Should all prayers be immediately answered according to our selfish desires and our limited understanding, then there would be little or no suffering, sorrow, disappointment or even death, and if these were not there would also be an absence of joy, success, resurrection, eternal life and Godhood.
We are assured by the Lord that the sick will be healed if the ordinance is performed, if there is sufficient faith and if the ill one is “not appointed unto death”. Here there are three factors. Many do not comply with the ordinances and great numbers are unwilling or incapable of exercising sufficient faith. But there is the other factor which looms important: “If they are not appointed unto death” Every act of God is purposeful. He sees the end from the beginning. He knows what builds us, or tears us down, what will thwart the program and what will give us eventual triumph.
The Lord does not always heal the sick, nor save those in hazardous zones. He does not always relieve suffering and distress, for even these seemingly undesirable conditions may be part of a purposeful plan.
Being human we would expel form our lives, sorrow, distress, physical pain and mental anguish and assure ourselves of continual ease and comfort, but if we closed the doors upon such, we might be evicting our greatest friends and benefactors. Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long suffering and self mastery. The sufferings of our Savior was part of his education.
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God controls our lives, guides and blesses us, but gives us our agency. We may live our lives in accordance with His plan for us or we.. Shorten or terminate them.
I’m positive in my mind that the Lord has planned our destiny. We shorten our lives but I think we cannot lengthen them very much. Sometime we’ll understand fully, and when we see back from the vantage point of the future we shall be satisfied with many of the happenings of this life which seemed so difficult for us to comprehend.
We knew before we were born that we were coming to the earth for bodies and experience and that we would have joys and sorrows, pain and comforts, ease , and hardships, health and sickness, success and disappointments, and we knew also that we would die. We accepted all these eventualities with a glad heart, eager to accept both the favorable and unfavorable. We were undoubtedly willing to have a mortal body, even if it were deformed. We eagerly accepted the chance to come... thought it might be for a day, a year, or a century. Perhaps we were not so much concerned whether we should die of disease. We were willing to come and take life as it was and as we might organize and control it, and this without murmur or complaint or unreasonable demands. We sometimes think we would like to know what was ahead, but sober thought brings us back to accepting life a day at a time and magnifying and glorifying that day.
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