“It Was as If a Blanket of Love Was Flowing over Me” Kevin J. Worthen ,

This address was given Thursday, May 2, 2013 at the BYU Women’s Conference

“My message today is simple. God loves us. God loves each one of us. He loves us whoever we are and wherever we are. He wants us to feel that love more fully. And He wants us to be changed by that love. Indeed, God commands us to be changed by His love. “A new

commandment I give unto you,” Christ said. “That ye love one another; as I have loved you.”17

God wants His love to be such a part of our lives that we love others with that same perfect love. That standard is so high that I believe we won’t fully comply with this commandment in this life. But, emboldened by Nephi’s testimony that “the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them,”18 let me suggest four things we can do to enhance both our ability to more fully feel God’s love for us and our ability to allow that love to increase our love for others. First, in order to feel more fully God’s love for us, we need to understand more fully the purpose of His love—His plan of salvation for His children. Unless we understand God’s love in the context of His plan, we can unintentionally reverse the order of Christ’s commandment to his ancient apostles. The commandment is for our love to become like God’s. But if we do not understand God’s plan for us, we can too easily believe that God’s love has become like ours. As strange as that statement may sound, there are some who, not understanding God’s purposes, measure His love for us by the standards of the less-than-perfect and less-demanding love we feel for our fellow beings, thereby figuratively dragging God’s celestial love down to the telestial level at which our love operates.

“This reversal manifests itself in the mistaken belief that if God really loved us, our lives would be free from much of the turmoil we experience—or in the related erroneous belief that our struggles in life are a sign that either God’s love for us is diminished or that we have failed to

merit it. This misunderstanding is so common that for some it is a stumbling block to believing

that there is a God. If God loves His children, some assert, and if He is all powerful, why do so

many of His children suffer? To these skeptics, the existence of pain, sorrow and injustice in the

world conclusively establishes that not only does God not love us, He does not exist at all.

C. S. Lewis’s response to this assertion is instructive. Said he: “The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love.”19 Too often we confuse God’s love with human kindness. To quote Lewis again: “There is kindness in love, but Love and kindness are not coterminous. …

Kindness merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.”20 Many of us want a God who is kind, by which kindness we mean “the desire to see others … happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people

enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at

the end of the day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”21

“But that is not God’s plan for us. He wants us to become like Him. He wants us to experience the fullness of joy He enjoys—eternal joy, not merely temporary contentedness. And He loves us enough that He will do whatever it takes for us to reach that goal, including allowing us to experience things that are difficult and soul-stretching. And He does it not because He doesn’t love us, but precisely because He does.

“But even when we have to learn things from our extremities in order to fulfill God’s plan for us, His love will be there to sustain us if we will understand the purpose of that love.”

17 John 13:34. See also John 15:12. Because both have perfect love for us, references to Christ’s

            love apply equally to the love of His Father for us. See John 15:9 (“As the Father hath

            loved me, so have I loved you …”).

18 1 Nephi 3:7.

19 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Harper/San Francisco 2001), 40.

20 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 32.

21 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 31.