"Human life with its cares and worries is transfigured into a radiant experience and adventure when it clings to...divine power and is blessed by it. To walk under divine authority, to possess it, to be a part of it, is to walk with heads erect, with grateful hearts, before our fellow men and our Father in Heaven."
There are two scriptures that you could say contradict each other:
1) Mosiah 4:27
See that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength.
2) Isaiah 40:31 (D&C 89:20)
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
But in fact they complement - because when all things are done in wisdom and order, the Lord shall renew our strength.
I grew older and I became so afraid of failure that I spent too much time learning my limits and living within them. But our potential is not budgeted and we do not have to live within our means. Our debt is eternal but it is of no consequence because the Atonement supplies an eternal wealth. Gordon B. Hinckley said "I have been quoted as saying, 'Do the best you can.' But I want to emphasize that it be the very best. We are too prone to be satisfied with mediocre performance. We are capable of doing so much better." And why? Why are we capable of doing so much better? Because "when we determine within our hearts that by and with the blessings of God our Heavenly Father we will accomplish a certain labor, God gives the ability to accomplish that labor." Plain and simple. But wait, Heber J. Grant has more to say on that subject..
"But when we lay down, when we become discouraged, when we look at the top of the mountain and say it is impossible to climb to the summit, while we never make an effort it will never be accomplished."
Discouragement.
When I say that I can't, I am insulting the very God who says to me I can. When I say I can't, it is the same as telling He who created me that I will not do what He created me to do. I can't only means I won't. There is no can't.
And, as always, it goes back to Jesus Christ. Why is there no "can't"? Because WE ARE INFINITELY MORE THAN OUR LIMITATIONS AND AFFLICTIONS. We are infinitely more because no matter our debt, He has given us infinite wealth. We are more because we are offspring of God. There is planted in us a seed of absolute divinity. He gave us the greatest gift He could, He gave us himself. He gave us himself in the form of His Son who was sent to earth as a man, with a body of flesh and blood - and in the form of our potential to become as He is. And so to deny our capability is to deny the very omnipotence of our Father in Heaven.
Joseph Smith tells us that "if [we] will be pure, nothing can hinder. "The angels cannot be restrained from being [our] associates." And so it is that we are limitless.
All this talk is stemmed from a recent bout of discouragement I have been plagued with. Satan wrapped his slithery tentacles around my tender heart for time and tugged me downward. But he just can't win. He can't win because despite the aching of my sometimes weak heart, the core of it is solid testimony. And when that knowledge of the truth seeps through to the surface his tentacles are singed and immediately retract, for they cannot bear the light. Discouragement cannot beat me because I am infinitely more than my limitations and afflictions. I am daughter of an infinite God. I am limitless.
