Digital Only: Young Adults
Not Easy, but Still Worth It
I thought skateboarding would be easy. But Nephi taught me that it’s often in our difficult challenges that God can help us reach the impossible.
I remember the excitement I felt when I first got a skateboard. I loved going to the skate park with my older cousins and seeing how creative they could be with their tricks. I was amazed at the way they could flip or spin a skateboard in the air just to land back on it with both feet and roll away in style.
Perhaps the best part about it was their ability to make their complicated tricks look so effortless. This gave me courage. If it looked so easy for them to do, I reasoned, then maybe it wouldn’t be too hard for me to learn the same things.
Practice and Discouragement
So I picked up my new skateboard and got to work.
Because I wanted to be a good skateboarder, I thought learning would be effortless and there wouldn’t be any major challenges. No mental blocks, no injuries, no pain. Skateboarding would be just as easy as my older cousins made it look.
It didn’t take long before I was overcome with discouragement. I would spend hours and hours attempting to pop my board up into the air, the most basic trick in the book. But it would take weeks until the ollie trick was good enough.
Looking back through my years of skateboarding, I’ve noticed a pattern I tend to follow with other parts of life. When I am excited to try something new and it is harder to accomplish than I expected, my enthusiasm surrenders to discouragement and my inspiration turns to doubt.
This often applies most to when I am trying to follow promptings from the Holy Ghost, only for things to not turn out as expected.
These unexpected feelings of uncertainty have always felt like a heavy blow to my initial excitement and eagerness to progress. But thankfully the scriptures have provided me a fresh view on how I can change my perception when I face challenges like these.
Relying on God to Do the Impossible
The opening chapters of the Book of Mormon tell about a family that faced serious trials. Little did they know how far they would have to go or the unseen challenges they would have to face. Yet their journey demonstrates how God can work in all of our lives.
Early in their journey, Nephi’s father, Lehi, received a revelation that Nephi and his brothers would have to go back to Jerusalem and convince Laban to give them the brass plates (see 1 Nephi 3). After two attempts to retrieve the plates and two death threats, it could have been easy for even Nephi to doubt the revelation his father had received and ask, “If God commanded me to do it, why isn’t this working?!” But there’s no indication in the scriptures that he went down this road of doubt.
I’ve discovered new insights upon pondering how this story applies to me. How much more did Nephi and his brothers learn to rely on God because they were presented with unexpected difficulties?
Is it possible that some things that God asks us to do are impossible? Just so that we can learn to rely on Him and discover how He makes the impossible, possible? Maybe God had to make it clear in Nephi’s mind that there was no way he could get the plates without Him.
God Is in Every Detail
This is a pattern I’ve found in the scriptures that I’ve seen in my own life. God inspires His children to do something beyond themselves—like making a change or accepting a time-consuming calling— and then unexpected challenges always seem to follow.
Whenever I feel the quiet tug from the Holy Ghost to do something important, I expect the results from following the prompting to come easily and quickly. In retrospect, I’ve discovered that it’s the difficult promptings to follow that give me the chance to see God’s grace. I recognized the truth of Moroni’s observation that “ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith” (Ether 12:6).
Sometimes it’s only when things don’t seem to work out the way I had envisioned that I see that God actually has been involved in every detail.
As President Russell M. Nelson promises us, “When you know your life is being directed by God, regardless of the challenges and disappointments that may and will come, you will feel joy and peace.”1 That is a promise I wouldn’t have been able to experience for myself if everything I had set out to do hadn’t required that I give God all my “heart, might, mind and strength” (Doctrine and Covenants 4:2).
I’ve learned that God’s vision is much clearer than mine, whether that be through my attempts at skateboarding or trusting Him to do the seemingly impossible. He cares not only that I trust in Him to reach my destination but also that I find faith in Him along the journey.