Sufficient Grace

Christ’s grace is sufficient. I’ve known this, and experienced the great grace many times. This week led to one more confirmation.
I’ve been sick this week, sick with stress. With accounting midterms, country analysis presentations, budgeting and HR papers piled on top of life-altering internship decisions, my body has reacted, and reacted poorly. I’ve had a fever, aches in my joints, headaches, and a stuffy nose as the icing on the cake. What has carried me through this stressful, critical week amid these physical ailments? Prayer, priesthood, and the love of a dear, sweet wife.
I literally felt a quickening in my body when I needed it this week. During the test, for example, my mind was alert, and sharp enough to get a good grade—something I wouldn’t have expected under the best of circumstances. During my presentation on Cambodia, I stood and presented confidently, and didn’t feel the effects of the sickness. During my interview this week I felt composed and ready to answer the interviewer’s questions. Almost always before and after these events I felt terrible. But of more importance, before and after these events Ariel was at my side, and so was the power of prayer and priesthood. She gave me medicine and I prayed for relief from my headache; she relaxed my muscles with a massage and I prayed for strength in my mind; she kept me eating healthy and I prayed for the strength to endure. An old mission companion showed up at my door this week and was able to give me a needed priesthood blessing, adding strength and security to my pleas.
Now perhaps I’m sounding a bit overdramatic . . . I probably am, it’s my style. That said, I’ve come to realize something important this week. I am nothing! “Therefore I will not boast of myself but boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things” (Alma 26:12). I have come to a greater realization that I am dependent on God for my life, and all that I have and am (Mosiah 4:21). I’m not just talking about health and life, or the necessities of survival. I’m talking about my education, my beautiful wife and wonderful baby, my car, my bed, my shower, my food . . . it is not mine, but God’s gift to me.
It’s been interesting how this experience and these thoughts have accompanied perfectly my morning reading in “Approaching Zion,” by the great Hugh Nibley. In his chapter entitled “Gifts” he writes, “It (meaning everything we have) is all free lunch, says King Benjamin . . . Either we believe that the lunch has been taken care of, or we are in for a long, horrible contest, both internal and external, over who is going to get the most.” Nibley explains over pages and pages that we are given “sufficient for our needs” and that we need no more than that. We are to be satisfied with that, and administer anything beyond that to others, for we are all beggars. We don’t have a “right” to anything, including money that we “worked” for. Not when Heavenly Father placed us in our homes, gave us our minds and bodies to work, led us to opportunities, and guided our parents and grandparents before us to get ahead for our benefit. No, the money we make is not ours, it is His. And that means we should be giving it freely to His children, keeping only sufficient for our needs. The only thing we have to give that is ours to give is our will, as Elder Maxwell teaches in the following quote:
“In conclusion, the submission of one’s will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God’s altar. The many other things we “give,” brothers and sisters, are actually the things He has already given or loaned to us. However, when you and I finally submit ourselves, by letting our individual wills be swallowed up in God’s will, then we are really giving something to Him! It is the only possession which is truly ours to give!”
So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m grateful to Heavenly Father and the unmatchable power of the Atonement for giving me everything, not just enough to survive, but enough to thrive and help others do the same. I hope to be more generous with the gifts He has given me, and in so doing, submit my will to His.