Faith #1

The first principle of the gospel is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Learn about faith from the scriptures and living prophets. Read Hebrews 11; Alma 32:17–43; Ether 12:6–22; and Joseph Smith—History 1:11–20. Read two general conference talks on faith. Exercise your own faith by establishing a habit of prayer in your life. Begin by regularly saying your morning and evening prayers. After three weeks of following this pattern, discuss with a parent or leader what you have learned about faith and how daily personal prayer has strengthened your faith. In your journal express your feelings about faith and prayer.

Of course we all know what faith is, but wow, this experience really strengthened my testimony of this principle and reminded me of some things I had forgotten.  We need to constantly be working on building our faith so that when trials come (because they definitely will!), your faith is strong enough to sustain you.  What do we need to have faith in?  The Atonement, life after death, repentance, that Heavenly Father knows what is best for us.  It's easy to talk about these things, but to practice them is a different story. 

My experiment of diligently and genuinely saying morning and evening prayers for three weeks went very well.  My normal "please bless my family with the things they need" became a lot more of pleading with Heavenly Father to please bless them individually with what they are struggling with right now.  And I saw a huge difference!  Probably the most awesome miracle that happened was on Day One, a Sunday.  I had a special fast through Facebook for one of my best friends, Jackie.  She was very sick and having crazy imbalances within her body because of her disease process and was in the ICU on that previous Friday.  I prayed all day for her and fasted for two meals, along with about 20 other friends.  She was able to be discharged that very night after being in the ICU just two days before!  Faith really does bring about miracles.  I also noticed so much more change in my family members, pertaining to things I was praying about.  Not only did this strengthen my faith, but also my relationship with Heavenly Father to be talking with Him twice per day everyday.         

One of the talks I read was "Faith - The Choice Is Yours" by Richard C. Edgley given in April 2010 General Conference.  He said he hasn't ever actually seen a real mountain move because of someone's faith.  But he has seen mountains of despair, doubt, fear, sin and pain removed when one's faith was strong enough.  Pretty cool analogy.