fallen world, He absolutely will ease the suffering of those afflictions by not allowing us to pass through them alone.  I have seen it time and again in my own life.  I have been provided for by His beloved servants when I thought I had been forsaken, I have been fortified by His skillful hand when I thought I was broken, and I have been directed by His guiding omnipotence when I thought I knew the way.  As I am coming to know God personally, I am learning that rather than changing my circumstances, directing my opportunities, and removing my discomforts, my wise and purely loving Heavenly Father is changing me in my circumstances, directing me through my opportunities, and comforting me amidst life’s discomforts.  Knowing these things, I can face life’s difficulties with renewed courage in hope, trusting that I can expect the Lord to take on these roles and relieve my suffering.  I testify that we can develop enduring hope by coming to know the true nature of our Father and recognize His reliable presence in our lives through continual personal prayer.

I share this in the name of His beloved son, Jesus Christ, Amen.

References

1.        D&C 128:21

2.        Romans 12:12

3.        Proverbs 10:28

4.        Psalms 38:15; Psalms 42:11

5.        “Hope: The Misunderstood Sister,” Larry Hiller, Ensign, June 2009

6.        Romans 5:4

7.        Jeremiah 17:7

8.        2 Nephi 2:2

9.        “Prayer,” Henry B. Eyering, General Conference, October 2001