All Of One

¹“But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren,” (Hebrews 2:9-11). We often say that the Atonement of Jesus Christ is so powerful that it was able to conquer death and hell and make up for all of the sins and suffering of every one of God's children, but I wonder sometimes if we have it backwards. Imagine Christ taking upon Himself all of the sicknesses and heartbreaks and guilt and anguish of first one person, and then another. With each person that He added, He combined the hard won experience and wisdom, the personal insights and epiphanies, the sheer grit and determination, the utter humility and helplessness of being cast into problems too big to solve. Imagine Him doing that a million, billion times. How powerful could one person be if they were able to combine the strengths and weaknesses, the wisdom and the folly, the pride and the humility, the compassion and judgement of all of those people into one? It is clear that only Christ had the power within Him to do all of this, but I do believe that the power of the Atonement has grown and continues to grow as more and more of us embrace Christ and add our small and simple contributions. Christ knows how to help us not just because He has already experienced everything that's going to happen in our lives, but also because He has experienced the lives of billions of others and He can add that full weight of collective experience and wisdom and knowledge to His own. When we come unto Christ both He that sanctifies us and all of us who are or have ever been sanctified are one. One great unity of faith and power that pierces Heaven, Earth, and Hell, and past, present, and all of eternity. We may think that Christ does not want us, wretched and wavering and faithless as we are. But the Captain of Salvation is made perfect through suffering. Not just His own suffering, but our suffering too. Christ needs us and our suffering and our experience in dealing with setbacks and heartache and especially the wisdom and the humility and the compassion that come from such experiences. He has bound up all of that within Himself and that is why Christ and His Atonement are so powerful, because it's not just His wisdom and His mercy but the combined wisdom and mercy of all of God's children forged together into one great whole. I am so grateful for the opportunities that I have to become one with Christ and with all of my brothers and sisters.