Faith in Jesus Christ

It’s a term I would often hear growing up. Facing your trials with faith. I don’t know that I was able at such a young age to wrap my head fully around that. As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate the phrase in my life. As we face trials with a trust in God and His bigger plan for us, we come to know and understand His plan better, which in turn increases our faith that He is there and that He loves us.

When I think about faith, an obvious example from the Book of Mormon is Nephi. I began to grasp fully what it meant for him to leave his home and go out into the unknown as I left for my mission. Nephi was faced with so many trials and hardships that it would have been easy to give up and ask why these things were happening to him. But he chose instead to remain faithful and to rely on God’s promised blessings to him. As a young missionary, I began to love reading about Nephi because I found so many similarities between our circumstances. Nephi ultimately shows his faith several times throughout the scriptures, when he says, “I will go and do the things which the Lord has commanded,” (1 Ne 3:7) or such phrases as, “I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.” (1 Ne 4:6) I truly wanted to be like Nephi. Little did I know, I would have experiences where I could show that faith and become more like Nephi.

About a year into my mission, I arrived in Munich, my new zone leader area. I had a wonderful companion who taught me so many things and we had a great ward behind us. Our area consisted of downtown Munich and we would often go along the main shops in the downtown shopping center by the university to contact people. When I arrived, we were opening the area and had to find new people to teach. We spent 8-10 hours every single day just trying to talk with everyone around us. In the first 6 weeks, we taught almost 70 first lessons, but not a single person wanted to hear a second lesson. For our next 6 weeks, we set a goal that we would talk to 350 people every single day. We would split up in the trains to talk to as many people as possible and wouldn’t pass a single person on the street without talking to them. We skipped our dinner and lunch hours every day. After a couple weeks, it still wasn’t working. We sat down in a companion study one morning and read Ether 12 together. We came to verse 18, which reads, “And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God.” We talked about what that meant and realized without our combined faith, we couldn’t create a miracle in that city and in that ward.

After a particularly hard week, we finally had a PDay. I was looking forward to it so much, but on that day, I received the email no missionary wants to receive. I was crushed. I began to ask myself why God wouzld do this to me. I was giving my best wasn’t I? As I prayed that night and poured my heart out, I felt comforted. I reflected on my thought process that day. I was so quick to blame Heavenly Father. I realized that many of us are like that. When things go well, we tend to enjoy thinking that we created our own success by ourselves, but the minute something goes wrong, we ask, “Well, where is God? He must not love me.” Through this experience, my faith deepened, and just the next week, we found a lady who was baptized just 6 weeks later.

Faith is the ultimate and first principle of the Gospel. Without it, we cannot amount to what Heavenly Father wants us to be. Each time we make a step closer to our Heavenly Father, whether it be through prayer, scripture study, coming to church, or obeying a commandment, our faith grows. Through my experiences, I have come to the knowledge that God is there and that He loves us. My faith has become so strong I feel as if it cannot be broken. I am thankful for that faith and will continue to rely on it throughout my life.