“If the bitter cup does not pass, drink it and be strong, trusting in better days ahead.” Jeffy Holland

Everyone seems to have just one opinion on the difficult times in life. Whether they believe it or not, it’s the most said belief: and that is to suck it up and get through it with a smile on your face. Well I am going to testify that that is NOT the only method for enduring tough times. Take it from someone who has seen family members and close friends die young, family suffering through financial hardships, trust in relationships being broken over and over and over again. Personal struggles of faith, purpose, loss and destiny. Everyone suffers in this life some way or other and people just expect us to get over it. They say “trust in God and things will get better” or “if it’s meant to be then it will happen”. Sometimes I just want to shove a cantaloupe down their esophagus and say “NO! I am in control of my life and I want things to go MY way.” And what’s so wrong with that? I help people, I consider myself a decent person, I look for the good in others. So why do bad things happen to good people?

I remember a couple of years ago my friend and I were watching the news. A tragic event had happened that we were troubled over. There was a plane landing crash that killed two teenage girls. The plane hit the ramp wrong or something and caused it to explode and catch fire on that specific area of the plane. My friend said,” This is why I don’t believe in God. Plane crashes like that are so rare and they didn’t deserve to die. If there was a God, he wouldn’t have let that happen.” Being the young and immature person I was then I didn’t say anything. And I think that might have been because I believed him. Those girls didn’t deserve to die. But if everyone got what they deserved, then this life wouldn’t be a test. We would have to live in a perfect world if good things only happened to good people, but we surely do not.

Incoming! Little House on the Prairie reference again 😛

Last week on an episode it showed the granddaughter of Mr. Ingles and this random guy’s wife being burned to death in a fire. Everyone was so upset and the deceased girls’ husband was having doubts about God. He would say, “there can’t be a God because He let this happen. WHY did it happen?” And the infamous, oh so clever Papa Ingles said, “I can’t know that, because that would make me God.”

We don’t know and probably will never know why such things happen to people who are righteous, God-fearin’ Christians, but we have to hold on to that little hope that God knows what He is doing. Even if we fight it. Even if we say, “He doesn’t care about me” or “I don’t love God anymore because He did that to me”. We can often feel betrayed or abandoned because we simply don’t understand. This is easier said than done though for sure. For example, I’m recently going through a very hard time that is altering my life and I feel betrayed by God. Or at least I did a week ago. I’m slowly coming back together, but it takes work. I tried to ignore God. I tried to believe that He didn’t love me or that His plan wasn’t right for me. But I knew deep down that it wasn’t true. And it takes time to get over bitterness, but the sooner we realize how foolish we are being, the sooner we can pick ourselves back up and be happy again.

God knows us. My favorite LDS apostle, Jeffrey Holland, said in a talk in September 2009:

“We must continue to believe, continue to have faith, continue to pray and plead with heaven, even if we feel for a time our prayers are not heard and that God has somehow gone away. He is there. Our prayers are heard. And when we weep He and the angels of heaven weep with us.”

https://www.lds.org/ensign/2009/09/lessons-from-liberty-jail?lang=eng

The angels of heaven weep with us. How powerful is that?! This thought keeps coming to my mind whenever I find myself burdened by life and it’s nice to know or even think that someone is crying with me. You don’t have to be happy now. You don’t have to get over that break up now. You don’t have to jump back in to being happy right after a hard time, but you need to keep hope. Understand that there is a mourning period to every bad situation, but eventually you will have to stand up. And God isn’t going to do it all for us either. We need to do all we can and then He will take care of the rest. You make things happen. God desires so much for us to be happy. He understands we need to have our bad days, but He is there the second we decide to turn to Him again. So remember that it isn’t a perfect world, but it is looked over by a perfect God. It’s okay to be sad and flustered with life, but you are going to recover from it. And the sooner you realize that, the more time you will have to rejoice. “If the bitter cup does not pass, drink it and be strong, trusting in better days ahead.” Keep the faith my friends.

Become Inspired.