Thankfulness Amid Expectations of Others and Ourselves
I recently heard Elder John A. McCune say, “Our ability to sense a full measure of God’s love, or to continue in His love, is contingent upon our righteous desires and actions” (“Joy Through Covenant Discipleship”, April 2025).
When I first heard this talk, just listening to the words, it sounded like “God loves the righteous more”. After a more careful reading, I’m certain that is not what was meant. It is not about God loving us more or loving us less based on our righteousness – it is about us feeling God’s love more when we draw closer to Him and less when we draw away from Him. His love for us is still there.
Elder McCune states “In our quest to understand what we do not know, we might sometimes rely on our familiar mortal experiences, or things we do know. … we should be careful in applying these comparisons too far in our attempt to understand our Heavenly Father.” We don’t understand Him yet – we are still learning. We follow Him in faith, knowing He really does love us and will follow through on all the promises and covenants He makes with us.
How to Feel God’s Love
Our ability to feel God’s love for us applies to each of us individually, where we are, and not about how much better or worse our neighbor or spouse or child is doing, or how we measure up to them. God loves each of us, individually, where we are, and provides each of us with specialized help to grow to live in the joy of His love.
John 15:9-10 says,
“As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.”
Abide in His love = continually feel His love toward us.
Thus, in order for us to fully appreciate God and feel his love, we must develop righteous desires and actions. Can we just snap our fingers and DO that? With God’s gifts, we can. It is a process, not an event. We can form a covenant relationship with God – we promise, He promises, we fail and repent, He atones and forgives, we take baby steps, He holds us up and then lets us walk on our own.
I serve in Primary accompanying the children as they sing “I am a Child of God”, “Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam”, “Reverently, Quietly”, “Give, said the little stream”, “Teach me to walk in the light”, “I know you, and you know me, we are as different as the sun and the sea.” Simple, clear truths. We wise old ones tend to focus on today’s crises, and loving God moves away from our focus out into our peripheral vision. We need to stand back to see the whole picture and regain focus on where we are going.
I believe that God’s love for us is much greater than our love for each other – we love some people more, some less, but God loves each of us completely as His individual child. And to Him, we are still children, learning as much as we open our hearts to allow Him to teach us. We are still in Primary.
The Gospel, the Good News, brings us hope through our faith, that we WILL learn to love the same as God loves us - we will eventually understand fully:
“Beloved, now are we the sons [in the original Greek: a child, son or daughter] of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).
Purify = achieve righteous desires and actions (and, to achieve that, repent and be cleansed and changed through the blood of our Savior Jesus Christ). This is something to contemplate with joy and thankfulness that God continually offers to us, each, as His child.
Righteous actions and desires: I play the piano because I love doing it, not because I want anyone to hear what I play. Is that a righteous desire? It takes away time from helping others, attending the temple, doing genealogy, and all the other officially righteous activities. But is it OK?
If I can be of service to anyone in need of piano accompaniment, I will do so. I practice enough to play in Primary and in Sacrament Meeting. Does that make it OK?
But my actual motivation in learning is primal – in the words of Sister Browning in the last General Conference, “my heart has learned to love in languages that my tongue does not speak” (Sister Tracy Y. Browning, “Tune your heart to Jesus Christ: The sacred gift of primary music”). I think we each have our own unspoken languages. Music. Old cars. Farming. Accounting. Knitting. Quilting. Each one of us expressing ourself in our own unspoken languages can bring us closer to God too. “We are as different as the sun and the sea”. These can all be done with an eye single to the Glory of God, righteous desires and actions, provided they don’t become our primary focus.
The Lord offers us covenants to help us. Baptism, confirmation, temple covenants. Callings. Spreading the good news of the gospel. These help us regain focus on “continuing in His love”. “Joy and eternal perspective come through being bound to the Savior by making and keeping covenants and through Christlike discipleship” (also from Browning’s talk).
There are many different righteous desires and actions we can choose. Our oldest daughter and her husband decided to adopt two children. We were almost empty nesters and loved having teenagers. We decided to do the same and adopted one at age 11, and then two more daughters at age 13. Poof! Instant teenagers! They are all wonderful, strong, and among the best people we know, and we have grown to love them dearly.
But the heartache when my daughter came home from High School one day and said “I hate that word”. What word? “Chink”. We learned a great deal about not being accepted, which was invisible to us beforehand. Their best friends pretty much had to be other Asian immigrants. Our youngest has expressed that she can’t be a part of anywhere – not in China because she has no natural parents and so isn’t a member of a family there, not here among Chinese US citizens for the same reason, and not here among the rest of us because they are Chinese. They wanted to be adopted at the time they were offered the choice, but what they found is not what they expected. Was adopting them a righteous thing to do? We thought so at the time but have learned a lot about “we are as different as the sun and the sea” since then. God loves them, as He loves us, and we help them as much as we can and have faith in God that He will bless them as He blesses the rest of us. We hope they will be part of our eternal family.
My point is that you never know what opportunities God will give you, and what challenges you will face when you follow through with them. And you find faith that God will support you in all things, and that you can have joy in being able to feel His love continuously and have perfect faith in Him to work things out eternally.
Let us be thankful for the time and opportunities we have, the choices we can make, the sweet joy in our families, the people around us that make the things and provide the services we enjoy (including pianists), and thankfulness to God for giving us the raw material and opportunities to do what we do. And for giving us our faith and hope and love and joy as we learn to “continue in His love”, and for giving us righteous desires and the choice to act so we can sense continuously the full measure of His Love and be drawn back into His arms.
“But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you” (1 Cor 12:20-21).
And this, I think, is what Elder McCune meant when he said, “Our ability to sense a full measure of God’s love, or to continue in His love, is contingent upon our righteous desires and actions.”
If we keep our eye looking toward righteous desires and actions, we can continue to sense a fuller measure of God’s love. We receive much advice from our prophet and spiritual leaders. And most of all, we receive revelation directly from the Holy Ghost to guide us.