You’re never going to fail, by believing in the Lord.
Elise is a faith-based business coach and speaker who loves to empower others to believe in themselves, remember their divine worth, and partner with God to fulfill their soul purpose. She has personally learned the importance of relying on God and trusting in His timing through her struggle with unexplained infertility for 12 years and counting, as well as other frustrating health issues. Yet, she has also felt encircled in the arms of her Savior, has experienced inexpressible strength from her Heavenly Father, and has learned what it means to pursue one’s heart’s desire while honoring God’s timing.
Why do you personally choose faith and trust in the Lord when other options are enticing or easier?
I love this question. The first thought that comes to mind is it’s…it’s all I have. The Lord and my faith in Him are the only true constants in my life.
I think back to my childhood. I came from an abusive home. Everything seemed to be crashing down around me all of the time. But, I always knew in my heart that I wasn’t alone. I would go to my room and I would pray, I would read the scriptures, and I would feel this closeness with Heavenly Father. How could I leave that? Yes, there were other options. But I couldn’t leave that peace that I felt and the love that I felt. With everything crashing around me, that peace and love were the comfort that I needed. And it just became a part of who I am.
I remember talking to a senior sister missionary when I was in college. She said to me, “You bloomed from a really hard situation.Your life could have ended up so different…You chose to bloom where you were planted.” I’ve never forgotten that. I just couldn’t leave the comfort that I felt from my Heavenly Father. So from my childhood, I brought that with me into adulthood. I think now about the challenges that I currently have with infertility, and I think about how there really is no other way for me to live my life. I choose to be faithful, regardless of the circumstances of the situation. There’s more peace and more joy that way, and that’s what I’m drawn to.
What do you do to intentionally build and maintain that trust and faith?
I try to include the Lord in everything that I do. I try to start my day with prayer and scripture study to help to stay as close to Him as I possibly can.
And anytime that I’m making a decision or have a question, I take it to the Lord. We study it out in our heart and mind and then get His confirmation. He wants to help us to succeed, but how can we succeed if we don’t take advantage of the help that He’s willing to give us? He wants to be involved in the big things and the small things in our life. And so I really try to do that, and take everything to Him, and always have that prayer in my heart.
What is amazing is that I know I can trust that He will help me. I’ve never run into something in my coaching sessions with the women entrepreneurs that I work with that we haven’t been able to overcome with the Lord. Sometimes I will be thinking in my head, “Okay God, I have no idea how to help this person through what she’s going through right now, but I know You do. And I know You will provide a way. Help me to be able to give her some comfort and whatever is needed in this moment.” And by the end of that coaching session, my client always gets what she needs, and she gets it from the Lord. It’s because of the Lord. I’m so honored and blessed that He would work through me in this small way.
I try to stay as close to Him as possible, include Him in everything that I do, and just trust that in both small and big things, He’s going to provide what’s needed.
What helps you continue in faith, even when outcomes differ from what you had hoped?
I’ve been pondering this question a lot lately, especially in the form of “Why do we set goals?” If we pour our heart into a goal and it doesn’t actually end up happening, or the outcome is different than what we want, then what was the purpose of putting our heart and soul into achieving it? If it’s all in God’s timing anyway?
But I’ve realized that taking that action step of believing and working toward something that we want to happen puts us on a very specific path. A path that we would not otherwise have taken had we not believed it was actually going to come true. You can’t go to the next off-shoot of the path that we’re actually supposed to be on if you didn’t take that path in the first place.
So, you’re never going to fail, by believing in the Lord. And by taking the path that He led you to, even if the outcome is different than you thought, you can be confident you are on the path that you’re supposed to be on. And that’s only going to take you to other paths better than you could ever have originally imagined. But it’s all in His timing. We just have to be willing to take those steps to walk that path.
Talk to us about giving up on a goal you’ve fought for vs. submitting to the Lord’s will. Are these contradictory concepts? How do we shift how we think about these things?
