Lemons and the Atonement

You know the saying, when life hands you lemons make lemonade? And we should, we should make the best of what the Fates throw at us. But I think most of us get so use to carrying the lemons in our pockets waiting for them to magically turn into lemonade on their own. I've been carrying quite a few lemons for a couple of years now and my coat is getting heavy from the weight. It's a pathetic analogy, but at least you can do something with the lemons handed to you rather than the rocks on your back. Each time we are handed a lemon we stick it in our pockets and when the time comes where we decide to get rid of the weight we can do something magical with this piece of sunny fruit. We can turn it into something beautiful, something that we can drink that will make us feel fresh and new on the inside, something that will help our countenance glow.

I've been studying the Atonement a lot lately whether I have been planning to or whether it's been thrown in my face a lot due to the Visiting Teaching message and my Doctrine & Covenants final. I even mentioned it in one of my English final's prompts. I recently reread Elder Steuer's devotional that he gave this semester and I was kind of smacked in the head by the way he talked about how we need to personalize the Atonement, which is something I have always had a hard time doing, but know that I need to do. Of course I know that Christ suffered just for me as He did you, but knowing that He also suffered for my illnesses, and my heartaches was not something I ever really took to heart. I knew it, but I never really understood it, and I never understood it because I never really sought His help with those lemons I was carrying. I am not one to drudge up past relationships, but I want to show you an example. Earlier this year in March I had just broken up with a guy and was feeling pretty blue. I did not really know where to seek solace from but for some reason I just had a feeling to call one of my sisters and later my mom. Both of them spoke of the best remedy for a broken heart: service. As I contemplated their words then and even more so now, I have begun to understand why serving is the best remedy. In doing service we forget about the lemons in our pockets and we help another person with their lemons. In doing service we allow Christ to help us make our own lemonade. It is in those moments that we forget ourselves and that pain, it is in those moments that Christ takes away the heartache and other sorrows.

Another thing I have never truly understood about the Atonement is how I can become a new person after repentance. It is funny that I don't really understand because I spent most of Sunday sharing a thought from James Faulconer about the Atonement (James Faulconer was formerly the Dean of General Education and Honors at BYU). In a talk he once gave titled "Remembrance," Faulconer stated this:

"I’ve thought quite a bit about what it means that the Father remembers our sins no more and I think we often do not take it seriously enough. We think that the scriptures must be speaking metaphorically when it says that. . . .

You will recall that I do not equate memory and recollection. To remember something is for it to be a locus from which one has a certain attitude toward the world. Thus, I would argue that the Father may well recollect our sins after we repent – just as we can. However, one’s relation to them and to the world is very different after one has confessed appropriately and repented. The sins are no longer what they were. (This requires the counter-intuitive belief that the past can change, but that counter-intuitive belief seems to me to be at the heart of Christian doctrine.)

Formerly, my sins were a memorial of my waywardness, wickedness, and rebellion. After proper repentance, they become a memorial of God’s grace and the sacrifice of His Son. In other words, they are no longer sins and, so, cannot be remembered as sins by the Father or by myself. What was an occasion for sorrow and despair has become something new by becoming part of an occasion for joy."

I guess this doesn't really go with understanding how we become a new person but I love how Faulconer explains the remembrance of our sins. Here is where we see our sins as lemons and not rocks. They become that sunny, yellow fruit, bitter for a second but sweet after it becomes lemonade. Of course we won't ever completely forget our sins, but once we change our attitudes about those past mistakes we can remember them as moments in our lives where we took advantage of the Atonement. I hope that as I continue to study the Atonement and take advantage of it in my own life that I will be able to understand the great change that can take place in my life when I do make mistakes. I'm not planning on having a lot more heart breaks, but if there are anymore in store for me I hope that I remember first hand that the best antidote for that pain is service and confiding in my Savior. I know that Christ suffered for all of us. I know both our Heavenly Father and our Savior love us so much, and I will admit that I am one of the first to forget that during those lemon days. But I know it is true, it is just one of those things you "get" and can't really explain why.