Goodness And Mercy Shall Follow

¹“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” (Psalms 23:6). It is a great comfort to know that God leads the way before us and prepares many wonderful things for us to find on our journey through life. It is even more comforting to know that Christ is always by our side to bear our burdens with us and even you carry us when our strength is utterly spent. But it is better still to know that mercy and goodness shall follow behind us all of the days of our lives. Let's face it. None of us manage to lead some picture perfect life. We each lead behind us a depressing wake of broken dreams and broken promises. We ruin things for ourselves and others. There are words and actions that we wish with all our hearts that we could take back but we just can't. But what are we to do? We can't fix hardly any of it on our own. Thankfully, mercy and goodness follow after us. The Atonement of Jesus Christ reaches both forwards and backwards in time, from the moment that Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit until the very last of God's children are judged and receive their final reward. That means that whatever messy and crooked path we carved through life, and however much collateral damage our choices have caused, thanks to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, mercy and goodness are following behind us, sweeping up all of the broken bits and putting them back together. It is good and necessary that we feel regret and remorse when we make bad or foolish decisions. Such painful feelings can goad us into being more thoughtful and wise about our choices in the future and more aware of how consequences can affect ourselves and others. But whatever lessons and insights we want to carry forward with us into our next trials, continuing to worry and beat ourselves up about the mess we left does us no good, especially after we have done all that we could to make restitution. We can't unring bells or put spilt milk back in bottles. We can't. But the mercy and goodness that follow after us just might be able to. We see only the tiniest sliver of God and all of His majesty during our mortal lives. From our skewed perspective God may appear either callously negligent or even sadistically cruel the way He allows certain evils and tragedies to occur. But just because He allowed certain things to play out in bitter and heartbreaking ways from our perspective with our limited view of linear time does not mean that God is bound by the same temporal narrow-mindedness as we are. God’s mercy and goodness can reach back through time and make all things, even the very worst moments of our lives, work together for our good and His glory. I'm so grateful that mercy and goodness follow after us and clean up all of our messes and make out of all of the ugliness we have endured something truly beautiful and wonderful.