I started making some bad decisions in high school. These decisions nearly derailed my life.
During that time I was becoming friendly with a girl. She knew about some of my bad decision-making.
One night when we were hanging out I told her I would never get married anywhere but a temple. This interested her. Why, she wondered, would someone like me, who seemingly cared nothing for this religion that I was raised with, care about a temple marriage?
I explained to her that I believed my church was true. If my church was true, then it held the authority to marry couples for eternity. That church, therefore, sealed families for eternity. I told her if I married someone I didn’t want it to end after we died. If I were to ever get married, I wanted it to be for eternity.
When I was in college my decision making had gotten increasingly worse.
On a night I don’t remember, it was later told to me that I bore my testimony to a girl at a party. I don’t remember any of this. Apparently, religion came up and I told her I knew the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was Jesus Christ’s church on the earth.
This girl asked the obvious question, “If you know it’s true, why are you doing the things you’re doing?”
I’m told I said that even though I wasn’t living the standards of the church, I couldn’t deny what I knew to be true.
That testimony that I don’t remember had a big impact on that girl.
Years later that first girl from high school sent me a postcard. That girl from high school had gotten baptized. Her postcard was one of a few critical moments that helped me come back to church and changed my life.
A month after that postcard, in the midst of my difficult journey back to church, I stumbled upon a Facebook message that had gotten blocked and I’d never seen. It was from years prior. It was from the girl at the college party, the girl I bore a drunken testimony to.
She told me she’d gotten baptized. She told me she had never let me know how big an impact that testimony had on her ultimately getting baptized. I visited her and her budding family. She was sealed in the temple. She had an eternal family. She was happy. It gave me strength to continue on the path of repentance that was so, so hard.
The girl from high school got married in the temple and now has three kids. She has an eternal family. She is happy.
A patriarchal blessing is extremely sacred. I share a short line from my blessing with the utmost reverence:
“Trouble not yourself over lost days, for you are an eternal being”
I can’t tell you how comforting those words were when I was trying to find strength to stay faithful, and how important those words continue to be to me.
It is all one eternal round to God (D&C 3:2). He knew I would stumble. What did He do when I stumbled? Put two people in my path that I could somehow, inexplicably, impact at my lowest, during my most degraded behaviors.
What did He do?
He put those two people back in my path when they could help me back. He put two people back into my life to help me remember what I always knew, what I was getting dangerously close to forgetting. He put two people in my path to remind me who I was. I am nothing special of myself, but I am a son of God. That is special.
I marvel at the workings of God. That He loves us so much that He gave us a world so we could leave our Heavenly home, just as children leave their homes here on earth to go out and learn, and grow, and fall. He gave us an earth to fall. But He allowed us a way back.
I know there is a way back.
I know that Jesus Christ allows that way back.
I know that God planned for everything. We are His work and His glory.
I can never deny what I know.
No Coincidences 