"When you come to the temple and receive your endowment, and kneel at the altar and be sealed, you can live an ordinary life and be an ordinary soul -- struggling against temptation, failing and repenting, and failing again and repenting, but always determined to keep your covenants.... Then the day will come when you will receive the benediction: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord' (Matthew 25:21)"
Elder Boyd K. Packer, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled [1991], 257.
It's a great quote for a perfectionist like me to stop me from panicking over all my imperfections. But what really hit me hard and got me thinking was the scripture in Matthew, specifically the phrase "well done." I've heard it a kazillion times, but for some reason, this time a picture of a steak popped into my brain.
I actually do like my steak well-done, and grey through. I know, I know, sacrilege and catastrophe to those of you who prefer to eat it "still moo-ing" as I describe anything less cooked. I want my meat dead and cooked 'till it's dead again, just in case. Sometimes this means the chef splits it in half (butterfly) to get it to cook faster. Sometimes it comes a bit singed and burnt around the edges and I have to cut them off. And sometimes I have to send it back to the grill to cook some more, because the middle was still oozing red or pink-ish.
Anyway, back to the idea that formed in my brain of the Savior declaring me "well done" - and reflecting on what that would mean if I were a piece of meat. Perhaps I won't be declared ready to enter into the joy of the Lord until I have been proven well-done in life and thoroughly cooked through the fiery trials of my faith.
I remember the only time I've ever gotten my hair professionally styled (for my senior prom). The stylist wrapped my wet hair up in curlers and put me under this furnace of a hair drying station. That thing was hot - I stayed under it until I worried about second degree burns on my neck, certain that my hair must be dry, if not toast, by then. But alas - it was still wet when she undid the curlers, and I got sent back to Hades, I mean under the hair dryer, until I was thoroughly cooked.
I think that's often how I feel about life - I keep checking in with the Lord in the midst of my trials, sure that I must be done, but getting thrown back on the fire 'cause I'm really not cooked through, still having some hidden pink, some lesson not quite learned. Sometimes the trials life are so painful as to cut me down the middle, and grant me a broken (butterflied) heart and a contrite spirit. And maybe sometimes the trials are so severe that I end up getting burned, and a little charred around the edges.
Reminds me of what the prophet Joseph Smith said about himself:
"I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain; and the only polishing I get
is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with
accelerated force ... all hell knocking off a corner here and a corner there. Thus
I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty..."
Guess I'm not the only one with some singed parts in my character that need trimming. :)
So really, what is it that I want to hear when I kneel down at the feet of the Savior someday?
Yes, I want to be told that I am well-done, that I stuck it out, that I am cooked through, that I accomplished the things the Lord sent me here to do.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley, wife of President Gordon B. Hinckley, stated it quite perfectly:
"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with grass stains on my shoes from mowing Sister Schenk's lawn. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor's children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived."
And with that pondering, I am forever changed. Don't know that I will ever be able to order a steak again without thinking about the Lord's declaration, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant..." May it give me more strength to endure and faith to overcome life's fiery furnaces.
"Like the intense fire that transforms iron into steel, as we remain faithful during the fiery trial of our faith, we are spiritually refined and strengthened."
Elder Neil L. Anderson, Trial of Your Faith, October 2012 General Conference
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