The Atonement of Jesus Christ and His Love for us is real!

The gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt.  We know that Jesus experienced the totality of moral existence in Gethsemane.  It's our faith that He experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief.  We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family.  But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means He knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you.  He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election.  He knows the moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid.  He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia.  He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau.  He experienced napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.

Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman (or man) that He does not also know and recognize.  On the profound level, He understands about the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy.  He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause.  He understands about rape and infertility and abortion.  His last recorded words to His disciples were, "And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20).  He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Downs syndrome.  He knows when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old.  He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years.  He knows all that.  He's been there.  He's been lower than all that.

So do you think you're shielding Him by keeping the door closed while you're throwing paper plates on the table and sending Chrissie to wash her hands a second time? Do you think he doesn't know?  Doesn't understand? Wouldn't laugh and help?

But He'll stay in that room if you put Him there.  Do you know why?  Because if one great constant in the universe is the unfailing love of the Savior, the other great constant is His unfailing respect for human agency.  He will not override your will, even for your own good. He will not compel you to accept His help.  He will not force you to accept His companionship.  He leaves you free to choose.    Chieko N. Okazaki, Lighten Up! p. 6-7