I gave a talk a few weeks ago and most of you weren’t there to hear it so I figured some of you may want to read through all of it. If not, that’s fine. It’s not exactly the same as the one I gave because I tried not to look at my paper very much.
How can we overcome our weaknesses?
Imagine a beautiful flower bed. It starts out with fresh, fertile brown dirt. You plant a few flowers and water them. The sun comes out. The flowers grow.
However, weeds soon come to the flower bed. Everyone who sees the flower bed enjoys the flowers, but they are distracted by the weeds.
You try to keep up with the weeding and discover that the earlier you pull out the weeds the easier it is and better your flowers grow. You notice that pulling out a few weeds every day is a lot easier than putting it off for a long time and having to pull out tons of huge weeds all at once.
Now, imagine your life as a flower bed. The flowers are your strengths and the weeds are your weaknesses, sins, and mistakes.
If you want a beautiful flower bed you need to grow your strengths and weed out your weaknesses before they get too big.
How do we get the weeds out of our life – in other words how do we overcome our weaknesses?
Grow strengths
A good place to start is by working on growing our strengths aka flowers so there isn’t as much room for weaknesses.
We are all born with certain gifts, talents, and abilities. They are gifts from God. I think too many of us focus on our weaknesses and not our strengths.
We can’t be happy and successful in life without recognizing our strengths and working on improving them.
Be humble
Why do we have weaknesses in the first place? I mean, can’t our lives just be all beautiful flowers with no weeds?
In Jacob 4:7 Jacob says: “Nevertheless, the Lord God showeth us our weakness that we may know that it is by his grace, and his great condescensions unto the children of men, that we have power to do these things.”
To me, this means that part of being mortal is being weak. Every one of us is weak and it is only by God’s grace that we can overcome our weaknesses.
So, weaknesses are given to us to humble us so we will turn to Christ in faith and let him make more out of us than we previously thought possible.
I hear other talks about the reason we have trials is so we can grow (and that’s true) but we don’t talk as much about how trials help us understand how we can’t accomplish anything without Christ and how we owe everything we have to him.
This realization is humility and once we humble ourselves then Christ can help us through grace.
Grace
When we humbly work on improving our weaknesses then we will qualify to receive the Grace of the Savior.
The Lord said this to Moroni in Ether 12:27:
“And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
When we do all we can to grow our strengths and weaknesses then the Savior will make up the difference with his Grace.
I think sometimes we forget that the atonement covers a lot more than just sins. It also covers Grace, comfort, insecurities, and a bunch of other things that the Lord knows we need to have joy.
Personal Revelation
In Feb. 2020 President and Sister Oaks gave a Face-to-Face event and it really made me stop and think. I thought it was good because they went over in detail the “Pattern for Growth” section of the new youth and family goals program, which is basically an outline of the process a youth and all of us can follow to get personal revelation.
How cool is it that they are starting with Primary-age youth and giving them a roadmap to get their own revelation?
When I got the topic of speaking about weaknesses I thought of this program because an important part of overcoming our weaknesses is through personal revelation.
Here is the four-step process they outlined –
The first step is “Discover” – This is really important. Through the spirit we can recognize what our strengths and weaknesses are. If you are like me, I could list 100 goals I could potentially work on, so you need to prayerfully let the spirit help you decide which ones you need to actually focus on.
Let me warn you that praying about what weakness to work on takes a lot of faith and humility. There’s a good chance you won’t like the answer you get. You may even dismiss the answer or try to ignore it for a while.
But I can tell you that when you involve the Lord in this step (and every step) then your results will be so much better because he knows you better than anyone else.
The second step is “Plan” – This is where you take your big goal and come up with a plan of action. This should also be done prayerfully. When you are prayerful about it you will often get ideas of things to do you would not have otherwise thought of.
You should break down your goal to small, actionable steps. Plan out where, when, or how you will accomplish your goal.
For example, rather than saying, “I’m going to get in better shape.” Say I am going to do 10 minutes of yoga every morning at 9:15 and I’m going to set a reminder on my phone.
The third step is “Act” – This is where you get to work and take small steps at a time and work on your goal. Pray for help, see what works and doesn’t and make changes if necessary.
The forth step is “Reflect” – This is such an important step! This is where you carefully go back to the Lord in prayer and evaluate what is going well, what isn’t working, if changes need to be made, or if you are done with your goal for now.
This would also be a great time to write down your experiences and feelings and maybe share them with others around you. That will help both you and the person you are sharing with.
It’s ok to be proud of your accomplishments! Don’t forget to thank the Lord for the help he gave you.
Once you finish one goal, then you start the cycle all over again.
