THE GREATNESS OF GOD

We can find comfort in the knowledge that God will turn all things in our life to good.  This is a principle that is taught often in the scriptures.  No situation is ever negative in the long run and, therefore, life is always fair.  Whatever happens to us God can turn it to good if we trust him and stay on the path.  He teaches that principle in every book of scripture.  In the Book of Mormon, Lehi testifies to his son Jacob:  "In thy childhood thou hast suffered afflictions and much sorrow, because of the rudeness of thy brethren.  Nevertheless, Jacob, my firstborn in the wilderness, thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for they gain (2 Nephi 2:1-2).  Part of God's greatness consists in his ability to turn even the most negative of situations into positive truth and learning. 

The Lord instructed Joseph Smith in this principle while the Prophet was suffering in Liberty Jail.  "All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for they good" (D&C 122:7).  Our Father in Heaven can turn even the most negative situations to good for us, if we will trust him and stay true to his gospel.

C.S. Lewis once wrote a little piece that very poignantly taught this truth.  He said:
Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective...All their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved...All their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell.  That is what mortals misunderstand.  They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it,: not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.  And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but THIS and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.  Both processes  begin even before death.  The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven:  the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.  And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the Lost, "We were always in Hell."  And both will speak truly. (The Great Divorce.)

S. Michael Wilcox