However Long and Hard the Road

 

Elder Holland talked about the Salt Lake Temple being built in a talk given at Brigham Young University in 1983. The saints at the time had pretty much just arrived in the Salt Lake Valley and were tired and weary. They had just left behind a beautiful Temple in Nauvoo Illinois, and they were told to build another. This time, it was bigger and grander than any could have imagined. The work was slow and difficult, it took so long to accomplish the building of the Temple that many died before seeing it finished.

The example of the Temple being built reminds me that I need to first be involved in something worthy of my time, secondly, I need to remember that all good things take time.  The Temple was ordained of God and the saints understood that they must have prayed and felt the holy ghost testify to them that the Temple was important and worthy of their time. They spent many years of their lives working to complete the Temple, if I am to spend many years of my life completing something I should make sure that it is something that God wants me to be doing. Once I have determined that God ordains my pursuit, I need to be patient and have faith that if I put in the time, I will be blessed. Just as many of the saints likely did not know how the finished Temple would look, they knew that all their hard work would produce something amazing and bless them and their families for eternity.

I don’t know where my life will take me, but I do know one thing for sure, I plan to keep putting the Lord at the center of my life. I know that if I do that, I will succeed in all aspects of my life. I know that life is hard, harder than I could have imagined, but the Lord softens the work and helps me to accomplish the impossible.

 

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