Our Relationship with our Father

Feb. 25^th, 2017

When I try to think of all the gospel-centered lessons I learned this week, there are almost too many to count. I definitely did not expect some of these things to occur, but overall, heavenly Father is always working to answer our prayers when we seek out the answers!

It kind of all started in Relief Society this past Sunday. I had made a comment about prayers and our relationship with Heavenly Father, and my visiting teacher decided to counter comment on that by saying that she was impressed with the way I prayed – like I was talking to Heavenly Father as a real person, and we were just having a conversation together. I was fascinated by this outlook, because I hadn’t really known that I prayed in a slightly different manner than most people, and I realized that I was super comfortable with Heavenly Father. This came to mean a lot the following day – I had to know my standing with God and how I felt about my own self-worth as I spoke to a friend in need about some of my coping mechanisms here on earth in a fallen state. And they all work because of my relationship with Heavenly Father. So this lead me to wonder…

…what should our relationship with Heavenly Father look like?

What a perfect time to wonder, as we skimmed over good King Benjamin’s words at the beginning of Mosiah in Book of Mormon this week. He does this cute thing where he tells the people that they are less than the dust of the earth in comparison to God, and that we’re nothing. He’s everything. My self-esteem as a child of God was called into question for a second, but this is where another lovely viewpoint of Benjamin comes into play, in Mosiah 4 – the knowledge of God’s goodness is what truly should make us feel like nothing and be happy about it. We need to “believe in Him and that He is” in order to truly start to align our plan with His. That seems really backwards to me, but it says that the people were so happy and pleased by his mercy. It’s making me wonder what other aspects of my relationship with God need to be developed. While I think it’s definitely a good thing to feel like Heavenly Father is truly my father that I can tell anything to, there’s something else that I learned I want to develop: a sense of awe and reverence; a reality of what God truly has done for me. This reminds me of something that I had almost completely forgotten about – on my mission, I had the chance to hear a Muslim pray, and I was blown away by the amount of awe and respect that this man had for God, while still talking to him like a person. There was a type of humility and understanding there that I just don’t quite possess yet. I want to treat Heavenly Father the way he deserves to be treated, and along the way, I’ll develop a stronger understanding of who and what He is. I hope that I can begin to apply what I have learned here, because as Benjamin begins his close, he says that if we believe these things, “see that ye do them.”