I’ve experienced this with my fertility journey. There have been times when I just gave up. I just said, “You know what? I’m done. I’m not going to do this anymore.” It was after our eighth IUI (out of 10 we’ve tried so far) that I was just…I was done. This giving up came, though, from this place of ego. It was all about me. It didn’t have anything to do with the Lord or His will. It was because I was tired of hurting, and I just couldn’t see an end in sight.
Eventually, we decided to try again. And then a while later, there was a point where my husband and I felt that we should just try naturally (stop focusing on the medical aspects of getting pregnant). We both felt really strongly that that was the will of the Lord for us. And we did; we stopped for, like two years. And it felt right, like we were honoring the Lord. And then later, it was our time to start trying again.
I could look back over all of this and ask, “Did I misunderstand what God was telling me in the first place? Should we have been doing this the whole time?” But really I knew that peace was in place, and so we knew we were going in the right direction. When I compare the two times we stopped and ask myself what the difference was, it was all about where I was coming from. It was all about the mindset and the purpose we felt around those decisions.
The first time I was saying to myself, “I’m just going to give up because it’s not going to happen.” It was a spiteful, self-centered place. In that situation, it was about me, and not about the Lord. But when we could feel the Lord’s plan for us, we had peace in that time of changing direction. We were doing it for the Lord; we were doing it because we feel like that’s what the Lord wanted us to do.
I remember reading a talk by Elder David A. Bednar that brought this concept to light. Elder Bednar spoke about this young man who had cancer. The young man and his wife began praying that he would get through the cancer. The couple asked Elder Bednar to come and give him a blessing. During that visit, Elder Bednar asked the man, “Do you have the faith to not be healed?” When I read that part of his talk, it was like the Lord was talking straight to me: “Do you have the faith, Elise, to not be healed of this infertility?” And normally, anyone’s gut answer would sound like, “Um…no…like, I want to have the faith to be healed”, right? But the “faith to not be healed” is choosing what the Lord has in store for you.
I had to realize that I may never be a mom, on this earth. And I had to be okay with that concept. And that was really hard. I finally got to that point where I committed, “Okay, I’m surrendering my will to Yours. I’m not giving up, meaning I’m going to continue to take any steps that You tell me that I should take, and I’m going to act on those promptings. But I’m going to be okay with not receiving the blessings that I am wanting right now.” And that’s when the increased guidance of what we should do to try to get pregnant went up tenfold! I had to surrender my will and have it be more about trying to honor His, instead of my own.
Now, I’m not pregnant yet. But I believe it’s still around the corner. And I’m just acting on the promptings of the Lord, whenever they come, as they come.
About trusting in the Lord’s timing…What would you tell others who are in a similar spot, those who are also “waiting on the Lord”?
I think the whole point is that waiting on the Lord is meant to try us. So it’s okay if you have really unfaithful days, days where you don’t believe in it anymore, days where you don’t even know when or how you’re going to get your faith back. But knowing that every morning you wake up and it’s going to be a new day because of the Savior’s Atonement for us, we each have the opportunity to choose faith–every single day. As we choose faith consistently, it amplifies our ability to continue to do so.
It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard to wait on the Lord when you want something so much. And you can’t see why you can’t have it right now. But I think keeping the big picture in mind that God is our Heavenly Father is so comforting and helpful. He could “snap His fingers” and just give you exactly what you want, when you want it, and He would love to do that in a sense; but, He knows that it’s not in your best interest to do that.
It’s like when a kid wants candy from the store. As a good parent you don’t want to just give into that every time they ask for something because they’ll never learn valuable lessons. And you’re doing that out of love, not out of spite. Our Heavenly Father takes that concept and magnifies it by a million, because we’re not just learning to be good citizens on this earth, we’re learning to be celestial beings.
Everything that we go through is meant for our own good. These experiences teach us that even though some moments are really hard, and we may not be able to see how they are going to work out, we can trust in Him. We can know that He has our best interests at heart and that He wants to bless us with more than we can even imagine. We can know that He will bless us with those things that we desire, but it is always better to do it in the Lord’s timing than in ours.
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Photo credit: Diana Simumpande on Unsplash
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