Finding Hope
God never promised life would be easy. In fact, trials are one reason we were sent here to live on earth. Through our trials, we learn to trust God and to
turn to Him for comfort and hope. A new website by the Mormons offers counsel and inspiration for those seeking to hold on to hope in the most difficult of circumstances.
Finding Hope offers this promise to visitors:
Finding hope in Jesus Christ sustains us through times of difficulty and despair, teaching us there is reason to rejoice even when darkness seems to surround us.
The website opens with a video of a talk given by Dieter F. Uchtdorf, an apostle of the Lord and a counselor to the Mormon prophet, called The Infinite Power of Hope. He teaches that we learn to have faith and hope gradually, a step at a time. We can learn to trust that our prayers will be answered. He reminds us that the atonement of Jesus Christ offers hope to even the bleakest moments, and can bring us joy.
President Uchtdorf understands the power of hope. He began his life in Czechoslovakia near the end of the Second World War. His father was drafted into the German army when President Uchtdorf was only three, and his mother was left to do the best she could with a young family. The children and their mother were often hungry and afraid. Finally, his mother decided to flee to Germany, where her family lived, crossing war zones and enduring hunger. President Uchtdorf notes that his mother did not sit back in fear. She acted in faith.
Another video offers to story of Victor Guzmon, a survivor of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He talks about his struggles after the attacks, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ helped him to find peace and acceptance.
Further down the page, you’ll find personal stories from real people, sharing how they learned to allow Jesus Christ to bring peace into their challenging lives. In these stories, you’ll discover tools you can use to find your own peace.
On the right hand side are three questions site visitors might have about hope: What is hope? How can hope help me? What do I need to do to find hope? Clicking on these questions will take you to brief explanations of the answers, and links to further resources.
Hope is defined as trusting God. God is our Father in Heaven and He loves us completely and unconditionally. He knows us better than anyone else and He knows what the future holds. He can guide us to make the right choices if we allow Him to do so. In time, we can learn that even our trials can become blessings as they help us to grow and mature. We can choose to be afraid or to let those trials destroy us, or we can choose to strengthen our relationship with God and let them become blessings. As we have to make choices during our trials, we can turn to God in prayer to receive perfect guidance. God can’t end all our trials, or prevent them in the first place, because they are often helpful to us. Some trials impact others. Some are caused by the agency of others, or our own agency. However, He can give us the strength to get through them and He can help us learn the purpose of each trial and how to use it to better our lives and the lives of others.
Would you like to teach others, including your children to have hope? Organize a family night with your children and prepare a brief lesson on hope and how it can help them. Just below the links discussed above are links to other resources. One of them takes you to media that can be used to teach others, including children. There are coloring pages of Jesus Christ and other hope-related topics, puzzles, games, and activities that can be printed off. The same section of links also takes you to beautiful music about hope you can listen to or sing with your family.
Images of hope is one of my favorite pages on the site. It contains paintings of the life of Jesus Christ. Through the eyes of great artists, we can view the birth, childhood, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Savior.
The final link in this section takes you to a list of scriptures about hope. Read what the Bible says about the subject and learn how we can apply them to our own lives.
Thomas S. Monson, the Mormon prophet, teaches: “Faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other.” (See Thomas S. Monson, “Come unto Him in Prayer and Faith,” Ensign, Mar 2009, 4–9. When we increase our faith, our ability to hope also grows.
The Book of Mormon is a book of scripture the Mormons use in addition to the Bible. It states: “And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true (Alma 32:21). From this scripture in the Book of Mormon, we learn we don’t have to have perfect faith in order to have hope and comfort. If we had a perfect knowledge, it wouldn’t be faith. We can begin to develop our faith in God in small ways, gradually increasing our ability to trust God and to act on that trust.
Tags: Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Faith, hope, inspirational stories, Mormons, uplifting stories
This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 9:06 am and is filed under Array. You can follow any responses to this entry through the /feed feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.