Lately I’ve felt him near me, loving and strong. That’s painful, I can’t describe it, it should be comforting, but I feel so sad about it. BUT I’m letting him in. I think he’s as he would have been.

This is cathartic, please just disregard me. I’m still a powerful, strong and funny woman. In terrible anguish. LOL Don’t anybody get sad now.

Guilt and the pain that accompanies it are natural and serve a definite purpose, but many people dredge up feelings of guilt long after they have made amends and received forgiveness. Satan wants us to fall into this trap, because it tricks us into putting aside the efficacy of Christ’s atonement. The more Satan can get us to wallow in our guilt, the happier he is; it’s his way of making us feel special.

I’m reminded of a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five where Vonnegut describes an old war movie backwards: People and planes that are riddled with shrapnel are miraculously healed and repaired by other planes that use long, narrow tubes to suck the bullets out of them. Below the airplanes a city is being ravaged by fire, and some of the healed planes open their doors and exert magnetic forces that collapse the fire into small steel cylinders and then suck the cylinders up into the planes where they are stacked neatly on racks and flown to America. If the atonement is real, then it has an effect on our sinful state very much like the miraculous bullet sucking tubes and the powerful magnetic forces of the airplanes–except I don’t think that our sins end up stacked neatly on racks and delivered to America.

So if I repent, then the consequences of my SIN are negated, wiped out. Think about that one for awhile. It’s like this world doesn’t even really exist.

which goes with my personal philosophy that we are all having a virtual reality experience and in your world, you are the screwed up one and I am the serene wonderful one. Eat your heart out. :)

While this is probably true, the Lord does make the statement that when He forgives He forgets. I think He’s being literal here. More than just not thinking about our sins or not being harrowed up by them anymore, I think in some mystical way they are wiped from the mind of God. And aren’t we commanded to be as Christ-like as humanly possible? Granted, Christ is forgetting the sins of others, not his own, which is a crucial difference. Still its seems odd to me that the things that we go around remembering and occasionally shuddering at, Christ hasn’t the foggiest idea of. A strange eternal disconnect. I think the ideal would be that we would almost completely forget about our past transgressions. If repentance is truly a change of heart in which the heart no longer desires to sin, then shouldn’t that new heart be adequate protection in keeping us from committing the same mistake? Of course this is all hypothetical, I can’t say I’ve yet forgotten my repented of sins. But I think it is worth pondering.

I think as a people, Mormons are very hard on themselves. We preach works to the exclusion of grace and perpetuate the false doctrine that we can do it ourselves.

I think the peace that comes can only come from the knowledge that Christ did the hard part for us. All we have to do is let him. How many Mormons are out there, living lives of quiet desperation, trying to work out their own salvation?

I think we see a correlation between happiness and righteousness on the one hand, and wickedness and unhappiness on the other. Of course, when I say “happiness” and “unhappiness”, I mean on the most fundamental level. But I think we commit a fallacy in assuming that correlation means causation.

It is not so much that choosing the right brings peace, but that a third thing brings both of them. This third thing is a state of being. It is a state wherein we know that our will is in line with God’s will (or in cases where we don’t yet fully comprehend God’s will, we know that our will is in line with what we know deep down to be right). There are a number of names for this state of being: “a heart that’s in the right place” is a simple one, being “out of the box” is one that Arbinger uses, “a moral conscience” is probably an ambiguous one.

It is, of course, not a fully black and white thing. There are different degrees to which we are in this state, but the more we are in this state, the more we will make righteous choices and the more we will be at peace.

This, I believe, is how it is possible for Alma to be filled with joy even though he had not yet committed any good deeds. He changed his state of being – and from that he was filled with peace and made righteous choices.

Circling back around to the original post, remembering our sins becomes important because, in many ways, it contributes to our current state of being. We are more humbler for it. And thus, we are happier for it.

I remember Truman Madsen speaking of “remembering with peace” as coming with repentance. That is consistent with Alma’s clear recollection of his sins several decades later (when he was talking to Helaman in ch. 36) but without the harrowing.

Analogous is the Lord’s statement in D&C 58, where he says that “I the Lord remember them no more.” How can God, whose memory is perfect, forget?

In that case, I think we need to look to the passages where God speaks of “remembering sins against” the unrepentant. That, I believe, is the no more remembering that the passage in Sec. 58 refers to.