Humility

Oops! I didn't write last night. I felt it was more important to take care of a few other things during my limited personal time during the week and weekend. I did spend a lot of time journaling, so I'm going to pull together some of those thoughts here. Some of these thoughts also come from a personal reflection essay I put together at the beginning of the year (I referred that in the "That Ye Be not Tempted" post).

The Lord has blessed me with experiences to help me know that I am nothing. As I approach the Lord in prayer, I feel especially humble this week. I feel an urgency to have the protecting, healing, and enabling power of the atonement present in my life. I know that I cannot be the father I want/need to be without the help of the Savior.

I find strength to be the person I want to be when I have the spirit with me. When I feel the influence of the Holy Ghost (whether or not I consciously recognize it), I feel happy and confident in the Lord's presence. I feel like a good person. As a fallen man however, too often I confuse the spirit's goodness with my own goodness. I mistakenly think that my happiness is a result of my goodness, when really the happiness is what comes from the grace of the gift of the Holy Ghost. If I make choices that offend the spirit, my perceived goodness vanishes and my own fallen nature becomes clear again to me.

In the past when I heard general authorities express their inadequacies, I often thought,"Really? Come on. You're an apostle. You really can't be serious about not feeling qualified. You're just saying that because that's what you're supposed to say." I thought that part of humility was confessing weaknesses and shortcomings, so sometimes I similarly expressed feelings of inadequacy, even though deep down inside I felt very capable. I wanted to be humble and feel like I relied on the Savior, but deep inside, I was prideful and thought that I was a pretty capable and good person.

The Lord is blessing me with experiences to allow me to deeply feel how truly inadequate I am.
I am coming to feel what I've known in my mind for a long time: we are all less than the dust of the earth. None of us is truly good. President Monson? Dirt. Joseph Smith? Dirt. Nephi? Dirt. They are not good, but learned to allow the spirit to act through them and spread the goodness of God. We are not inherently bad either, but we do need to daily overcome the desires and temptations of the flesh that are part of our fallen and sinful nature. The spirit is essential in allowing Christ to bring out the goodness we inherited from our divine Father.