Recognizing Tender Mercies

Psalms 145:9 "The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works."

1 Nephi 1:20 "...behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance."

We are told that tender mercies are all around us. How do we learn to recognize them? We need to sensitize ourselves to them. One way to do this is through a daily gratitude journal. If we take a few moments at the end of each day to think back over the events of the day and write down the things for which we are grateful, and especially where we have seen the Lord working in our lives, we will grow in our capacity to recognize his hand.

President Henry B. Eyring told a beautiful story of how he learned to see the tender mercies of the Lord. He said,

"When our children were very small, I started to write down a few things about what happened every day.... I wrote down a few lines every day for years. I never missed a day no matter how tired I was or how early I would have to start the next day. Before I would write, I would ponder this question: “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?” As I kept at it, something began to happen. As I would cast my mind over the day, I would see evidence of what God had done for one of us that I had not recognized in the busy moments of the day. As that happened, and it happened often, I realized that trying to remember had allowed God to show me what He had done. 

"More than gratitude began to grow in my heart. Testimony grew. I became ever more certain that our Heavenly Father hears and answers prayers. I felt more gratitude for the softening and refining that come because of the Atonement of the Savior Jesus Christ. And I grew more confident that the Holy Ghost can bring all things to our remembrance—even things we did not notice or pay attention to when they happened."

Watch the video of this talk.
Read the entire talk from General Conference here.

President Eyring learned that we have to look for the hand of the Lord and His tender mercies. When we take the time to look, and to ask Him to show us what He has done for us, He is happy to oblige.

In Alma 30:44 we read, "...The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and call things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator."

Moses taught, "And behold, all things have their likeness, and all things are created and made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth, both above and beneath: all things bear record of me" (Moses 6:63)

How do all things bear record of God? Though the universe may seem random, there is great order in it. The earth is perfectly designed and positioned to support life as we know it. There is complexity and diversity of life and yet there are basic similarities between all things. The very existence of self-sustaining life indicates intelligence, for the natural law of thermodynamics says that order turns into disorder without a force to keep things in order.

The order and design of the universe, from the largest galaxy to the smallest sub-atomic particle, reveal an Intelligence. Numbers and patterns repeat themselves in many ways. For example, Fred Wilson, of the Institute for Creation Research, wrote an fascinating article titled "Shapes, Numbers, Patterns, and the Divine Proportion in God's Creation." In this treatise, he examines how shapes such as the spiral are consistently repeated in " hurricanes, spiral seeds, the cochlea of the human ear, ram's horn, sea-horse tail, growing fern leaves, DNA molecule, waves breaking on the beach, tornados, galaxies, the tail of a comet as it winds around the sun, whirlpools, seed patterns of sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, and in the construction of the ears of most mammals."

Mr. Wilson concludes his article with this assertion, "These shapes, numbers, spirals, and the divine proportion are ubiquitous in their presence throughout all of creation. They are found in living and nonliving phenomena. Their symmetry, beauty, and mathematical preciseness are evident in every aspect of nature. Although absolute perfection is not found in all of these (due to the effects of Adam' sin), their very presence virtually everywhere and in everything argues against their having occurred by blind chance or evolutionary processes. The only rational conclusion is that the Creator of the universe is a personal, intelligent Being, who created these things as a visible fingerprint of His invisible, yet personal existence."

Surely as we look around the universe and in our own lives, we can recognize God's hand and His tender mercies. If we do not see them, it is only because we are not looking and not asking.