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This week's journey:

Read:  Alma 32, 24, Our Heritage pages 68-72 (attached as a PDF)

Explore: “We Weep When We Remember Zion: Early Latter-Day Saints as Refugees” 

https://history.lds.org/article/we-weep-when-we-remember-zion-early-latter-day-saints-as-refugees?lang=eng

Write:  Write your thoughts on the “infinite and eternal sacrifice” of the atonement (Alma 34:10).  What does the term “infinite” mean to you in relation to the atonement?

We have the opportunity this week, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of our Savior, to deeply ponder some of the most clear, powerful words in the scriptures about faith, our spiritual potential, and the atonement.  I bear you my solemn and sacred testimony that these chapters, restored in the latter days, for this very day, have the power to transform your heart, mind, and life.  Please read and rejoice as you celebrate the Savior!

This week's personal story is shared by Amanda Olson, of the Ravenna Park ward.  Thank you Amanda for your beautiful words!

Alma 5 is a record of Alma the Younger teaching his people about conversion.  In this chapter, Alma is reminding his people of truths their parents knew and observed and that they—one short generation later—have forgotten.  He uses his father’s experience as an example of being truly converted, and he observes that “according to his [father’s] faith there was a mighty change wrought in his heart” (verse 12) that started his father down the path of being truly converted.  I noticed this idea of “a mighty change” as I read this week, probably because I’ve been thinking about needing some “mighty change” in my own life.  What struck me this time was the connection Alma makes between his father’s faith and the change itself:  the change only happened because the faith was there first. 

In the next verse (13), Alma explains that when his father preached the word to his people, they also had a change in their hearts—a change that “wrought in their hearts.”  So because their faith was present, the word of God made them a new heart.  And then Alma explains what that new heart let them do: 

[A]nd they humbled themselves and put their trust in the true and living God.  And behold they were faithful until the end;  therefore they were saved.  (v13; emphasis added)

I want these amazing things in my life.  I want to act out of humility, not out of insecurity.  I want to trust God, trust my patriarchal blessing, trust truths I’ve maybe known but am forgetting.  I want to be believing all the way through instead of giving up and feeling forsaken when it feels like God is absent.  I want to be saved from myself, my pride, the anxiety my doubts create.  Here Alma teaches me that I can have and do and be all of these things.  This is the mighty change.  It is the new heart.  And it comes when I’ve done the hard work to create the faith required to cradle, protect, nourish, and save it.