“And I trust, according to the Spirit of God which is in me, that I shall also have joy over you; nevertheless I do not desire that my joy over you should come by the cause of so much afflictions and sorrow which I have had for the brethren at Zarahemla, for behold, my joy cometh over them after wading through much affliction and sorrow.” (Alma 7:5). Sometimes what makes a trial truly tough is not the severity or degree to which we are called upon to suffer, but the resistance we encounter on making even minor improvements to our situation. When we’re really going through it, doesn’t it feel like taking any step in the right direction is about as easy as wading through cold molasses? If we were to place ourselves in a waist- or chest-high river and challenge someone standing on the bank who was much older and with significantly worse health problems to a race, the person walking along the bank could walk much faster and endure much longer than we could wading through the river. When we are stuck in the river and see others whizzing by us without even breaking a sweat, it is easy to fool ourselves into believing that we are making no progress at all. But just because we wade much slower than we can walk does not mean that wading will get us nowhere. It is hard to keep pushing ourselves to do the right thing when we are wading through afflictions and sorrows, but if we just give up and flop onto our bellies, then the river’s current will carry us back downstream and erase any progress we made. There is joy waiting for us at the end of the river, but we will only get there by wading through our afflictions and sorrows, feeling the fear and doubt and resistance, the self-interest and the laziness and the wounded pride, but still putting one foot in front of the other, even if each step is its own battle and we only make it five or six feet in the same time that it might have taken us to walk five or six miles if only we had been on dry ground. I know that wading is harder and slower and just plain worse than walking, but sometimes we’re in the river of sorrows and afflictions and we can let ourselves get swept away and lost in our grief and pain, or we can keep on wading through it until we get to dry ground on the other side.
