God Will Feel After You

Sometime after the crucible of Liberty Jail, the Prophet Joseph met with the Twelve in Nauvoo and imparted the following wisdom that John Taylor remembered in later years:  "You will have all kinds of trials to pass through.  And it is quite as necessary for you to be tried as it was for Abraham and other men of God, and (said he) God will feel after you and wrench your very heart strings, and if you cannot stand it you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God" (John Taylor, Deseret News Semi-Weekly, August 21, 1883, page 1).  This is one of those sobering truths (Elder Maxwell referred to them as "wintry doctrines") that we don't really like to talk about all that often.  It is the kind of doctrine that scares us to death and causes us, like Pollyanna, to reach out for some of the happier doctrines of the Gospel.  Hearing this, we are at times tempted to step back.  But even as we fear that doctrines like this might cause us to shrink and to fail to drink out of our own bitter cups, we are compelled to admit that truths such as this sanctify our souls and prepare our hearts for salvation.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this doctrine, is that these kinds of trials almost always find their way into our lives in the moments when we are striving our hardest for righteousness.  They come to us, not in spite of our righteous efforts, but directly because of our righteous efforts.  In the very moments when we are perhaps most "qualified" (I use this term loosely) to enjoy the presence and blessings of the Lord, He seems to withdraw those very things from our lives.  These moments throw our minds and hearts into chaos, almost always causing us to ask ourselves why the very God we were trying to serve had forsaken us.

But it is there, in our agony and in our grief, that these trials begin their divine work of sanctifying and expanding our souls, drawing us nearer to the very God whom, for a small moment, we felt had forsaken us.  For it is in our agony that we are brought to our knees, gaining a power to pray, to plead, and to commune with the Holy One that we had never possessed before.  It is there, in our grief, that we begin to learn the meaning of the words "thy will be done," and just how hard it can be to place that holy phrase upon the altar of sacrifice.  Whereas early in these trials we begin to feel that God has taken us to the very edge and limits of our faith, having submitted our will to God, we begin to sense the expanding circumference of the faith we had once felt was shaken.  We find that we have given our feeble and broken hearts more fully to God because He was the only One with the power to mend them.  While at points we may have felt as though the wrenching was without purpose, we come to understand that what He was doing was operating upon a heart that had actually been broken and struggling long before the painful procedure had begun.

This wintry doctrine is, in reality, the very essence of the doctrine of Christ.  Though we almost always ask if there isn't an easier way, it provides the means whereby the Lord and His atonement begin to come more fully into our lives.  Far from signaling a withdrawal of his presence and blessings from our lives, these are the very moments in which He is closest to us.  Note that the Prophet declared that in these moments He would feel after us.  What a tender blessing, to know that the very God of Heaven knows you, knows exactly what you need, and will feel after you to provide the needed blessing!