Having a hard time forgiving yourself for past mistakes? Let the Savior help rewrite your pain into your purpose.
I saw the arrow turn green and I accelerated while glancing down at my phone’s GPS. I expected to be able to look up in time to turn. Instead, my car jolted to a horrific, crunching stop…directly into the fender of the car in front of me. Afraid and embarrassed, I realized that I’d just had my first car accident—and that it was all my fault.
We all have painful moments like these that we look back on with remorse and maybe even shame. We likely knew that we were doing something we shouldn’t—even at 17 I had definitely known not to look at my phone while driving. In situations like these, I struggle to forgive myself, even though I know the Savior can and already has helped “edit” my mistakes.
Photo by Pixabay
In her BYU devotional, “Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher,” Sister Sarah K. Clark offers a unique change of perspective: What if Jesus Christ is not our editor, but our coauthor, offering our mistakes “meaning, grace, and direction?”
Sister Clark teaches that the life we are currently living isn’t a backup plan because we messed up “plan A.” Our entire life—mistakes and all—is God’s plan A. And the mess we made? The Savior can help reframe it in a way that will heal us, “rewrit[ing] pain into purpose.”
In literature, celebrated heroes aren’t loved merely because they saved the day; they’re loved because they made a slew of mistakes and still saved the day. From Percy Jackson to Elizabeth Bennet, our favorite characters made mistakes, learned from those mistakes, then defined their new trajectories based on the lessons they learned. Their stories inspire us, reminding us that we are more than our missteps.
The mistakes we make in our own stories are essential to our learning. Even I learned from my car accident and now am an alert and defensive driver. Our mistakes teach us to do better and lean closer to the Savior, who can help us define a new trajectory.
Just like we see and love literary characters’ entire stories, Christ sees and loves our entire story. And Christ sees us as the hero. Each of us can see ourselves as the hero in our own stories too, if only we let him show us how.
Discover more advice on rewriting your story and understanding how your mistakes fit into God’s plan for you in Sister Sarah K. Clark’s devotional “Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher.”
Source: BYU Speeches
—Emma Jean Nelson, Latter-day Saint Insights
FEATURE IMAGE BY ROMAN ODINTSOV
Find more insights
To discover more how our lives are like book character’s stories, read Elizabeth Walker’s Latter-day Saint Insights article “The Author of Agency.”
For more insight on this topic, take a look at Camille Johnson’s speech “Invite Christ to Author Your Story.”