Now I’m going to give you some examples of some people who overcame their weaknesses.
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith was not well-educated and had a hard time writing. A lot of his early writings have spelling errors. For example, in some of his early writings he couldn’t even spell the name of the town he was born in.
He freely admitted this weakness and worked on improving it by studying, praying, and working on writing.
He studied the scriptures very thoroughly and wrote a lot of his experiences down. In fact, many of the revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants came about after Joseph Smith studied certain passages of scripture.
He eventually wrote all sorts of things, like the Articles of Faith and he was know as a great scriptorian.
My example
Let me give you an example of following this personal revelation cycle from my life. A few months before this Face-to-Face (so at the end of 2019) I felt like I wanted to be a good example to my child and Young Women I work with and try to follow the new Youth goal program.
But I was having a hard time coming up with my goals. After praying about it, I got the idea that I needed to come up with some life goals first.
So, I started at the bottom of a sheet of paper with all the possible things I could make goals about.
I narrowed it down to three areas – personal, family, and helping others with several sub-goals under each of these areas.
The chart started with several small goals at the bottom and more narrow as I worked my way up the top. At the top I ended up with my ultimate goal – to have eternal life.
Then I went back through the chart and took off any goals that didn’t lead me to Christ. That was really hard for me to do for some of the goals because they were temporal things I wanted or things I want to do that were fun but didn’t really have lasting value.
Doing the chart helped me realize that if the goal didn’t have a place on the chart then I should be working on other goals that were on the chart or maybe even that weren’t on the chart yet but that should be.
After doing this little exercise the Spirit led me to create some goals over the next few months. Some of them were to –
- go to the temple more often
- make more freezer meals
- be more proactive as a mother
So you could say I finished the “Discover” stage.
Next was the Plan stage. For my temple goal I decided to try to go once a week to the temple if possible, whether it was by myself, taking my children to do baptisms, or doing sealings with my family.
Before this I had probably been going once a month but this was Jan. 2020 and Kayla had just turned old enough to go to the temple. I didn’t feel like I would be able to keep it up for too long but I felt very driven to do this goal for as long as I could.
For the freezer meal goal, I planned to make a large batch of food every 3-4 days and freeze the extras in individual containers and eat the frozen food on days when I wasn’t cooking.
For the being proactive as a mom goal I decided to focus on noticing what was causing bad behavior from my children and trying to find ways to prevent future problems.
For the Act stage for my temple goal, I was really good about going to the temple weekly. I had some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in the temple and I could really feel the Lord leading me in my life.
It was hard to keep up the schedule, but I felt really driven to do it and the more I went, the more I wanted to go. That is, until COVID hit about 2.5 months into my goal. I still remember going to do baptisms with my children two days before they closed the temple. The temple was almost empty and there was such a sweet spirit there. We knew we probably wouldn’t be able to go back for a while (but we didn’t realize how long it would be before we could go back). I’m so grateful I felt prompted to go as much as I did before COVID because it really gave me a lot of strength as COVID progressed.
My freezer goal went pretty well and I was really grateful I felt guided to do that goal because when COVID hit, I had a freezer full of food and didn’t have to rush out to the store nearly as badly as if I hadn’t been trying to fill my freezer.
When COVID hit it became very obvious to me why I was led to have a proactive mom goal since not too long after making the goal we were stuck in the house together most of the time.
I was grateful that one of the main goals I did at the beginning of the year was to schedule a lot of doctor, dentist, eye doctor or other appointments that I had been putting off and that we would not have been able to do during COVID.
COVID also became a good time for me to notice the cause of my children’s behaviors and implement a new reward/punishment system. Through the spirit I was also able to notice there were some things that were not going to be fixed without professional intervention.
When I reflect back on these three goals, I obviously had to change my temple goal. That turned into doing more family history until the temple opened back up.
I took a break from making freezer meals for a few weeks while we waited for the grocery stores to calm down a bit and then made it a more long-term way of living.
As for the proactive mom goal, that became a main goal during COVID and spending so much time together really helped to highlight some of the problems we were having and made me much more motivated to take care of them instead of ignoring them or hoping they would go away on their own.
Conclusion
Just like growing a beautiful flower bed, working on our strengths and weaknesses takes work. You don’t ever “arrive.” You can’t stop.
Satan will try to make you feel like it’s too much work to keep up, that you will never get rid of all the weeds so you should give up. You can’t let him win! You have to keep weeding, pruning, plucking, watering, and fertilizing. But it’s so worth it.
I know if you humbly work on improving your weaknesses with the help of the Lord, you will not only be stronger and happier, but more importantly, you will feel the Savior’s atonement in your life. And that’s priceless.
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