“With prophets revealing to us our place in the plan of salvation, we can live with perfect hope and a feeling of peace,” President Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the First Presidency, said. “We never need to feel that we are alone or unloved in the Lord’s service because we never are. We can feel the love of God. The Savior has promised angels on our left and our right to bear us up. And He always keeps His word.”
President Eyring said, “If we have faith in Jesus Christ, the hardest as well as the easiest times in life can be a blessing.”
Trials Bring Blessings When Endured with Faith
In his message “Mountains to Climb,” given during the April 2012 general conference, President Eyring promised that “a great blessing [can] come from adversity to more than compensate for any cost.” He recalls the words of the Lord to Joseph Smith in his prison cell: “All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. … Therefore, hold on thy way.”
The key to enduring trials well, President Eyring said, is an unshakable foundation of faith. “The way to rise through and above trials is to believe that there is a ‘balm in Gilead’ and that the Lord has promised, ‘I will not … forsake thee,’” President Eyring encouraged.
“I cannot promise an end to your adversity in this life,” President Eyring explained. “I cannot assure you that your trials will seem to you to be only for a moment. … [But] in Their perfect love for you, Heavenly Father and the Savior want you fitted to be with Them to live in families forever. Only those washed perfectly clean through the Atonement of Jesus Christ can be there.”
Building a Foundation of Faith
President Eyring explained that the process of building foundations for houses requires preparing the ground, building the form, putting metal bars carefully inside the forms to give the finished foundation strength, pouring the cement, and then waiting for it to cure. “In a similar way,” he said, “the ground must be carefully prepared for our foundation of faith to withstand the storms that will come into every life.”
The process of building faith requires time and patience, President Eyring said. “A foundation of faith in the reality of [the] promises [of God] takes time to build. … If the foundation of faith is not embedded in our hearts, the power to endure will crumble.”
“Curing does not come automatically through the passage of time, but it does take time,” said President Eyring. “Getting older does not do it alone. It is serving God and others persistently with full heart and soul that turns testimony of truth into unbreakable spiritual strength.”
Personal Integrity Builds Faith in Jesus Christ
Faith in Jesus Christ is what helps us endure trials well, President Eyring said. This faith is built by “choosing the right consistently whenever the choice is placed before us.”
President Eyring encourages us to start now to build a foundation of faith. “It is never too late to strengthen the foundation of faith. There is always time. With faith in the Savior, you can repent and plead for forgiveness. There is someone you can forgive. There is someone you can thank. There is someone you can serve and lift. You can do it wherever you are and however alone and deserted you may feel.”
Choosing to follow the Savior in all circumstances we encounter will, over time, build an unshakable foundation of faith, President Eyring promises. “When hard trials come, the faith to endure them well will be there, built as you may now notice but may have not at the time that you acted on the pure love of Christ, serving and forgiving others as the Savior would have done. You built a foundation of faith from loving as the Savior loved and serving for Him. Your faith in Him led to acts of charity that will bring you hope.”