Sometimes a little comfort is all you need to make it through a particularly bad day, week, month, or even year.
The Holy Spirit is quiet, but if we let it, it can make a powerful difference in our lives. Not only does it help us to make hard decisions and nudge us to try things we might never have tried, but the Holy Spirit also gives us hope and comfort in difficult times. And sometimes, a little comfort is all you need to make it through a particularly bad day, week, month, or even year.
Photo by NoName_13
We can also follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit to comfort others. God often helps people by working through those around them. If we listen to the Spirit, we can become aware of problems in another person’s life that we might not have been aware of otherwise, and do our best to support them. In his April 2015 general conference talk “The Comforter,” President Henry B. Eyring teaches that “we never will cease to feel in our hearts the urge ‘to mourn with those that mourn…and comfort those that stand in need of comfort.’” Following this urge can help us build rewarding, even lifelong, relationships and feel the satisfaction of knowing we did everything we could to help.
However, we don’t always have to wait for a prompting from the Spirit to act. If we see someone struggling, we can always choose to take action. We each have our own agency and our own insights about the world and those around us, and if we have a good idea that helps someone, in the end, it doesn’t matter if it is from the Holy Spirit or if it is from our own minds.
Source: General Conference
—Eliza Kimball, Latter-day Saint Insights
FEATURE IMAGE BY MELCHOR GAMA
Find more insights
Read more about the effects of the Holy Spirit in our lives in Sarah Riley’s Latter-day Saint Insights article “Illuminate Your Faith Through Spiritual Reflection.”