Preparing to Meet God.

I'm feeling deeply introspective right this moment. I have been reading Alma Chapter 34 for several days now, (I just keep finding more and more brilliant amazing doctrine in each verse so that I cannot quite move on to the next chapter.) and I had a powerful memory come back to me this morning. Verse 32 reads

For behold, this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for men to perform their labors.

I remembered the first time that I read those words in my personal scripture reading. I was probably ten or eleven years old because that was around the time when I started reading the Book of Mormon for the first time. I was a good reader and could fly right through all the stories with fairly decent comprehension of what was going on. I got to this part in which Alma and Amulek are teaching the crazy Zoramites, and suddenly I came to this verse.

It hit me hard and left a mark. It was like a light turned on in my mind. I thought, "Hm. So that's what life is about." I thought about it for a long time and repeated the words over and over in my mind. I was forever changed by those words.

If I was going to meet God some day, I thought, I needed to be ready. I would have to talk to him about everything I had done in my life and all the things that I had worked for. I wanted my life to be devoted to preparing for that meeting. It put everything else into perspective and nurtured in me a powerful desire to do everything that God would ask me to do. When I met him after my life, I wanted the meeting to be a good one, a happy one. I didn't want to have regrets or to feel bad about my life.

I don't pretend that I've done everything right up to this point, but I can say honestly that I have devoted my life ever since then to that preparation. I feel like my testimony of the gospel really started that day, and I still look forward to my meeting with God. I know it will be happy as long as I keep pressing forward.