Happy for belief in CR talks!

So the talks are available and I went to Elder Hollands as there was so much info that went right along with my goal of gaining understanding and growing spiritually on some specific levels.  I thought ...well, I'll just copy a few things that really hit me hard and it was practically the entire talk!

I read it three times and I'll just need to sleep on it and digest it.  I felt encouraged and excited and on course for myself.  I felt hopeful and eager and curious.

So much going through my mind.  I can hardly wait to check my notes and look up things in some of the other talks.

Wasn't this a fantastic spiritual experience on this Conference?

Elder Holland had my full attention when right off he referred to the scripture that I had shared earlier in the week.  here

Oh, yes...my ears were perked up mightily!  and yes...my heart was racing!!

in part...

The author of Hebrews warned us of this when he wrote, “Call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions.”¹ That post-illumination affliction can come in many ways, and it can come to all of us. Surely every missionary who has ever served soon realized that life in the field wasn’t going to be quite like the rarefied atmosphere of the missionary training center. So too for all of us upon leaving a sweet session in the temple or concluding a particularly spiritual sacrament meeting.

Illumination

Hebrews 10:32:
But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great ^afight of afflictions;...

I remember the first time I read this scripture and felt it was a pattern for things that happened in my life.  I would feel really positive about something that was going to unfold and become a reality, and then things would gunnysack.  

Eventually the positive event/situation/happening/project would occur, just as I had originally felt that it would, BUT it was after a lot of struggling aka afflictions.  That positive feeling of the eventual outcome, earlier seen/felt, would indeed happen but not on an immediate time table...not at the moment of that awareness but it would eventually happen.  

I have learned that there is an illumination  followed by struggles, followed by the reality of the first brightness of hope in that earlier illumination, and that gives me faith and hope to carry on and endure to the end.

That has happened to me in lots of situations/incidents in my life.  I find it familiar and comfortable because I know if I just hang on, endure to the end of a siege of struggles/afflictions, that things will end up okay.  The earlier illumination will become my own reality.  I will recognize that brightness and the Spiritual power source.  A full circle.


also from Hebrews 10:35 &36

35 Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward.

 36 For ye have need of ^apatience, that, after ye have done the ^bwill of God, ye might receive the ^cpromise.

and also....Doctrine and Covenants 58:4 & 5

4 For after much ^atribulation come the ^bblessings. Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be ^ccrowned with much ^dglory; the hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand.

 5 Remember this, which I tell you before, that you may^alay it to heart, and receive that which is to follow.

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(so many talks about marriage being between a man and a woman!  My friend Mariah, and her wife, had a tough time listening to General Conference.)