How is your Spiritual resilience?

I had the missionaries Imagine what it would be like if their name tag changed colors according to their faith.  A black name tag means they are full of faith, but bright pink means they lack faith to the point of murmuring.  I called it the murmur-metro for fun.  It is easy to have a lot of faith on a good day, but on a difficult day, it can be very hard.   I’ll admit, having your missionary tag become a murmur-metro might be a little embarrassing some days!

This causes me to re-think how I act when bad things happen to me.  Am I emotionally and spiritually resilient?   All these ideas came to me when I was reading 1 Nephi with Come Follow Me last month. I couldn’t help but compare Lamen & Lemuel murmuring for every trial with Nephi’s faith. Being a visual person, I decided to make a graph of the differences to learn more.  This is what I discovered: 

I found the exercise enlightening because I could see how much Laman & Lemuel went back and forth from having faith to murmuring.  I learned that they weren’t always murmuring.  In fact they did a lot of repenting, but unfortunately they would always go back to murmuring because they weren’t spiritually resilient.  Honestly,  after seeing this, Laman & Lemuel seem more relatable because I often do the same thing.

When I looked at Nephi’s murmur-metro readings, it reminded me of the iron rod talked about in Lehi’s dream.  Nephi’s path was always straight because he never wavered.  It is such a contrast with Laman and Lemuel’s path!

So I asked myself, what does my daily path look like?  Is it straight and true like the iron rod, or is it crooked because sometimes I murmur and forget God’s promises?  How can I change so that I can become more resilient like Nephi?

The answer is in this quote by President Nelson: 

…the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives - President Russel M. Nelson. (GC OCT 2016)

If you are familiar with the story of Nephi, you know that he always focused on our Savior. It is not a coincidence that in each of the sacrament prayers we are reminded to ‘always remember Him so that we can have His Spirit to be with us’.  This is the answer to becoming spiritually resilient on a mission and in life.  As you remember Him, think of ways that you want to change in order to become more like the Savior and then use His atonement to help you change.  I promise that if you will learn to do this, you will discover joy that you never thought was possible.  I know this is true because I have felt it for myself.