True Confessions: The Visiting Teaching Message: God's Love

Another example showing that I'm no spiritual success story:

The February 2017 visiting teaching message was titled, "Christ's Atonement is Evidence of God's Love."  My visiting teaching companion generally was too busy to come with me, which meant I would be teaching by default.  This was another message I dreaded teaching.  I've spent a lot of time in my life intellectually knowing God loves me, but my heart feeling like He doesn't.  I have only felt God's love for me once in my life, despite praying off and on to feel it ever since I was a teenager.  I am incredibly grateful for that one experience, but I haven't felt it since.  I'm also grateful for that experience so I could at least share a little testimony at the end of my lesson!

When I taught this time, it was super awkward because I had asked someone to come with me that I didn't know very well, and I didn't know the woman I taught very well and wasn't clicking with her at all.  Not a safe spot for my confession.  But I did it anyway.  I don't think either of them knew how to respond.  I think my substitute companion asked my visiting teachee when she feels God's love, and she responded that she feels God's love and feels close to Him when she prays.  I was kind of dumbfounded.  I have never had that experience.

I won't give up.  I'll continue to ask.  Someday I will have that testimony, and will know in my heart what I know in my head!


My lesson, for the curious...

This month’s visiting teaching message is titled, “Christ’s atonement is evidence of God’s love.”

President Benson said, "No mortal being had the power or capability to redeem all other mortals from their lost and fallen condition, nor could any other voluntarily forfeit his life and thereby bring to pass a universal resurrection for all other mortals.

"Only Jesus Christ was able and willing to accomplish such a redeeming act of love.

"We may never understand nor comprehend in mortality how He accomplished what He did, but we must not fail to understand why He did what He did.

"Everything He did was prompted by His unselfish, infinite love for us."

Unlike the rest of us, Christ wasn’t motivated by duty, glory, honor, or any other worldly reward.  He was motivated by His love for you.

In C.S. Lewis’s book “Mere Christianity,” he said, “[God] has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.  He does not have to deal with us in the mass.  You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created.  When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only [woman] in the world.”

It amazes me to think that Christ would have atoned just for me.  I can imagine Him having enough love to atone for billions and billions of people, but it’s harder to imagine Him loving just me enough to die for.

Several years ago, I went reluctantly to a Relief Society fireside.  The woman who spoke had experienced a horrible event as a child, and she testified how she felt God’s love during the event and throughout her life afterwards.  At the end of the fireside, I escaped the chapel quickly so nobody could see me crying.  As I left, I felt God’s love for me very strongly.  I don’t know why that was when God chose to answer my latest round of “do You love me?” prayers, but I was very glad I had chosen to attend that fireside and have that experience, since it is my one experience of feeling God’s love for me.