The Give and Take of Sin and Sorrow

I have thought of the irony of the give and take of my sins and character defects. It was probably my third or fourth meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous at the Wednesday Old Timers Meeting as I pondered and seriously read the Twelve Steps. I had hoped to knock them out in a week or so, so I could graduate, learn to manage my drinking and my life, and get on with the rest of my life. Twenty seven years later I'm still trying to figure it out--one day at a time.

Step Three looked hard. Do I really have to give Him my will and my whole life just to get sober? But Seven looked rather easy, "Humbly asked Him to remove my shortcomings." Over a year later when I got around to Step Seven (because a friend said, "They're numbered for dummies like me."), I found it wasn't nearly that easy.

I had read plenty about surrender and turning it over, but the concept of having my sins and shortcomings removed meant Somebody had to take them, or make them magically go away.

As I started coming back to the Gospel I found scriptural passages to magnify this idea.

"Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29).

"Behold, I say unto you, that it is he that surely shall come to take away the sins of the world; yea, he cometh to declare glad tidings of salvation unto his people" (Alma 39: 15).

"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows" (Isaiah 53: 4).

And many years later I read about the scapegoat in ancient Israel. On Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the priest would lay his hands on the head of the live scapegoat, confess the sins of the people, and then turn him loose into the wilderness to carry the sins away (see Leviticus 16: 21-22). I learned just last week at Education Week that someone was assigned to follow the scapegoat to chase him off a cliff to insure that those sins did not return to the camp of Israel.

I never had such a luxury, and many of those old sins and character defects would return and I have to keep surrendering.

Of course the "take" is the easy part. My Savior has already carried my sins and sorrows and taken them upon Himself. His Atonement is infinite in scope and time, although He has "finished (His) preparations unto the children of men" (D&C 19: 19). The price has already been paid at an infinite, staggering cost, causing Him to "tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore."

Now the ball is in my court as I struggle to give them away. Truly, everything I surrender has claw marks in it. In the Book of Mormon, Lamoni's father was ready to forsake his kingdom in order to have his sins taken away. He pleaded with God saying, "I will give away all my sins to know thee" (see Alma 22: 15, 18).

In a masterful discourse, Jacob pleads with us to prepare for that "glorious day" that we will not shrink in the presence of God, "and be constrained to exclaim: Holy, holy are thy judgments, O Lord God Almighty—but I know my guilt; I transgressed thy law, and my transgressions are mine" (2 Nephi 9: 46). 

They are mine only if I am not willing to give them away.